Wheels Within Wheels

Is it some sort of variation on the sunk cost fallacy? Then again, perhaps it simply is the sunk cost fallacy? So much has been invested in the Fairford nonsense that there can be no backing away from it. Herewith, 24-year-old Mohmed Ahmad Abdulkarim, whom Iran allegedly paid £70,000 to load the three white vans with metal drums containing petrol, water butts and smart dashcams. Hope for us all yet.

Will this be put before a jury? When last was a case laughed out? Still, if more than 20 Iranian terror plots really had been foiled in the last year, then I for one would not be remotely surprised. But like everyone else who had ever been arrested in relation this matter, both Abdulkarim and his co-accused, Nouman Essghir, have been released on bail, meaning that no one truly suspected them of terrorism. And if the USAF has fled Fairford for fear of Abdulkarim, then our own national security cannot be said to have been endangered by that flight.

We are in far more danger from the USAF, both because of the target that its presence on our soil makes us, and because of the likes of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Morris, to rescue whom the United States Marines were illegally deployed on the streets of London so that he could be flown home before the Police had the opportunity to question him about the possession and distribution of child sexual abuse images. Like the blind wheelchair-users and the octogenarian clergywomen of Palestine Action, Abdulkarim and Essghir are the least of our worries.

Nor is any defence offered by having three of Britain's four nuclear submarines at sea. Anyone whom that was supposed to impress knows all about their test failures, their misfirings, and so forth. We may as well try to deter them (from what, exactly?) with a man in a wheelchair.

Consultation, Exercise

You do not have to be poor to be right. If your pay has not kept pace with your private employer's profits, then you have a legitimate claim. Or if, like the NHS consultants, your pay from the currency-issuing State has not kept pace with inflation, then you have a legitimate claim. By striking for a rate of pay that retained the most committed and engaged staff, they are striking to save the National Health Service.

Strikes are supposed to be disruptive, and arranging them to cause the most disruption is fundamental to them. Strikes in the NHS do not, in themselves, pose a threat to life, as if Aneurin Bevan, of all people, had never thought to put the necessary safeguards in place. I'll give you a clue. He did, so they are. The NHS flourished in the glory days of British trade unionism. Strikes have always been planned for. There is no threat to patient care, and any Health Minister or informed commentator knows that in detail. Even the deliciously demoted Yvette Cooper, who has severely damaged my own already fragile health and that of millions of other people over the past 18 years before targeting me personally last year, so that my support for any action against her is not merely wholehearted, but downright fanatical. However much she said that this strike would cost, what would otherwise have been done with that money? It is clearly available, so use it to settle the dispute.

The existential crisis in the NHS is not being caused by this strike. This strike is being caused by the existential crisis in the NHS, which goes back to the Blair Government's signature domestic policy of privatising it in England. That idea existed only on the fringes of the thinktank circuit until Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan took office in 1997. Since then, it has been the policy of all three parties except under Jeremy Corbyn, and of most Labour MPs and all Labour Party staffers continuously. Only Andy Burnham has ever privatised an NHS hospital, but in September 2009 he modestly proposed that the NHS should be its own preferred provider. Peter Mandelson's and thus Jeffrey Epstein's Progress wrote to Burnham to protest that he was "restricting the use of the private sector in the NHS", and using its eponymous magazine to opine, not only that "With an election approaching, Labour has regrettably adopted anti-market rhetoric on health", but that, "The pro-market principles espoused by Andrew Lansley are the right ones." Was it proscribed? Who was expelled?

Burnham's position was called "profoundly worrying", and its endorsement by Unite was branded "insulting and ignorant", by the Deputy Chief Executive of the Association of Chief Executives. Don't laugh. All right, do. But that person was Peter Kyle, like his former Cabinet colleague Anna Turley a member of the same salon that gave a grateful nation Joe Docherty, Matthew Doyle, Phil Woolas, Dan Norris (whose proxy vote the Labour Whips have pointedly stopped casting since Parliament most recently resumed), and Kyle's close friend, closest ally, former lover, and constituency predecessor, Ivor Caplin. And who was the salonnière? None other than Mrs Corrigan. Think on.

Get On With Doing The Right Thing

At the very, very, very least, if a job paid minimum wage no matter how long you had been doing it, then that should be the same for everyone doing it, regardless of age. If the triple lock did take the state pension over the income tax threshold, then politically that threshold would have to be raised for everyone. Splendid. Now also raise the savings limits for Universal Credit claimants, two in five of whom were in work, since those limits had been carried over from the previous benefits system and had not changed since 2006. 20 years ago. Twenty. £6000 in 2006 is hardly £6000 today. Never mind next year. If there really were to be any backsliding on the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme, then coalfield Labour MPs should seriously consider resigning the whip. And imagine being even more right-wing than Darren Jones (Bristol North West) (Lab):

I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Redditch (Chris Bloore) and for Lichfield (Dave Robertson) and others for securing this important debate. It is a pleasure to speak in it, but I am disappointed we are having to discuss this topic yet again, because we have been here before: the owners of Royal Mail prioritising profits over the public service requirements of the business they bought; the regulator seemingly unable to do anything at all about it; and postal workers once again being treated so badly when they are the ones who go out on the frontline day in, day out. The question we therefore need to answer is: why?

During my time as Chair of the Business and Trade Committee in the previous Parliament, I spent days and days of parliamentary time cross-examining Royal Mail bosses, the then Government and the regulator. I sought to give a voice to postal workers who, more often than not, felt voiceless in the workplace, and I was proud to support the efforts of the Communication Workers Union to give its members more strength in the power games that were being played between management and the workforce, but quite frankly, what good did that do? The then chief executive was asked to move on, albeit with a handsome exit payment, a new owner has taken over the business, and the regulator conducted its reviews, issued its fines and changed the universal service obligation, yet we find ourselves here in Parliament discussing the issue once again. The only conclusion I can draw is that the business model is not fit for purpose. We should not be shy in coming forward to say that the privatisation of the Royal Mail and its separation from the Post Office was a mistake. The coalition Government got that wrong, and I hope that this Labour Government will put that right.

As far as I can see, there are only two real options. The first is to facilitate the end of the public service provided by the Royal Mail, and to let the current owners turn it into a truly profitable business. We should not be surprised that the new owners of Royal Mail want to make the business profitable, and to focus on its profit-making services—that is the business they are in. However, the problem with privatisation of a public service is that profit making comes first. So it falls to us, as the guardians of public services in this country, to decide whether we will protect the public service functions of the Royal Mail or not.

Some might say the issue is not that binary. No doubt regulation of the parcels market to ensure fairer competition would go a long way to help, and the Government should ask the Competition and Markets Authority to conduct a market investigation into parcel deliveries irrespective of what happens next to the Royal Mail. However, the House should be clear-eyed about what it will mean if we continue with the privatised model. It will, in the end, be the end of the universal service obligation as we know it. That is important because, as we have already heard, the universal service obligation is not just about delivering letters: it is about having a human connection with the people of this country, at every doorstep of every house, in every community, across the width and breadth of the nation. The covid pandemic showed why the network of postal workers matters so much, and I believe that will become more, not less, important in the future. To those making an economic case about the drop in letter deliveries being the end of the universal service obligation, let me say this: think carefully about the end of this public service, because once it is gone, it will not come back.

That takes me to the second option. If Ministers agree with me that privatisation of the Royal Mail was a failure, the only other real option is to renationalise it. The House may be surprised to hear me, of all people, say that—I am not a natural fan of the Government borrowing yet more money to nationalise businesses that can be effectively run by the private sector. However, it has been proven that the Royal Mail is an example of a business that cannot be run effectively by the private sector, and an example of a business that I believe the Government can renationalise fairly easily within its fiscal rules.

When the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West and Pudsey (Rachel Reeves), updated the fiscal rules in 2024, the debt definition became public sector net financial liabilities, or “persnuffle” among friends. That allowed the Government to borrow money to invest in assets while maintaining the debt rule target that Government debt should fall in the long term as a share of GDP. In practice, that allows the Government to use so-called financial transactions to pay for equity or debt financing of publicly owned assets. That could be done with the Royal Mail, and it would fall outside the fiscal rules.

That merely leaves the question of how to raise the money to do so. I am very conscious that our national debt has risen to above £3 trillion, and that the cost of that debt is expensive to the taxpayer, costing over £100 billion a year in interest payments alone, but I think there is a way through that Ministers should consider. When the current owners of Royal Mail, International Distribution Services, bought the Royal Mail in 2025, the deal was valued at £3.6 billion. We should therefore use that number for the purposes of today’s debate.

In the spending review that I conducted in 2025, we allocated £23.8 billion for financial transactions alone between 2025-26 and 2029-30, and we are told to expect the Chancellor to increase that budget further this week. However, financial transactions can only be used by Departments to finance deals where there is a suitable public financial institution—or “puFins”—and where the Office for National Statistics agrees that it is a genuine financial transaction, not an attempt to redesign normal Government spending so that it falls outside the fiscal rules. We have several well-established puFins, from the National Wealth Fund to the British Business Bank, which I am sure will spend their budgets well. The Government Toggle showing location of have also committed to establishing several new ones, some of which have yet to be fully established. In short, it is quite hard to spend the financial transactions capital budget and I therefore assume, with some confidence, that there will be underspends that could be reprioritised.

Finally, if that is not convincing enough, I am certain that there will be public interest in a more mutual form of ownership of the Royal Mail and, I would hope, its reintegration with the Post Office. A public share offering and a special scheme for Royal Mail employees could be a nice way to do that, with the Government merely underwriting the risk, while funds are raised by the public in the years it would take to undertake the action. Having looked at this issue for so many years, I believe that this is the only solution to protecting the Royal Mail and its future.

Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op): Even if my right hon. Friend’s suggestion were to come to fruition, there would still be ongoing running costs. We know there is huge competition in this sector, so how would he propose to deal with that? Is he proposing an ongoing subsidy?

Darren Jones: I refer my hon. Friend to my previous comments about how the market needs to be better regulated, whether we own the Royal Mail or someone else does. That is why that work should be undertaken while a debate on ownership may continue with Government.

I believe that the end goal that we all want to see, that our constituents want to see and that the Government have the capacity and the ability to enable is a Royal Mail that is back in public hands, reintegrated with the Post Office network. That would be a tangible example of change in every postcode. I put that option on the table today for the Government to consider. I hope that Ministers will come to the same conclusion that I have and get on with doing the right thing.

Not Gushing In Gratitude

At 7:02 pm today, Baroness Fox of Buckley delivered this speech in the House of Lords:

My Lords, it is rather intimidating following the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, who gave such a compelling and insightful description of the crisis at the heart of criminal justice, but, put quite simply, no matter how bad that crisis is, rolling back jury trials cannot be the solution. In fact, many of us were relieved that the Government listened to the huge outcry against the earlier widespread removal of the jury trial, but if the Prime Minister has given an inch, for which I am a little grateful, forgive me for not gushing in gratitude.

I say this because so many of my Labour friends have told me that the attack on juries has been halted by Andy Burnham. That is just not true. This Bill continues an assault on juries, by removing a defendant’s right to choose a Crown Court trial for “either way” offences. That is not nothing. It means that sexual offences, violence and dishonesty can be treated as summary justice, like parking offences, with no right to appeal. Magistrates’ roles have been completely rewritten, now with expanded sentencing powers to lock up their fellow citizens for up to two years. I see this only as a recipe for miscarriages of justice. The Bar Council calls it a dangerous experiment.

Surely our elected colleagues in the other place would never have nodded through such a dangerous experiment without a comprehensive parliamentary kerfuffle about what is in this Bill. Sadly not. In the spirit of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, I make the complaint that the Report stage in the other place was allotted only 2.5 hours to consider dozens of new government amendments, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, referred to. Given that the Hansard Society considers those changes as fundamentally recasting the Bill’s purpose, that puts real moral pressure on this House to carefully consider whether the Bill is fit for purpose.

The Law Society urges us to judge the Bill by asking whether it will help break the cycle of crisis management or simply shift the problems from one overstretched part of the system to another. It seems to me to mirror how early release to tackle prison overcrowding has created havoc in the Probation Service and put the public at risk. Now we threaten a perfect storm in the magistrates’ courts, which have their own backlog. People have described how their workload has increased by 65% in the past three years and so on, but the Bill is offering them a poisoned chalice, is it not? It is telling people who might be considering being a magistrate or who are a magistrate that they can now lock up more people for longer, assess all the evidence and mitigating factors, write legal explanations and so on, and replace the jury. Does the Minister have any evidence that magistrates who donate their public service want or are attracted to these new burdens? Is it not changing the service completely?

One could have some sympathy with Ministers for harbouring a mistaken belief that removing increasing numbers of jury trials could save time, but it is telling that juries were, and still are, one of the key targets of action, rather than greater urgency in tackling the numerous avoidable inefficiencies and mismanagement that we have heard so eloquently explained.

I worry that the Government seem at ease with sacrificing fundamental rights to patch-up their own administrative failures. Perhaps the Minister can explain why the Government rejected any time-limited sunset clause that would at least ensure that this curtailing of jury trial rights would end once, or if, the court backlog was cleared, as was proposed in the other place. Instead, the Minister, Sarah Sackman KC, justified the erosion of jury rights as part of a “lasting improvement” in the operation of a modernised, fairer justice system. Can the Minister clarify whether the official position is that less use of juries will be fairer? It is hard not to agree with Judge Rivlin, whose recent paper on this Bill states: “I believe the enormous, scandalous backlog of cases has become an ‘opportunity’–some might say, an ‘excuse’–to recycle a long-held antipathy to jury trial”.

It is that implicit antipathy that worries me, particularly about Clause 3. It contains a prejudice that juries are just not up to the job of dealing with complex fraud cases. In case the public find that insulting, the Minister today justified relieving juries of that onerous burden by saying that having to sit on juries for too long is bad for their welfare and their family life. That was insulting in itself, but this bout of kindness towards the public’s well-being might be more convincing if it was not attached to a part of the Bill in which the Secretary of State, outrageously, has conferred on themselves the power to add to the list of complex offences without parliamentary veto. That was passionately opposed by the noble Lord, Lord Howard, and I agree. It is completely anti-democratic to do that.

What is more, the inference that some issues are much better dealt with by judge-only trials, full of clever experts and specialists, not only indicates a disdain for the public’s capacity or intelligence but gives up on the principle of open justice by abandoning the obligation to present cases in an understandable, intelligible way for the judge, jury, defendants and victims, as well as for the media and the public, as is part of the democratic agreement. As Jonathan Fisher KC explains, “Trying fraud without a jury risks the perception of opacity or special treatment”. He worries that it could, “feed the narrative that powerful defendants are judged behind closed professional doors”.

It seems unfathomable that, at this of all times, when there is existential distrust in the establishment and a widespread belief that there is unfair two-tier justice, some members of the establishment are trying to dismantle the one trusted norm of criminal justice, the right to be judged by your peers, and the one civic obligation that millions embrace despite the discomfort or the inconvenience, jury service. Those 12 randomly selected ordinary people with 12 different lifetimes of experience and knowledge create 12 chances for a lone voice to speak up and say, “Wait! Something is not right here”. That crucial voice has historically prevented miscarriages of justice, seen through the lies and denials of perpetrators, however respectable, and checked state overreach. There are no nodding heads or voting fodder there. Juries embody fresh eyes, disinterested questioning and the virtues of persuasion, deliberation and common sense pursuing truth. To be honest, we could do with a lot more of it, not least in Westminster.

Finally, I am very torn on Clause 16 and the plans to remove the law of presumption in relation to parental contact. It has been extremely well explained by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. We are told that removing this presumption sends a clear signal, but to who? I am not keen on using legislation for PR messaging purposes. I was also brought up short by a quote I read from the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, who said: “Being a parent is a privilege, not a right. The only right that matters is a child’s right to safety”. Surely a privilege is something that the state grants and can take away. Is the state saying that it owns parents’ rights? Actually, parents do have rights. I fear this is state overreach that risks making family courts ever more antagonistic. It is an attack on family rights. I hope the review that has been planned in the Bill will extend itself to Clause 16, because a lot of answers are needed there.

A Remainer Borrowed A Convenient Leave Voice

The problem could not have arisen if we had still had “no union card, no job”. There cannot be the free movement of any of goods, services, capital or labour without the free movement of all of them. Although he was not as sound as Ed Balls, who had arguably done more than anyone apart from his patron Gordon Brown to keep Britain out of the euro and who had wanted to renegotiate freedom of movement from scratch in 2010, Andy Burnham did express Eurosceptical views in the Shadow Cabinet of Ed Miliband. Still, as Paul Knaggs writes:

Andy Burnham has never changed his mind about Europe. That is the problem. What changes is what he is prepared to admit, and that depends entirely on who is in the room. On 7 December 2016, six months after the referendum, Burnham stood up in the Commons as MP for Leigh, a Leave-voting town on the edge of Wigan. He had wanted Britain to stay in. He told the House that his preference had been to reform free movement from within the EU, but that the country had understandably lost patience. Then he said something few Labour politicians have dared to say before or since: “There is nothing socialist about the system of open borders that allows multinationals to treat people as commodities and move them around Europe, to drive down labour costs and create a race to the bottom.”

He told the House that free movement was not working for towns where traditional industry had given way to low-wage, insecure work. He said those towns got no help to manage the pressure on wages, housing, schools and GP surgeries. He warned his own side that calling Leave voters racist was both wrong and politically suicidal, and that the left’s silence was handing the argument to the right. Every word of it was true. And he knew it.

Andy Burnham Brexit U-turn: From Leigh to Downing Street

Nearly ten years later, Burnham needed another Leave seat. Makerfield, next door to his old constituency, is reported to have voted 65 per cent Leave. In May, as he sought the Labour selection, he said Brexit had been damaging, but that the last thing the country should do was re-run those arguments. He told voters he was not proposing that the UK consider rejoining the EU. Once elected, he promised to apply a single question to everything his government did: would it work for the people of Makerfield and communities like it across England?

That was the doorstep. Then came the conference hall. In Liverpool in September, Burnham told Labour members that Brexit had done more harm than good, and that rejoining was among the options. This month, in an interview with the Sunday Times, he signalled that staying out of free movement would no longer be a red line. Downing Street had to clarify that he was “not setting out a concrete position either way”.

His ministers have followed the script. On Sunday, Housing Secretary Angela Rayner told the BBC that free movement should not be off the table, and that she wanted an honest conversation about the trade-offs before putting it to the people at a general election. Labour’s 2024 manifesto contains a single, unambiguous sentence: there will be no return to the single market, the customs union or freedom of movement. That was the settlement. Burnham promised Makerfield he would not reopen it. Within four months, he has.

Rejoining the EU Without a Referendum: A Treacherous Path 

Let me say plainly what I think is happening, because this is opinion and it should be read as such. This is not a conversation. It is a campaign. The next two years will be spent softening the ground: an “evidence-based” review here, a “closer partnership” there, ministers repeating that nothing is off the table until the table is all that is left. Then the next manifesto will carry a pledge to rejoin. We already know the route, because one of Labour’s senior figures has drawn the map. Dame Emily Thornberry, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, told Sky News this month that Labour should not bother with another referendum, and should instead make rejoining a general election issue. Put it in the manifesto, win a majority, and call that the mandate.

It is a way of overturning the largest democratic vote in British history without ever asking the same question again. Even voters who want to rejoin seem uneasy with it. YouGov found that 54 per cent of them still want a referendum before membership is restored. The likely result is an election fought as a single question: Labour or Reform, in or out, with the working-class towns that voted Leave forced to choose between a party that ignored them and a party that will exploit them. Before that, we can look forward to another parliament of paralysis, as the whole exhausting argument is dragged out and fought again. Every betrayal, real or perceived, will make another Reform voter. That is not leadership. It is a gamble with the heartlands as the stake.

Why Rejoin Arguments Miss the Reality of Britain’s Economy 

The rejoiners have arguments, and they deserve a fair hearing. They say public opinion has shifted. YouGov’s tracker has put support for rejoining at around 51 per cent since January 2024. But we have heard this before. Remain led in the polls for most of 2016, and the country voted Leave. Every year since, a new survey has declared the argument settled. And every time the question has come anywhere near the ballot box, people have answered differently: the Brexit Party topping the European elections in 2019, Boris Johnson’s three words, “Get Brexit Done”, delivering the largest Conservative majority since 1987, and this May, Reform winning the most council seats in England. In Wigan, the borough that contains Makerfield, Reform took 24 of the 25 seats up for election. A poll measures what people say when nothing is at stake. An election measures what they do when something is.

The rejoiners have other arguments. They say Brexit added red tape and friction to trade with our nearest market, and that is true for many goods exporters. And they say Brexit did not deliver control of immigration, which is also true: net migration rose to record levels after we left. But look at what those arguments leave out. Ministers now claim exports have fallen by 20 per cent. Yet House of Commons Library figures show services exports to the EU have grown strongly since 2020, even where goods trade has suffered. The economy did not collapse. The IMF projected that Britain would outgrow Germany, France and Italy in both 2025 and 2026. The doom was a forecast, endlessly repeated until it was mistaken for a fact.

As for migration, the record numbers were a choice made in Westminster, not an accident of leaving. A British government designed that visa system, and a British government can redesign it. Burnham himself told conference that the British right “gave it away in the first place”. He is right. So why is his answer to give it away again? Sovereignty is not a guarantee of good government. It is the precondition for it. Power used badly is still power you can use well. Hand it to Brussels, accept rules made by others under “dynamic alignment”, and you lose the right to use it at all. Nye Bevan saw this coming in 1957. Writing in Tribune, he called the Common Market “an escapist conception in which the play of market forces will take the place of political responsibility”. He understood it as the symptom of socialists who had lost faith in using their own parliaments to plan their own economies. Seventy years on, a Labour government with an enormous majority is reaching for the same escape.

Who the Single Market Serves: Cheap Labour and Stagnant Wages

None of the rejoiners’ arguments answers the question Burnham himself posed in 2016. What does free movement do for the towns he described? The single market rests on four freedoms: goods, services, capital and people. The City wants its services passport back. The business lobbies want their pool of labour back. For finance and for the boss, rejoining means opportunity. For the plasterer whose day rate has not moved in a decade, the shop worker whose hours are cut whenever a cheaper rota can be filled, and the young man in Ashton on a zero-hours contract, it means the same downward pressure Burnham described in the Commons, with nobody left to stop it.

Most economists find the average effect of EU migration on wages was small. But averages are where working-class grievances go to be dismissed. The pressure was never felt in the average. It was felt at the bottom of the labour market, in exactly the towns that voted Leave, and that is why they voted Leave. There is a revealing line in Burnham’s conference speech. He listed the things that had put Britain on the wrong path for forty years: deindustrialisation, deregulation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit. He is right about the first four. But Brexit does not belong on that list. For millions in the heartlands, Brexit was the vote against the other four. It was the one time in forty years they were asked, and they answered.

Industrial Strategy Over Brussels: What Northern Towns Need Now

What would pass Burnham’s own Makerfield test is not a return to Brussels. It is an industrial strategy with teeth. That means public ownership where the market has failed, public procurement that buys British, apprenticeships that lead somewhere, and an economy that makes the things we use here rather than shipping them in from the other side of the world. Every one of those tools is easier to use outside the single market than inside it. A cheaper bus fare is welcome. A warm summit with Ursula von der Leyen may make good television. Neither will lift a single wage in Hindley or Leigh. If Burnham believes free movement now serves the communities he spoke for in 2016, he should go back to Makerfield and say so on the doorsteps where he made his promise. He won’t, because he knows the answer. Burnham knew the truth when he needed Leigh’s votes. He knew it again when he needed Makerfield’s. The only thing that has changed is that he no longer needs them.

Assessing The Appropriate Next Steps

The Jason Arday affair has repeatedly been shown to have been nothing like as bad, or even as unusual, as it was presented, and there may well be more such correction to come. The whole thing was got up over the summer to distract from the true scandal of Lola Salem, itself extending to the emergence of a Parisian-style Far Right intellectual and cultural scene in London with connections to the very hearts of Reform UK and the Conservative Party.

The self-appointed inquiry into Arday announced its existence and composition in one of the two magazines closest to Salem and to the already convicted Henry Hopwood-Phillips. Another writer for both, no less than Nathan Cofnas himself, is soon to speak at the Oxford college from which Salem has been suspended. He is to do so under the aegis of Reform, which clearly regards his startling views and vocabulary not only as open to academic interrogation, which of course they are, but as worthy of a platform provided explicitly by that party. That is before mentioning his questionable qualifications. Cofnas has never written anything except “race realism”. Not about it. The thing itself. In this decade, first Cambridge and then Ghent have appointed him in that full knowledge, thereby declaring his field to be within the bounds of academic discourse, a declaration that has been repeated by those who have petitioned in his cause. Again, not just the study of it, but “race realism” itself.

When Arday died, Cofnas gave a triumphant interview in which he said that “after the revolution”, he would be “the Head of the Department of Eugenics and Race Science at Harvard”. No inference that he was joking could have been drawn from the record on which Cambridge had appointed this alien, to whom a United Kingdom visa had therefore been granted and by whom it is clearly still held. Ghent and Belgium have the same questions to answer, especially since Ghent reinstated Cofnas on the orders of Donald Trump via Ambassador Bill White. As with the proscription of Palestine Action, to support that is to support Trump. If you already did, then so much for national sovereignty. But if not, then, again, you are saying that Cofnas’s views were academically respectable. Fascism is the shield and sword of bourgeois liberalism. The liberal bourgeoisie always chooses it when the choice has to be made, a story a century old.

It was well before the 2022 appointment of Cofnas to Cambridge that Evolutionary Psychological Science published him at least twice, including once in dialogue with Edward Dutton, whom I knew at Durham, where he once tried to seduce me after Mass, so that I know his little secret. In 2018, Evolutionary Psychological Science also published this masterpiece by Dutton, who is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Mankind Quarterly, which he used to edit. Another member is Dr Adel Batterjee of Jeddah, the founder of the Benevolence International Foundation, which was placed under UN sanctions because it was a front for funding al-Qaeda. On the Editorial Board of Evolutionary Psychological Science is the archetypal Epstein Class academic, Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, although one does have to wonder for how much longer, but not because the revolution would replace his Chair and person with those of the very Cofnas in whose defence he was organising most prominently, suggesting that he would be quite at home in the New Order. Pinker is one of the self-appointed inquirers into the case of Arday.

Perhaps they are all planning to decamp to Oxford? Cofnas stands no chance of a return to Cambridge, and Ghent is allowing him only to work from home even for research purposes, with a complete ban from teaching. But he seems to be welcome at Oxford. He may not be the only one, as Helen Warrell, Wilf Vall and Ramsay Hodgson write:

James Orr, Reform UK’s former head of policy, has stood down from his two academic management roles at the University of Cambridge due to concerns about “media scrutiny”. An FT investigation last month revealed that Orr, an associate professor of philosophy of religion and friend of US vice-president JD Vance, had been subject to two complaints by former Cambridge students. One of the complaints led to a £5,000 payout by the university and a written apology from the Divinity faculty.

Orr was suspended by Reform after a subsequent undercover sting broadcast by Channel 4 News contained allegations that he breached electoral law by soliciting political donations from foreign citizens. Cambridge has not revealed whether it is conducting an internal investigation into Orr. However, he had quietly stood down from his most substantial role as the chair of the Faculty of Divinity’s undergraduate exam board — which involves oversight of end-of-year exams and final grades for all students — according to several people familiar with the matter. He would also no longer take up his expected position as convener of the philosophy of religion master’s degree this year, these people said. As a result, his responsibilities will now be largely limited to giving student supervisions and lecturing.

The university indicated that the decision had been taken by the head of Orr’s department after he requested a discussion about his duties for the coming year in light of “recent media scrutiny”. Orr said that he had asked for “different administrative responsibilities for this academic year” in the hope he would cause colleagues fewer distractions, following “media scrutiny in recent weeks”. He declined to say what his new administrative responsibilities are.

When responding to questions from the FT in August, Orr said he was expecting to take up both roles — as exam board chair and masters course convener — when term started this month. “I have been chair and deputy chair for the board of undergraduate examiners . . . for every year since my post began (with the exception of the academic year . . . when I was on sabbatical),” he said. “I will continue in this role next academic year.” He said he had “regularly” been director of the MPhil in philosophy of religion and would be again in this current academic year.

Orr was appointed Reform’s head of policy in February, in an effort by the party’s leader Nigel Farage to bolster its links with academia and build closer ties with US Maga Republicans. A Channel 4 broadcast in early September showed Orr and another senior Reform aide, Dan Jukes, in conversations with a man purporting to arrange illicit political donations. Later that month, the Metropolitan Police announced that it was conducting a criminal investigation into whether the party had broken electoral law. Both Orr and Jukes have denied wrongdoing. An internal Reform inquiry cleared them of having acted illegally, but they remain suspended from the party.

The FT’s investigation included allegations about conflicts of interest and safeguarding relating to Orr’s housing of students in his own home — akin to a proto-college which he has described as a haven for “refugees” from the main university. It also included allegations that Orr’s role as head of policy at Reform had been detrimental to his university job. When contacted for the FT investigation, Orr denied any wrongdoing and said no disciplinary action had been taken against him. He said he had “received repeated assurances” from the university that the housing of students in his home was “perfectly in order”. The university said Orr had followed its rules about students living in his home, and that it had “no reason to believe . . . [Orr’s external jobs] have adversely affected his performance of his contractual duties”.

Earlier this month, Orr resumed lecturing undergraduates in ethics. However, he no longer has a pigeonhole in the faculty and his picture has been removed from the board of staff in the department’s entrance hall. Michael Banner, director of studies in theology at Trinity College, Cambridge, said he was “surprised” Orr would no longer be taking up his academic management roles. “When a number of us wrote to the Vice-Chancellor sharing our concerns about his commitment to his teaching and other responsibilities, we were rather brushed off,” said Banner, an expert in ethics in public life. “And yet it looks as if, behind the scenes, there are concerns about Orr’s ability to hold such positions as chair of examiners.”

Jason Scott-Warren, a Cambridge professor and a member of the University Council, the principal executive and policymaking body, told the FT that Cambridge should investigate whether Orr’s role as head of policy at Reform “led him to neglect his academic duties, and whether his unethical behaviour in that role renders him unfit to continue in post”. Cambridge declined to say whether it is investigating Orr, but is understood to be assessing the appropriate next steps.

Judge-Alone Trials: The Latest Proposals

His Honour Geoffrey Rivlin KC writes:

An Open Letter to Peers

Long retired from sitting as Resident Judge at Southwark Crown Court, I have nevertheless joined with other retired judges to articulate as best we can how contrary to principle, unworkable and unnecessary, are the government’s proposals to curtail the scope of jury trials. Why me? After over 50 years at the criminal bar and on the bench, largely appearing in or trying cases of serious crime, in particular serious and complex fraud, I have considerable experience of juries. Nevertheless, I would be far happier, as no doubt would my Readers, to leave this paper to judges with current experience of presiding over criminal cases. We retired judges cannot speak for serving judges at the coal face – but nor can they – because they have been instructed to remain silent about the Courts and Tribunals Bill (‘the Bill’) and no one in a public setting has heard anything from them, or anyone on their behalf.

Principle – The Constitution

Peers will soon be considering the Bill at their Second Reading. I hope they may agree that the current, very recent proposals with regard to juries, if implemented, will have significant and profound constitutional implications, and should be scrutinised by their eminent Constitution Committee. I should spell out why.

It began with Sir Brian, now Lord Leveson. This extraordinary statement in Part 1 of his Independent Review of the Criminal Courts (July 2025) formed the entire basis of his recommendations to curtail jury trials: See page 143, para 42: (All emphases mine.)

‘Most often, the resistance to reforming the right to elect has centred on whether a defendant has a constitutional ‘right’ to a jury. I make clear my position that there exists no such constitutional or common law right to a trial by jury … It is on this premise that I proceed with my subsequent recommendations in this chapter on judge alone trials.’

In December 2025, having jettisoned Leveson’s recommendations and substituted far more extensive and radical legislation, the baton was taken up by the Lord Chancellor himself. On 10 March 2026, David Lammy opened the Second Reading debate, solemnly assuring MPs: ‘There is not and never has been an automatic right to a jury trial.’ Next, on 30 June, Sarah Sackman KC, the Courts Minister, told the Commons, ‘There is no right to a jury trial in this country; there is a right to a fair trial’. Perhaps Mr Lammy and Ms Sackman had forgotten that the very first heading of their Bill reads: ‘1. Removal of right to elect trial on indictment’. For literally hundreds of years trial on indictment has meant, and only meant (absent proof of jury-tampering) trial by jury. This is truly automatic. Therefore, ‘Removal of the right to elect’ must mean ‘removal of the right to jury trial’. But it goes much further than that:

The Common Law. Could MPs be expected to know that at least since Bushell’s Case 1670, after which juries could no longer be punished for their verdicts (if not long before), jury trial has for centuries been deeply ingrained in our common law? Theodore Plucknett, in his Concise History of the Common Law (Ed.5 1956) explains how since the thirteenth century it has been ‘expedient to declare by statute that the petty jury was now ‘the common law of the land’.’ Rather more recently, a Law Lord, Lord Hobhouse (R v Connor and Mirza [2004] UKHL 2, Para 130 (c)) confirmed that: ‘Under the common law system of jury trial, all findings of fact are to be made by the jury and it is ultimately their decision whether to convict the defendant.’ 

The Constitution. Of course there is no ‘right to jury trial’ under our constitutional system in the sense that Parliament cannot interfere with it, because our system of parliamentary sovereignty does not accommodate ‘rights’ to anything in that sense. Not, for example, the right to vote or the right to freedom of speech. But for centuries jury trial has been recognised as a vital part of our constitutional fabric or structure, no less than any institution of government or basic liberty of the individual; and the failure of Leveson, Lammy and Sackman to acknowledge this is as surprising as it is alarming. Once it is acknowledged that trial by jury forms part of our unwritten constitution, it follows that there must be a ‘right’ to it, for otherwise the statement is devoid of any meaning.

Here are just a few of the statements and comments which not only recognise the place of jury trial in the constitution, but suggest that it has long been counted one of its greatest jewels. Some of them have the added authority of being made from the Bench:

Lord Erskine (1705-1766) Lord Chancellor: ‘Criminal justice in the hands of the people is the basis of freedom…’

Lord Camden (1714-1794) Lord Chancellor: trial by jury – ‘is the foundation of our free constitution’. 

Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780) Judge and Jurist: ‘ … inroads (taking away rights to trial by jury) upon this sacred bulwark of the nation are fundamentally opposed to the spirit of our constitution…’ 

Lord Eldon (1801-1827) Lord Chancellor: trial by jury – the ‘greatest blessing which the British Constitution had secured to the subject.’ 

Lord Denning (1899-1999) Master of Rolls and Law Lord: in Ward v James [1966] 1QB 273 ‘Trial by jury … has been the bulwark of our liberties too long for any of us to seek to alter it. Whenever a man is on trial for serious crime … then trial by jury has no equal.’ 

Lord Devlin (1905-1992) Law Lord: ‘ … So that trial by jury is more than an instrument of justice and more than one wheel of the constitution: it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives …’ 

Lord Bingham (1933-2010) Senior Law Lord, in R v Pendleton [2001] UKHL 66. Para 17: ‘Mr Mansfield is right to emphasise the central role of the jury in a trial on indictment. This is an important and greatly-prized feature of our constitution.’ 

Lord Steyn, (1932-2017) Law Lord, in R v Connor and Mirza (above, para.7): ‘The jury is an integral and indispensable part of the criminal justice system. The system of trial by judge and jury is of constitutional significance. The jury is also, through its collective decision-making, an excellent fact finder. Not surprisingly, the public trust juries.’ 

Lord Judge, (1941-2023) Lord Chief Justice. In R v Twomey [2009] EWCA Crim 1035: (a rare case of jury tampering) ‘trial by jury is a hallowed principle of the administration of criminal justice’ … ‘a safeguard against oppression and dictatorship’. 

Lord Hope, (1938-) The first Deputy President of Supreme Court, in R v Connor and Mirza (above, para. 144): ‘The right to trial by jury has a unique and vital role to play in our criminal justice system … The jury trial has been adopted in all the main common law jurisdictions. It is rightly regarded as a bastion of the criminal justice system against domination of the state and a safeguard of the liberty of its citizens. This is an affirmation of human rights principles. The detail in each country may differ in order to suit their own culture … For the public it is a highly valued part of our unwritten constitution…’

Professor Sir J.H. Baker (1944-) Distinguished legal historian, in An Introduction to Legal History: ‘It [jury trial] was to become a constitutional principle sacred to generations of Englishmen, and later to a new world as well, that men should be tried by their peers, and that judges should not meddle with questions of fact.’ 

Lord Hodge (1953-) Former Deputy President of the Supreme Court, in a speech at the University in Shanghai, China: ‘The right of a citizen charged with a serious criminal offence to be tried by a jury of fellow citizens is a powerful tradition in the United Kingdom and in other common law countries.’ 

JUSTICE, the highly respected cross-party legal reform charity contends that in England and Wales jury trial for all but minor offences ‘has acquired the status of a constitutional right’. 

Our criminal justice system has a long history of public participation. The public are vitally involved, and have a direct interest in its future. It may not be beyond change – over the years it has been changed a number of times – but the great tradition of trial by jury has an honoured place in the constitution, and its place is at the top table. It gives us far more than protection against state oppression; it provides a precious leavening of the inflexibility that trials by judge-alone necessarily involve. Any proposals to change it, therefore, demand very close scrutiny; any proposals to remove it – extreme caution’. I suggest that it must be without question that the proposals in the Bill do have constitutional implications – but they have been introduced without a manifesto, without a mandate, without consultation, and manifestly without caution.

What, then, does this mean? It means first that as with any proposal to modify the constitution, the case for change must be compelling and command a high degree of support; and second, it means that any proposed change must be preceded by the most careful consideration and the fullest possible debate. And this must surely include the judges. Sir Stephen Mitchell, retired High Court judge and long-term editor of Archbold’s Criminal Pleading, Evidence and Practice, wrote: ‘The experience of judges uniquely equips them to identify and assess the consequences of implementing these proposals... Yet those best qualified to assess, explain, justify or oppose—the independent serving judiciary of England—remain either silent or silenced’ (The Sunday Times, 26 April 2026).

The House of Lords Constitution Committee exists to examine the constitutional implications of Bills brought before Parliament. The Committee should know that in debate after debate MPs have expressed their deep concern that a Bill of this nature was being presented to the House without prior mention in a manifesto. If I may take just two examples from the debate on 7th January: Alicia Kearns: ‘The Labour manifesto made no mention of curtailing our right to jury trial. This is not a minor shift in policy; it is a worrying trend fundamental to the relationship between the individual and the state.’ Dr Shastri-Hirst ‘… there is no mandate for this decision. It represents such a significant constitutional change to our legal system, and is being made without reference to the will of the people. Justice delayed is indeed justice denied, but justice expedited at the cost of constitutional principle may prove a far greater denial still.’ Hansard will show that these complaints also featured in the Second and Third Readings of the Bill (10 March 2026 and 13 October 2026).

For over a year the erratic, shifting and changing journey of this legislation has been marked by lack of thought, lack of direction and a determination, it would seem at all costs, to secure what is euphemistically called a ‘structural change’. The MOJ has now conceded that its main structural proposal, set out in the original Clause 3, should be removed. (Its epitaph was delivered with typical brio by Karl Turner MP: ‘The reality is that the CCBD (Crown Court Bench Division) was completely, unbelievably unworkable, as Members from across the House warned the Government. It would not — could not — have worked. It will never work.’) Nevertheless, two important incursions into jury trial, now Clauses 1 and 3, and allied schedules, remain.

There are those who scorn jury trial, but no one has yet explained how the present parlous state of the criminal justice system has any bearing on mode of trial. I believe the enormous, scandalous backlog of cases has become an ‘opportunity’ – some might say, an ‘excuse’ – to recycle a long-held antipathy to jury trial and quite possibly its expense. In support of this, I need do no more than quote the words of Ms Sackman, who has largely assumed the burden of promoting the Bill. For all her considerable abilities, her words, winding up this 7 January debate, betray that the jury proposals may in truth be ideological. They do also reveal a distressing perception of the nature and role of our criminal justice system:

‘To conclude, everyone in the Chamber today has agreed we are in a state of crisis. The difference between His Majesty’s Opposition and the Government is that I reject the learned helplessness that festered under the previous Government. This Government has a choice to make and we are making it. We are making the decision to use a crisis and turn it into an opportunity – to bring down waiting lists and modernise the system in the process. ‘People ask me, “Sarah, would you be doing this if there was not a crisis in our courts?”. I say, “yes, because we need a better system, one in which the courts, not criminals, triage cases …”’

1. The Right to Elect 

The concept of a right to elect trial by jury has been with us for a long time. In 1855 – an age of draconian punishments – we find a Criminal Justice Act giving accused the right to have certain crimes and sentences downgraded from indictable to summary offences. Next, and perhaps more to the point, under the Summary Jurisdiction Act, 1879, the pendulum swung the other way. Section 17 is headed: ‘Right to claim trial by jury in case of offences otherwise triable summarily.’ It gives a defendant charged with an offence other than violence for which a sentence may exceed three months the right to claim trial by a jury. 

Clause 1 of the newly revised Bill makes for impenetrable reading. It refers to, adopts or amends sections from no fewer than six other Acts of Parliament. It is left to the Explanatory Notes to translate and tell the story: 

‘The Bill will remove defendants’ right to elect for trial in the Crown Court for all triable either-way offences’. This means that a decision on jurisdiction will be made solely by the Magistrates’ Courts.

This will prevent cases that Magistrates determine are suitable for summary trial from escalating to the Crown Court, ensuring they are heard in the most appropriate venue, according to the seriousness and complexity of the case.

Legislation relating to online plea and allocations will also be amended. Certain uncommenced provisions in the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980, inserted by the Judicial Review and Courts Act 2022, provide defendants with an opportunity to indicate their plea and preferred mode of trial online. Provisions relating to mode of trial will be amended or repealed to reflect that the decision rests with the Magistrates’ Courts.

Crown Court judges are currently able to remit a case to the Magistrates’ Courts where they determine it to be within a Magistrates’ Court’s jurisdiction. However, this is subject to defendant consent. Legislation will be amended to remove the consent requirement so a case can be remitted to the Magistrates’ Court without the defendant’s consent.’ 

The effect of these provisions, if enacted, will be to give Magistrates the right to decide whether, set against their maximum powers of 18 months or two years imprisonment, the case should be tried summarily (Magistrates’ Court) or on indictment (Crown Court with jury). This encompasses a huge range of serious criminal offences – of violence, sexual offences, dishonesty and many others – all save for a very few ‘indictable-only’ offences and those qualifying under Clause 3. This means that it will be at the discretion of Magistrates whether they should be tried summarily or with a jury. As far as I am aware there is no right to appeal their decision. This development is massive. In all our long legal history, it may be difficult to find a provision affecting the laws and liberties of the individual to be of such far-reaching, profound, constitutional significance.

Why would anyone elect trial by jury? The Government plainly wonders what their motive could be, and has repeatedly ascribed election to ‘criminals gaming’ the system. No doubt this does happen, but we should not set aside the fact that there are cogent, principled, and very positive reasons why a defendant should choose to elect trial by jury. Obvious arguments, requiring little elaboration here, are the need for equality under the law and to avoid a two-tier system of criminal justice, where defendants charged with the same or very similar crimes will find themselves before quite different tribunals with very different processes. There are many evidential instances where one tribunal of fact (jury) will be cleansed of inadmissible evidence prejudicial to a defendant, but the other (judge sitting alone) must strive to ‘ignore’ it. Perhaps the most dramatic of these is to be found in the field of disclosure, where the trial judge sitting alone, for reasons unknown to the defence, may be made aware (for example, from material emanating from informants) of deeply prejudicial material, which may or may not be true.

But there are other principled reasons of equal force, and in this regard we do not have far to go to arrive at the ultimate paradox – that the original promoters of the Bill’s ‘Removal of the right to elect trial on indictment’, Keir Starmer, Prime Minister and David Lammy, Lord Chancellor, have each provided some of the strongest arguments in favour of it:

Clive Walker and Keir Starmer on Miscarriages of Justice – A Review of Justice in Error (1999) ‘… there are clear advantages for defendants in trial by jury as compared with trial by magistrates. One benefit of jury trial is that jurors are not usually made privy to inadmissible evidence which may prejudice the tribunal of fact. Another is that the principle of random selection appears to be a better foundation for impartiality and independence than the principle of selection by unaccountable advisory committees appointed by the Lord Chancellor.’

David Lammy. In 2017, as shadow justice minister (later, first black Lord Chancellor), he chaired the Lammy Review – ‘An independent review into the treatment of, and outcomes for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals in the criminal justice system’. (Sir Keir Starmer was on the Advisory Committee.) It concluded: ‘Juries are not merely a ‘success story’; they are the one part of the criminal justice system where minorities were treated without racial bias. The way that juries make decisions is key to this. ... When a jury retires, its members must consider the evidence, discuss the case and seek to persuade one another if necessary. This debate and deliberation act as a filter for prejudice … In the final decision, power is never concentrated in the hands of one individual … Juries are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement. Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea’.

When writing these words, Messrs. Starmer and Lammy knew perfectly well what kind of case they had in mind, and what kind of person – those particularly vulnerable to oppression, bias and injustice – they were seeking to protect. The cases captured within the wide net of Clause 1 are just the sort where, under this provision, oppression, bias and injustice would be likely to occur. At the other end of the scale, Sir Geoffrey Cox KC in the Third Reading debate pleaded for defendants of good character always to be granted jury trial, but it is easy to see how this would create another can of worms, and fail in the name of equality before the law.

And so, considering the problems with this Bill, perhaps first and foremost we should be aware that no problem compares with the gross folly of giving Magistrates the formidable responsibility and power to decide in advance of a case – on paper – its ‘seriousness and complexity’, the likely sentence and by what means their fellow citizens should be tried. I do not aim this remark at Magistrates. I suggest this would be an extremely onerous, unacceptable task for experienced judges (of whatever rank) – as will occur if the Clause 3 proposals go forward.

Quite apart from all these matters of principle, there are good practical reasons to doubt the feasibility of this scheme. Many of these featured in the debates on the Bill, some forcefully articulated by Labour MPs, including Katherine Atkinson the new Justice Committee Chair: – that Magistrates’ Courts already have a backlog several times greater than that in the Crown Court; that there is a severe shortage of Magistrates; that considering representations as to mode of trial will become a time-consuming industry by itself; that summary trials with their reputation for speedy outcomes are less likely to secure justice; that many trials assigned to Magistrates will be difficult, often impossible, to manage and continue uninterrupted from start to finish; that an increasing number of defendants on trial will be unrepresented; that unrepresented defendants are likely to be wholly unqualified to make representations as to their ‘correct’ mode of trial. Many will not have the skill or the facilities to do so ‘on line’ (They will be equally unlikely to consider and articulate reasons for an appeal – see below).

But before we ever go down the rabbit-hole to confront these problems, we should first consider the impact of these provisions on our understanding of the Rule of Law, of which jury trial has long been a cornerstone. I have suggested it is clear that an issue arises as to the constitutionality of this Bill, and very much hope that this will be scrutinised by the Lords’ Committee. Even if the Committee has no problems with the Bill, I trust that Noble Members debating it will be concerned with balance – that it purports to erode entrenched valued freedoms in the name of, but only in the name of, reducing a serious court backlog.

2. Complex or Lengthy Cases

The original Leveson recommendation was that: ‘serious and complex fraud cases should be tried by judge alone. Eligible cases should be defined by their hidden dishonesty or complexity that is – outside the understanding of the general public. The allocation decision should be made at a Preparatory Hearing. The limits of and process for these powers should be set out in a Practice Direction by the Lady Chief Justice.’

‘Hidden dishonesty outside the understanding of the general public’? This necessarily confined judge-alone trials to a very few cases. I cannot say that such a case has never existed, but in all my time at the Bar and on the Bench I never encountered one. Nor, apparently, has His Honour Nic Madge, who recently wrote to The Guardian: ‘I presided over fraud trials with juries, including a Ponzi fraud worth £48m and a Russian identity fraud with more than 40,000 documents. The juries were totally on top of both trials and delivered sensible, rational verdicts – in both cases guilty on some charges and not guilty on others. My experience is that the key issue in fraud cases is frequently whether the defendant acted dishonestly. That is not a technical question. It is something that juries are much better able to decide than judges.’ This accords with the Supreme Court, see Ivey [2017] UKSC 67.

In a lecture delivered by Lady Justice Hallett, now Baroness Hallett, when Vice President of the CACD, she said: ‘One has to question – why, if a prosecution of a criminal offence is so complex that only a highly educated and trained professional will follow – has it been brought? Fraud offences are defined by the standards of ordinary people and prosecutions should be intelligible to the public. If the prosecution cannot explain in sufficiently simple terms why they say someone has behaved dishonestly, is a prosecution for a criminal offence punishable with imprisonment justified?’

Moving on from Leveson, we come to Clause 3 and Part 1 of Schedule 3ZA of the Bill. Under the heading ‘Trial on indictment without a jury: complex or lengthy cases’, the Bill now gives a judge the power to decide (without right of appeal) whether a whole range of specified indictable offences of dishonesty should be tried by judge alone. We are now no longer concerned with a small number of offences ‘outside the understanding of the public’. Without any consultation of which I am aware, subject to meeting certain conditions, a great swathe of offences of dishonesty is now specifically slated to qualify for trial by judge-alone. They are ‘Fraud and conspiracy to defraud, fraudulent trading, tax evasion, false accounting, insider dealing, money laundering, terrorist funding, bribery and ‘historic fraud offences.’ Fraudulent trading appears to have been added in the last few days! Most of these offences are regular fare at one court or another. Some of them, e.g. insider dealing, terrorist funding and bribery, might be thought as particularly well suited to jury trial.

What are the conditions?

‘The court is satisfied that the likely complexity of the trial or the likely length of the trial (or both) makes it appropriate for the trial to be conducted without a jury,

The court does not consider that it is in the public interest for the trial to be conducted with a jury, and

The court does not consider that there are any other reasons why it would be more appropriate for the trial to be conducted with a jury.’

There is no guidance, let alone definition, of what is meant by the terms ‘complexity’ or ‘likely length’ or ‘public interest’; nothing said about what might make a judge-alone trial ‘appropriate’. The entire decision as to mode of trial is left in the air for determination by a judge who will know far less about the case than either the prosecution or defence, and against whose judgment (dare I say, in some cases – prejudice or whim) there is to be no right of appeal. I have remarked that for centuries trial on indictment has meant trial by jury. Now this right is to be taken away, and given to judges. We should recall the words of Lord Bingham: ‘Mr Mansfield is right to emphasise the central role of the jury in a trial on indictment. This is an important and greatly-prized feature of our constitution.’

Those with knowledge of the Bill will be aware that attached to Clause 3 is a clause – loosely called a ‘Henry VIII clause’ – which gives the Secretary of State power to remove or add offences to this provision. The Bill’s Explanatory Note makes it clear that these will not be confined to offences of dishonesty. Any offence, other than one of the few specified as ‘indictable only’ will be vulnerable. In his article Silence of the Judges, New Law Journal, Professor Graham Zellick KC asks: ‘Who would have thought that any government would think it appropriate to legislate to withdraw the right to trial by jury by secondary legislation? This proposal crosses a constitutional Rubicon and cries out for comment.’

I do not intend to weary the reader with a discourse on the unworkability of cases envisaged for judge-alone trials, or dilate upon the extraordinary situation in which we may find very similar cases in adjacent courts in the same building being tried by jury or judge-alone under very different conditions. If the Reader wishes to learn about these in detail, kindly access the following link: [Focus - September 2025]. I should remark that since writing these articles, it has emerged that Jonathan Fisher KC had, at the Government’s request, prepared a Review which unequivocally supports trial by jury in these cases. The publication of his Report, Fraud in the Digital Age, July 2026, CP 1600, was unaccountably delayed by the Home Office for seven months, and did not appear until after the Second Reading in the Commons.

What is now said to be the justification for this Clause? Who has campaigned for this change? Not Parliament, which voted against the idea in 2010; not the Bar, not Solicitors, and certainly not the Judges who are used to trying these cases. Ms Sackman (13 October 2026) enlightens us:

‘There remains a strong case for judge-alone trials in the small number of cases that pertain to complex and lengthy fraud and financial matters. I can confirm to the House that we will proceed with this measure, which has had strong support from those responsible for investigating and prosecuting serious economic crime. Our primary objective here is to minimise the burden on ordinary people, who sit as jurors on such trials. We know that these trials can be lengthy, often lasting months at a time, which can mean long periods away from work and family responsibilities, lost income and real pressure on family life.’

If this is the case, the Government is on weak ground indeed. First, we should note that all the old arguments about juries being unable to comprehend the evidence, judges giving reasoned judgments, etc., have long been trashed and disappeared. Second, it relies for support only from investigators and prosecutors. (Times have changed. In the three years I spent within the SFO as adviser to the Director, I never once heard a complaint about jury trial). It is certainly unsurprising that there is no mention of support from the professions, or any other agency involved in the criminal justice system. As far as I am aware, all of them object strongly to the Bill. I wonder how many letters the MOJ has received from judges who have presided over these cases, or indeed from jurors who have served on them, objecting to the experience.

In January 2026 I had the privilege of submitting evidence to the Justice Committee [Evidence to Justice Committee, January 2026]. On 13 February, the Chair of the Committee wrote to Lammy asking for information:

‘HH Geoffrey Rivlin KC, former Resident Judge at Southwark Crown Court, has submitted written evidence to the Committee in which he makes a number of points that raise questions about the Government’s decision to adopt this policy. He explains that many non-fraud criminal trials, such as multi-handed terrorist, murder, gang grooming and rape trials, are as, if not more, serious, complex and potentially burdensome to a jury than fraud trials. He also cites data from Southwark Crown Court, a serious fraud court centre, which shows that, between 2019 and 2024, the great majority of cases, fraud or otherwise, lasted less than three months. He further notes that case law emphasises that the question of dishonesty is for juries/the general public to decide, saying “the law places at its heart the standards of the layman/woman – the ordinary man and woman in the street (not the standards of individual judges)”.’

David Lammy was invited to comment on the above, and say if modelling had been carried out to assess the time that would be saved by its policy. As far as I am aware, no answer has ever been given to any of these points, or many others explaining the unworkability of the proposals. I do not know if this modelling has ever been carried out. The Committee received a reply, without explanation, that it was estimated that under the Bill 25% of long and complex cases would now be tried by judge-alone.

Appeals

There is very little I need say about the Government’s proposals, which are intended to reduce the number of appeals, and make them more focused. The advantages and disadvantages of these proposals are well known, and well documented. I would only add a special concern that so many defendants will be unrepresented, with all that entails. I believe the impact of the ‘right to elect’ provisions, if implemented, would inevitably increase the number of appeals, in particular those against conviction – resulting in a doubling up of trials rather than a saving of time.

Conclusion

No doubt the House of Lords will be outraged, as is the Commons and public at large, that the backlogs in the Crown Court and Magistrates’ Courts are so high. The Government may have achieved a healthy majority at the Third Reading, but over 100 Labour MPs failed to support the Bill. Indeed, at both the Second and Third Readings, most MPs from all parties expressed grave reservations about the jury proposals. They lamented the lack of resources over many years – the closure of courts, the shutting down of sitting days and the gross inefficiencies of the present system, which mean that courts are often unable to sit full days. Some MPs who had suffered as victims of crime strongly protested the Government’s reliance on the plight of victims and ‘victimhood’ as any justification for these proposals. Apart from Ministers, I cannot recall any speaker who claimed that curtailing jury trial would have a significant impact on the size of the backlog, or the department’s ability to reduce it. Taken all in all, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the true motivation behind these provisions, if not led by the Treasury, is, or has quickly become ideological.

His Honour Geoffrey Rivlin KC was called to the Bar in 1963 and took silk in 1979. At the Bar he practised on the NE and SE Circuits, mainly in serious fraud and homicide. He was appointed a judge in 1989. In 2004 he was appointed Resident Judge at Southwark Crown Court and the Honorary Recorder of Westminster, trying some of the most serious cases of fraud in England. He also sat as a Deputy High Court Judge and as an additional judge in the Court of Appeal. In 2012, following his retirement from the Bench, he took up post as Adviser to the Director of the SFO and was appointed a Member of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.