Noteworthy

Historical figures have been on the banknotes only since 1970, and Winston Churchill only since 2016. That’s right. 10 years. Ten. If he is to be replaced with wildlife, then let it be the grey squirrel. That would make GB News worth the licence fee on its own, whether for the contributors who insisted that it was an Atlanticist, Anglospheric and Canzukian beast, or for the absence of such, as the case may be. But there is no comparison between a refreshment on the banknote design, and the removal of the hereditary peers, or the assault on trial by jury, or the move towards digital ID, or the ban on the Quds Day march.

Between Peter Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, each side of the debate on the hereditary principle ought to keep quiet for its own good. The Government has always been free to appoint as many life peers as it pleased, and many an hereditary peerage was bought and paid for in the first instance. None of the constitutional changes since 1997 has made Britain any more equal economically or any more peaceable internationally, but before then the hereditary peers had proved no obstacle to Michael Howard’s attacks on civil liberties, and from 2010 to 2024 the remaining 92 of them were no more use against such erosions than they had been from 1997 to 2010, so there is no reason to think that they would have defended trial by jury.

On jury trials, Rosie Duffield voted against the Government, and I have been unable to find outside Parliament any of the feminist clamour that was expressed by the likes of Natalie Fleet. For the first time since Dan Norris lost the Labour whip, the Labour Whips did not cast his proxy vote, but they did yesterday on the Finance (No. 2) Bill, so who knows what is going on? If we abolished almost all jury trials, and the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court, then might Donald Trump be persuaded to impose tariffs?

Then again, those measures are very much integral to the takeover of Britain by the likes of Palantir. Wes Streeting and Bridget Phillipson may be refusing to hand over key data to the digital ID scheme, but their successors will give way, and the consultation paper itself says that the whole thing will feed into facial recognition by the Police who, having been spooked by the reaction to their fully justified ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv, by the ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action had been unlawful, and by the decision, which they will have been advised to expect, to uphold the dismissal of the case against Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, have demanded and obtained a ban on a march that had been held for 47 years. They have surrendered control to self-appointed “community leaders” who did not understand liberty and democracy.

The proscription of Palestine Action was an all-or-nothing measure that also banned the Russian Imperial Movement and the Maniacs Murder Cult. Similarly, the Courts and Tribunals Bill contains excellent provisions while forcing any MP who wanted to vote for them to vote at the same time for its evisceration of trial by jury and of the right of appeal, which was not in Labour’s manifesto, unlike the abandoned commitments on workers’ rights, on an equal minimum wage, and on the abolition of leasehold. I am proud to say that yesterday, on the anniversary of the Birmingham bin strike that has now cost far more than it would have taken to have settled the dispute, my union, Unite, cut its Labour affiliation by 40 per cent, to the tune of £580,000:

“Unite has made it clear that the actions of Labour against the Birmingham bin workers will not continue to be tolerated. As well as an escalation of the strike in Birmingham, Unite has voted to cut its Labour affiliation by £580,000. This move is unprecedented and shows the anger of Unite members. As streets fill with rubbish in every corner, residents and workers suffer, while the council dither around a deal already scoped out at conciliation service Acas. A deal blocked by government backed commissioners on £1,200 a day. Labour’s incompetent behaviour in Birmingham has come on the back of a failed economic strategy, that has left our industrial base fighting for its life. Oil and gas workers facing decimation, buy British defence promises broken, the public sector undervalued and the elderly and disabled under attack. Prior to the rules conference next year (which decides affiliation) Unite has made the decision to substantially cut its affiliation and will now formally consult with its members to see whether they want to remain in the Labour Party.”

Borrowed Bombs

How the world turns, both that Rachel Sylvester would write this, and that The Observer would publish it:

On his first day in Downing Street, Keir Starmer was given the codes for the nuclear weapons. Like all prime ministers before him, one of his first tasks was to write four identical “letters of last resort” to the commanding officers of the four submarines that provide Britain’s continuous deterrent. These handwritten memos contain orders about what to do if an enemy nuclear strike has destroyed the British government and killed or incapacitated both the prime minister and his second in command. Nobody knows what they say and, assuming nuclear Armageddon does not occur before Starmer leaves office, they will be destroyed without ever being opened. For any new prime minister, writing the letters is the moment when the responsibility of the office really hits home, a vivid reminder that “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown”.

What nobody likes to highlight, however, is that the United Kingdom’s supposedly independent nuclear deterrent is actually entirely reliant on the United States.

The submarines and the warheads are made in Britain but the Trident missiles themselves are owned by the Americans. They are leased by the UK but are manufactured, maintained and stored in the US. British submarines have to travel to the US Strategic Weapons Facility at King’s Bay, Georgia, to pick them up before taking their turn patrolling the oceans.

Darya Dolzikova, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, says there is a legally-binding contract which gives Britain control of the missiles in return for a fee. “At any given time there is a UK submarine out at sea with 16 missiles on it that the prime minister has the sole authority to use. He doesn’t need to ask anyone’s permission for that. If the UK tomorrow decides we’re going to launch a nuclear weapon we can do that.” But she says questions remain about how independent the deterrent really is. “They are US-owned missiles. We lease them out so hypothetically speaking they could turn around tomorrow and say ‘we’re going to tear up this agreement, don’t pay us any more, we won’t give you the missiles’.”

The UK-built submarine missile compartments are designed to take the American weapons. No other missiles can be used in them – so if the US suddenly pulled the plug, the UK would be without the nuclear capability that the prime minister describes as the “bedrock” of national security. The new Dreadnought submarines which are currently being built, supporting 30,000 jobs around the UK, will also take only the American Trident missiles.

It is an arrangement that dates back to the era of Harold Macmillan, who decided that Britain could not afford to go it alone after the second world war. But the current Labour government has doubled down on the collaboration. Just weeks after the 2024 election, the defence secretary John Healey tabled an amendment to the UK-US Mutual Defence Agreement – which allows for the transfer of nuclear materials, technology and information – ending the requirement for crucial clauses to be renewed every ten years.

Peter Ricketts, the former national security adviser, says: “We depend completely on the Americans for the supply of the Trident missiles. It would be a colossally expensive and long-term effort to replace that with another system. So in practice, we are locked into reliance on the Americans and the relationship would have to get into a pretty terrible state for the Americans to somehow restrict or cut off our access to the Trident missiles.”

Before Donald Trump, that was never a realistic threat. But with an increasingly unpredictable and unreliable US president in the White House there are growing concerns in Whitehall about Britain’s dependence on America for its nuclear weapons. Trump has not held back from seeking to humiliate Starmer over his refusal to support the war on Iran. The “rupture” between the US and Europe over Greenland has raised questions about whether there is any longer even an alliance of values.

The truth is the Ministry of Defence budget is already over-stretched. The UK could not afford to develop its own nuclear missiles, even if it were practically possible. But the pivot away from the US towards the EU on defence cannot ignore the nuclear dimension. Ben Judah, who was David Lammy’s special adviser at the Foreign Office, believes there needs to be a fundamental rethink in the longer term. “We have an America problem,” he says. “Our closest ally around which we have built our entire security has become profoundly erratic, unpredictable and emotional. Trident and the nuclear special relationship with America simply has to continue, but if I was still in government, I’d be urging we begin to diversify with a new nuclear special relationship with France.” Behind the scenes, that cross-channel alliance is already underway. The Lancaster House Treaties – a 50 year defence partnership between the UK and France, agreed in 2010 – included a pledge to collaborate on nuclear weapons.

Decisions about military hardware take decades to implement. In 2028 the new Dreadnought submarines will start to be deployed, but Dolzikova says it is time to start thinking about what happens after that. “As we look at what the future fighter jet for the UK looks like – could you put nuclear weapons onto that? Could they be French? They’re the right questions to ask. For a capability that’s as fundamental to UK sovereignty and security as our nuclear deterrent, we need to prepare against every contingency.”

Of Note

I did Winston Churchill yesterday, but there really should not be any politician on the banknotes of a monarchy. If there must be one, though, then it should be by far the most successful British politician in living memory, Queen Camilla, whose very title declares her astonishing ascent. She is at it again today, doing the #BelieveAllWomen line in the midst of the parliamentary progress of the Bill to abolish almost all trial by jury, even though rape would supposedly still be triable only by jury, and even though juries convicted in 76 per cent of rape cases. She may have access to information that was not in the public domain, since she is a Privy Counsellor, and indeed a Counsellor of State alongside the man whom the Royal Family's own website still calls Prince Andrew.

One would have thought that both the famously bibliophile Queen, and the upper-middle-class gynocracy that was the Parliamentary Labour Party, would have raised enough objection to have kept Jane Austen on the tenner. On my stated principle, the sometime Robert Maxwell MP may be tricky. But the case for Jeffrey Epstein in unanswerable by or under a Government that had been appointed by Peter Mandelson last year, the year after Mandelson had handpicked the members of its Commons majority. That ought to enjoy crossparty support, since the Epstein Files named centrists, right-wing populists, right-wing elitists, and an anarcho-syndicalist libertarian socialist. At least unless Noam Chomsky would not vote either for the Green Party or for the Zarah Sultana wing of Your Party, then their proximity to his views and indeed to him should identify them as Epstein Class parties, and thus no more deserving of our votes than any of the others was.

War Footing

If Britain is not at war with Iran, then why ban the Quds Day march? By, or in support of, which proscribed organisation has it been organised? Yesterday saw that ban, the vote to abolish most jury trials while abolishing the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court, and the further progress of digital ID.

On that last, you may have thought that the People's Panel was called the House of Commons. But since apparently not, where does one apply to be on it? And then again, while the quality of debate on jury trials was very high on the side opposed to their erosion but woefully low on the side of the proponents, it was the proponents who won the vote. Rape will supposedly still be triable only by jury, and juries convict in 76 per cent of rape cases, so what is someone like Natalie Fleet going on about? And has anyone ever bothered to check Fleet's career-making version of her early life story? She was pregnant at 15, but how we do know that that was not by a boy from school?

Yesterday, for the first time since Dan Norris lost the Labour whip, the Labour Whips did not cast his proxy vote, so something about him is about to come out. There were 90 Labour abstentions, and while no one would suggest that, say, Yvette Cooper was making a political statement, no one would deny that about 80 of them were. If there really are several Labour MPs in discussion with the Greens about defection, then one trusts that none of them voted with the Government last night, or to withdraw the Winter Fuel Payment, or to keep the two-child benefit cap, among other examples.

Learn from Reform UK, which is hoovering up veterans of the Government that the electorate massively rejected two years ago, and whose poll lead is already starting to slip, three years before the next General Election. Neither Nigel Farage, nor the former Attorney General and Home Secretary Suella Braverman, turned up to vote to save trial by jury and the right of appeal. At the time of writing, Farage now says that Britain should keep out of the war with Iran, while Kemi Badenoch has the front to claim that she had never called for British involvement in it. British commanders boast nightly on social media about the sheer extent of that involvement. Most jury trials are to be abolished, along with the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court. We are all to be issued with digital ID. And the Quds Day march has been banned. Think on.

Kwasi and Crypto, Thai and Tether

Other than Nigel Farage, who could possibly think that anything involving Kwasi Kwarteng was an investment opportunity? Why would you want anyone of that mind as First Lord of the Treasury? But having taken £12 million from Christopher Harborne, Reform UK’s ties to cryptocurrencies are very much current and very far from cryptic.

There is being right-wing, and then there is having two kings. But do you have to take a Thai name to be naturalised in Thailand? If not, then why does Harborne have “Christopher Harborne” on his British passport, but “Chakrit Sakunkrit” on his Thai one? Harbone’s generosity has made Nigel Farage the political spokesman for cryptocurrencies, and specifically for Harbone’s Tether.

Yet the speculative value of cryptocurrencies is hurtling towards their intrinsic value of zero. A suspicious number of those who decry us sceptics of the cashless society also claim that we are under constant threat of cyberattacks, and a surprising number of those who are forthright against the cashless society are enthusiasts for cryptocurrencies, about which the clue is in the name. In the cashless economy, every penny that we spent would be tracked. Cryptocurrencies are beyond democratic political control. The combination of the two would be, and increasingly is, that level of tracking by those who were thus unaccountable.

Unaccountable not least because Tony Blair and Gordon Brown surrendered democratic political control over monetary policy, a surrender for which they had no electoral mandate but which they had plotted in Opposition, just as Keir Starmer and his cronies plotted fiscal drag, assisted suicide, puberty blockers, digital ID, facial recognition, the abolition of trial by jury, the taxation of family farms to the point that they would have to sell up to giant American agribusinesses, and much more to which we have yet to be made privy.

At least Brown did keep us out of the euro. Much to the chagrin of Peter Mandelson, who now enjoys the hospitality of George Osborne. Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin have vital information, with a book due out this year, about the Epstein network’s connections to cryptocurrencies. Osborne has written in the venerable pages of the Financial Times that Britain risked being “left behind” by stablecoins.

All that, and digital ID and facial recognition, too? Starmer has said that to access our own money, we would need the digital ID that the Tony Blair Institute would have linked to facial recognition. Expect it to be illegal to fail to produce whichever form of it a state functionary demanded, and impossible to make or receive payment without it. There is a word for the merger of state and corporate power to the point of the physical violence on which that merger depended.

Not that it would be anything new in this country. If the spycops inquiry received anything like the coverage that it deserved, then digital ID would have public approval below 10 per cent. Facial recognition probably already does. Reform wants to hold the line against them. But it already has 12 million reasons why it cannot.

Inter Arma Silent Leges?

Rumour has it that tomorrow, the Government will release some of the Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein documents, conveniently just after Prime Minister’s Questions. Presumably, they will relate neither to Mandelson’s selection of the vast Labour intake in 2024, nor to his conduct of the 2025 Ministerial reshuffle. If Britain were not in the Epstein Class’s war with Iran, then Keir Starmer would no longer be Prime Minister. But while half of that Class’s London operation pretends that he had bravely kept us out of it, even though the British commanders in the Gulf boast nightly on social media about their participation in their hosts’ missions, the other half screams that we had not gone far enough into it, making Starmer “no Margaret Thatcher” and “no Winston Churchill”. They ought to be pleased.

The only organisation that ever succeeded in getting rid of Thatcher was the Conservative Party. If it loved her in life as much as it loves in her death, then it had a very, very, very strange way of showing it. In her memoirs, the extremely bitter chapter on the Poll Tax makes it clear that she laboured under no delusion that she had been removed because of “Europe”. That was the cover story, but “Europe” had not been the reason why scores of Conservative MPs had been on course to lose their seats. The content, rather than the tone, of that policy did not change under her successor. By contrast, the Poll Tax was abolished completely, with a reversion in all but name to the previous system of domestic rates. The Conservatives then unexpectedly won the General Election of 1992, when Thatcher retired from the House of Commons.

Thatcher’s humble origins are greatly exaggerated. She was the daughter of a major local businessman and politician who ran most of the committees and charities for miles around. Even the people who love her can see why the people who hate her do so; they just do not agree. But why the people who love her do so is, in their own terms, a complete mystery. She gave Britain the Single European Act, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the Children Act, the replacement of O-levels with GCSEs, the destruction of the economic basis of paternal authority in the stockades of male employment, the massive increase in benefit dependency, the rise of Political Correctness, the general moral chaos of the 1980s, the legalisation of abortion up to birth for “severe fetal abnormality” that did not have to be specified, the fight against Victoria Gillick, and that is just the start. Her only Commons defeat was when she tried to make Sunday just another shopping day. The basis of the lockdowns was the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. Who was the Prime Minister in 1984? For having publicly set fire to the Quran, Martin Frost and Hamit Coskun were both charged under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. Who was the Prime Minister in 1986? Three years later, Thatcher’s supporters wanted to use that provision against those who had publicly set fire to The Satanic Verses.

The stockades of working-class male employment were destroyed, and a new ruling elite of middle-class women funded and empowered by the State was created, by the politician who proclaimed the self-made man and the self-made woman, a proclamation of which the inexorable logic is gender self-identification. Just as Thatcher emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and Dick Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show, so a comparable figure, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman. Thatcher has already been played by a drag queen at least once on British television, and specifically on Channel 4, which she created, meaning that one of her most abiding legacies is that Britain has two state broadcasters, one of which nevertheless carries advertisements. Thatcherism in a nutshell, as has always been clear from the output.

Was Thatcher “the Iron Lady” when, in early 1981, her initial pit closure programme was abandoned within two days of a walkout by the miners? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she had Nicholas Ridley negotiate a transfer of sovereignty over the Falkland Islands to Argentina, to be followed by a leaseback arrangement, until the Islanders, the Labour Party and Conservative backbenchers forced her to back down? Was she “the Iron Lady” when, within a few months of election on clear commitments with regard to Rhodesia, she simply abandoned them at the Commonwealth Conference in Lusaka? Was she “the Iron Lady” when, having claimed that Britain would never give up Hong Kong, she took barely 24 hours to return to Planet Earth by effecting a complete U-turn? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she took just as little time to move from public opposition to public support of Spanish accession to the Western European Union?

In the Budget of December 1976, Denis Healey and Jim Callaghan had delighted Thatcher by blindsiding the critics of monetarism on the Conservative benches, but was she “the Iron Lady” when she gave up monetarism completely during her second term? Thatcher’s continuous contact with the IRA, universally assumed at the time, has long since been confirmed. Four of the Hunger Strikers’ Five Demands were granted on 6 October 1981, and by 1983 even the right not to do prison work had been conceded. The Lady was as Iron about that as she was about most other things, namely not at all.

Thatcher was, though, true to her assurance in 1979 and in 1983 that, although until 1985 the Ulster Unionist Party remained affiliated to the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations, there would be no return to office for Enoch Powell. But then, when told that Thatcher professed to have been influenced by his books on economics, Powell replied that, “She couldn’t have understood them, then.” He baffled her by telling her that he would have fought in the Second World War even if Britain had had a Communist Government. He would still have fought for his country. With no Tory roots, that was beyond her. With deep Liberal roots, she thought that wars were about “values”. That wider conversation was about what was then the recent Falklands War. While Powell had supported it on his own principles, Thatcher had seen it as an example of her dictum that, “If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values.” Many years later, when asked her greatest achievement, she replied, “New Labour.” Quite. Thatcher has been named as her political heroine by Shabana Mahmood, who would issue us all with digital ID, and who would make people who had lived here for at least 10 years earn indefinite leave to remain by performing both paid and unpaid work to her satisfaction.

In 1981, Thatcher did impose an absolute ban on all government work for Andersen in view of its role in the DeLorean fraud, a ban that lasted until the General Election of 1997, when Patricia Hewitt was made Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, having only just entered Parliament from her position as Head of Research at Andersen Consulting. And in 1988, Thatcher and Nigel Lawson did correct the taxation of wealth at a lower rate than earnings until, in 1998, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown put the clock back to the Chancellor of the Exchequer who had gone on, as First Lord of the Treasury, to introduce monetarism to Britain and vice versa. But if those moves made Thatcher a better social democrat than New Labour, then their reversal made New Labour better Thatcherites than Thatcher or even Lawson.

The middle classes were transformed from people like Thatcher’s father into people like her son. She told us, and she really did, that “there is no such thing as society”, in which case there cannot be any such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation. Even more damagingly, and that is quite a feat, she endorsed the vugar illiteracy that the currency-issuing State had no money of its own, and could therefore “run out of other people’s money”. All in all, she turned Britain into the country that Marxists had always said that it was, even though before her, it never had been. Specifically, Thatcher sold off national assets at obscenely undervalued prices, while subjecting the rest of the public sector, fully 40 per cent of the British economy, to an unprecedented level of central dirigisme.

Thatcher continued public subsidies to private schools, to agriculture, to nuclear power, and to mortgage-holders. Without those public subsidies, the fourth would hardly have existed, and the other three, then as now, would not have existed at all. So much for “You can’t buck the market”. You can now, as you could then, and as she did then. The issue is not whether private schooling, agriculture, nuclear power, or mortgage-holding is a good or a bad thing in itself. The issue is whether “Thatcherism” was compatible with their continuation by means of “market-bucking” public subsidies. It simply was not, and is not.

Thatcher’s assault on council housing created the Housing Benefit racket, and it used the gigantic gifting of capital assets by the State to enable the beneficiaries to enter the property market ahead of private tenants, or of people still living at home, who in either case had saved for their deposits. What, exactly, was or is conservative or Tory about that? Or about moving in the characters from Shameless either alongside, or even in place of, the respectable working class?

It is thanks to Thatcher that the Conservatives have been the party of Net Zero for 40 years. Svante Arrhenius first theorised about anthropogenic global warming in 1896, and Thatcher was briefed about it by Sir Crispin Tickell, the then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs at the Foreign Office. Thatcher always credited Tickell with having convinced her, leading to her speech on the subject to the Royal Society in 27 September 1988, the point at which the agenda of his 1977 Climatic Change and World Affairs entered the political mainstream. Tickell’s briefing of Thatcher was in 1984, tellingly the year that the Miners’ Strike began.

Thatcher began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, but she was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. By the time of her speech to the UN on 8 November 1989, she had made Tickell the British Ambassador to it, and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative on its Security Council. Johnson described Thatcher’s destruction of the coal industry as “a big early start” towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for many years.

In 1979, Thatcher had not initially wanted to meet Menachem Begin in London, since her generation remembered what he was, and afterwards she expressed her regret at not having stuck to her guns. In 1980, she signed the Venice Declaration of nine European countries against Israeli settlements on the West Bank. In 1981, she denounced the Israeli bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, calling it illegal. In 1982, she responded to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon by imposing an arms embargo on Israel that remained in force until 1994; when Begin wrote to ask her to reconsider, then she did not even reply. In 1988, she expelled two Israeli diplomats and closed the London Mossad station when one of its double agents had been convicted of terrorism in Britain and when that station had been caught for a second time forging British passports, a practice that was to resurface, with similar but notably less severe consequences, in 2010; no Israeli diplomat had ever before been deported from a friendly state.

While all of that was to her credit, that would not be the view of her flamekeepers today, any more than they would approve of her attitude when visiting Kiev in June 1990, when she said that Britain would no more open an embassy in Ukraine than in California or Quebec. When the Soviet Union did collapse anyway, then she ludicrously pretended to have brought it down merely because she had happened to be in office at the time. But she did make a difference internationally where it was possible to do so, by providing aid and succour to Pinochet’s Chile and to apartheid South Africa, and by refusing to recognize either the Muzorewa-Smith Government or Joshua Nkomo, thereby paving the way for Robert Mugabe. Known as “the Peking Plotter”, she never saw a Maoist whom she did not like, from Mugabe, to Nicolae Ceaușescu, to Pol Pot. She even sent the SAS to train the Khmer Rouge, putting in the same boat as Noam Chomsky, but making her worse, since he had no power to deploy Special Forces.

And it was Thatcher who issued what amounted to the open invitation to Argentina, armed by Begin’s Israel, to invade the Falkland Islands, followed by the starved Royal Navy’s having to behave as if the hopelessly out-of-her-depth Prime Minister did not exist, a sort of coup without which those Islands would be Argentine to this day. Until the eve of the invasion, Thatcher had been about to sell the ships that then had to be deployed. At a bargain basement price. To Argentina.

Unlike Thatcher, although like the American Old Right, when the British New Right was still new, than it had little or no time for Churchill. Andrew Roberts devoted much of Eminent Churchillians to criticising Churchill’s Indian Summer Premiership of 1951 to 1955 as a period of betrayal on immigration and on relations with the trade unions, by a Government with scarcely a proper Tory in it, effectively a continuation of the Wartime Coalition. Rightly or wrongly, that was the view of the intellectual founders of the post-Thatcher Conservative Party. And Churchill’s role in the coup of 1953 makes him the last Briton who should ever be invoked in relation to Iran.

In Great Contemporaries, published in 1937, two years after he had called Hitler’s achievements “among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world”, Churchill wrote that, “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” That passage was not removed from the book’s reprint in 1941. Great Contemporaries was reissued in 2024.

In May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini, whom he had called “the greatest living legislator”. Gibraltar is still under British sovereignty only because Labour won the 1945 Election. After Franco had refused to let Hitler use Spain in order to invade Gibraltar and thus seize control of the Strait, Churchill had promised him Gibraltar once the War was safely won. That would have been just another colonial transfer in those days. But Churchill lost at the ballot box. In the meantime, over one thousand Spanish Republicans had fought the Second World War in the British Army. What do Churchill’s noisiest partisans think of that? It ranks with last September, when Konstantin Malofeev and Aleksandr Dugin played host to the Falange Española de las JONS, annual wreath-layers in memory of the Blue Legion.

So much for those who would use Churchill to make the case for continued support of the Ukraine of Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, and all the rest of them, including the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps. The Ukraine that in Ternopil  has named a football stadium after Roman Shukhevych, on a street named after Stepan Bandera. The Ukraine of Andriy Biletsky, to whom “the mission of Ukraine is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival against the Semite-led Untermenschen”. The Ukraine of Pavlo Lapshyn, who is still in His Majesty’s Prison, and who will be there for decades yet, because of his 2013 murder of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Brigade, being led by its “political ideologist”, Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell. 

All sorts of things about Churchill are simply ignored. Gallipoli. The miners. The Suffragettes. The refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. His dishonest and self-serving memoirs. The truth about the catastrophic humiliation at Dunkirk. The other one, at Singapore, for which Australians and New Zealanders have never forgiven Britain. The Lancastria. The men left behind in France. Both the fact and the sheer scale of his 1945 defeat while the War with Japan was still going on, when Labour won half of his newly divided seat, and an Independent did very well in the other half after Labour and the Liberals had disgracefully refused to field candidates against him. His deselection by his local Conservative Association just before he died. And not least, his carve-up of Eastern Europe with Stalin, so very reminiscent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He borrowed the phrase “the Iron Curtain” from Goebbels and used it to mean exactly what Goebbels had meant by it. Broken by the War, the Soviet Union had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe, or the Red Army would have carried on marching in the summer of 1945. Still less was the USSR willing or able to cross either the Atlantic or the Pacific.

The electorate was under no illusions while Churchill was still alive. His image was booed and hissed when it appeared on newsreels. He led the Conservative Party into three General Elections, he lost the first two, and he only returned to office on the third occasion with the support of the National Liberals, having lost the popular vote. In the course of that Parliament, he had to be removed by his own party. It comfortably won the subsequent General Election. We have not forgotten the truth about him in the old mining areas. Nor have they in the places that he signed away to Stalin, including the country for whose freedom the War was fought. Churchill coined the nickname “Uncle Joe” for Stalin.

Churchill presided over the famine in Bengal. His views on race shocked his younger colleagues even in the Conservative Party of the 1950s. He wanted to transport the Jews to Palestine, since he saw them as not really British. Having deployed the Black and Tans to Ireland, he redeployed them to Palestine in that Zionist cause. The Zionists later expressed their gratitude by plotting to kill him and by murdering his friend, Lord Moyne, as well as sending letter-bombs to the White House of his ally, Harry S. Truman. In the meantime, they had contracted the Haavara Agreement, fought against Britain throughout the Second World War, allied with Fascist Italy, twice sought an alliance with Nazi Germany on the grounds that it was a lesser evil than Britain, hanged the boobytrapped bodies of Sergeants Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice and photographed them, and bombed the King David Hotel. By contrast, before anyone brings him up, Haj Amin al-Husseini was holed up in Berlin with no practical influence in the Middle East, being instead a kind of mascot for the recruitment of Balkan, Caucasian and Central Asian Muslims into the predecessor organisations of those which now controlled Ukraine and of those for which the New Right campaigned during the collapse of Yugoslavia.

In such circles, the great cause of the moment is withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. Yet in May 1948, when the pompously self-styled Congress of Europe assembled in the Hall of Knights in The Hague, then it was Churchill who dubbed “the Voice of Europe” that assembly of politicians who had recently been defeated at the polls, of the representatives of Royal and Noble Houses that had fairly recently been dispossessed at least in political terms, of the likes of Churchill who fell into both categories, and of people whose lives’ work was trying to delude themselves that so did they. In the name of the order that had held sway for a century between the defeat of Napoleon and the First World War, their aim was very explicitly to check the social democracy that was sweeping Western Europe at the time. The material that they produced had that intention, and it has had that effect. It was written into British domestic law by Blair, whom, as we have seen, Thatcher identified as her own greatest achievement.

The famous dipping of the cranes for Churchill’s coffin occurred only because the London dockers, who despised him, had been paid to do it. Churchill’s cult seems to have begun only once he was dead, or at least so old as to have been politically as good as dead. It never translated into votes. But it is equally true that once the Attlee Government had a record on which to be judged, then it was barely reelected in 1950, and although it did win the popular vote, it lost office in 1951. For 75 years and counting, the Labour Party has dined out on a mere six years that did not impress the electorate at the time. If Churchill and Clement Attlee were the twin giants of the Golden Age, then that was lost on the voters who lived through it. They did not think much of either of them.

A Filter For Prejudice

Kim Johnson MP writes:

In 2017, David Lammy received deserved praise for his landmark review into the criminal justice system, which shone a light on the unequal treatment of minorities. One striking revelation was that jury trials were found to be one of the few parts of the system consistently free from racial bias, overall treating defendants equally, regardless of their ethnicity. In contrast, judges have been found to be significantly more likely to give jail sentences to Black, Asian and mixed ethnicity offenders than to white offenders for comparable crimes. As the then Shadow Justice Secretary concluded, juries were shown to “act as a filter for prejudice”.

Nine years on, Lammy now holds the government role he once aspired to, with the power to address many of the issues he previously highlighted. Yet instead of protecting juries, the Justice Secretary appears determined to sideline them. Under pressure to cut the courts backlog, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is proposing to almost halve the number of jury trials in England and Wales, giving magistrates and lone judges the power to decide the outcome of thousands more cases. Unlike juries, they do not reflect the diversity of modern Britain.

Given the findings of Lammy’s own review, these reforms are highly likely to increase the risk of racial bias, leaving ethnic minority defendants more vulnerable to miscarriages of justice. That is why I have coordinated a letter to the Justice Secretary, signed by ten Black Labour MPs, urging him to remove the plans for jury reform from the Courts and Tribunals Bill.

Frustratingly, the government has already acknowledged the risk of increased racial bias, but this serious concern is being treated as an afterthought. Last month, courts minister Sarah Sackman revealed the MoJ intends to review the impact of judge-only trials on minorities, but only after the reforms take effect. This is a backwards approach: roll out the change nationally, then investigate its harm later. The problems identified in 2017 have not disappeared – if anything, the resurgence of racism makes the lessons of the Lammy Review more relevant than ever.

Ministers keep insisting that these reforms are necessary to tackle the Crown Court crisis. The backlog – now more than 80,000 cases and projected to rise to 100,000 by 2028 – is extremely serious. But, as expert legal charity JUSTICE sets out, juries are not the cause of these delays and cutting juries will make no significant dent in this backlog – rather, it will create a host of new problems.

The true source of the delays lies in brutal justice budget cuts from the 2010s, and successive governments’ failure to repair this gutting of the system. Sitting days have been capped, legal aid decimated, and buildings left to crumble. I welcome the additional resources the government has promised as part of the package of measures to address the backlog, but this is just a first step.

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I’ve seen in my own constituency how trial backlogs can be driven down without curtailing juries. Through pioneering fast-tracks trials and other practical measures, Liverpool crown court has cut the average wait from charge to trial to 206 days, compared to a national average of 321. Undermining the right to jury trial is not a solution to this crisis, it is a diversion from addressing its real causes.

Everyone deserves a fair trial, free from discrimination. Juries remain one of the most important mechanisms we have to protect that right. Any move to remove or restrict them – particularly in the face of persistent racial disparities – risks eroding trust and confidence in our public institutions and damaging the very legitimacy of the justice system.

I urge the government to withdraw these proposals and commit unequivocally to protecting one of our fundamental democratic rights.

Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst MP writes:

Few features of the British constitution command as much quiet respect as trial by jury. It is not merely a legal mechanism, nor simply a tradition preserved for its own sake. It is a living expression of a constitutional principle.

When the state accuses a citizen of a serious crime, guilt must be established not only before officials of the state, but before ordinary members of the public.

That principle deserves careful consideration in the debate now unfolding around the Courts and Tribunals Bill. Amongst its provisions are proposals that would, in certain circumstances, limit the availability of jury trials in order to address the severe backlog within the criminal justice system.

No responsible parliamentarian should deny the scale of that challenge. Victims are waiting too long for justice. Defendants are waiting too long for their cases to be resolved. Confidence in the system is inevitably strained when delay becomes the norm rather than the exception.

However, acknowledging the problem does not absolve us of the responsibility to ensure that the solutions we adopt are the right ones.

Before entering parliament, I practised as a barrister. Whilst I was not a criminal practitioner, I did appear in the Coronial Courts, where juries still sit in certain inquests. Through that experience I saw first-hand how seriously jurors approach their task: listening carefully to the evidence, reflecting on the arguments presented to them, and appreciating the gravity of the conclusions they are being asked to reach.

It is a powerful reminder that justice in this country is not administered solely by the state, but with the participation of the public.

For that reason, proposals to curtail jury trial cannot be regarded simply as matters of efficiency or case management. When the state reduces the circumstances in which it must persuade twelve citizens before securing a conviction, it fundamentally alters the balance between the individual and the power of the state.

Those who propose such a change therefore carry a significant burden. They must demonstrate not only that reform is necessary, but that the particular reform proposed will genuinely address the problem it seeks to solve.

At present, that case has not yet been made.

The government has placed considerable reliance on the recent review conducted by Sir Brian Leveson. Sir Brian is a jurist of immense experience and his work deserves careful attention. However, a review, even one conducted with great care and expertise, cannot substitute for the broader evidential base that a reform of this constitutional significance requires.

In particular, there is a striking absence of clear modelling demonstrating that limiting jury trials will materially reduce delays.

In response to a question in the House of Commons on 3 February this year, the lord chancellor indicated that the government would publish modelling supporting the assumption that these proposals would reduce trial times by around 20%. Yet the impact assessment accompanying the legislation contains no such modelling. Instead, it adopts Sir Brian’s analysis as the basis for its projections.

Analysis is valuable, but analysis is not modelling. When parliament is being asked to scale back a centuries-old safeguard, it is reasonable to expect robust evidence showing that doing so will deliver the promised benefits.

Moreover, the causes of delay in the criminal justice system are neither obscure nor controversial.

The first is judicial capacity. Courts cannot hear cases without judges, yet judicial sitting days have for years been tightly constrained. Courtrooms sometimes sit unused not because juries are unavailable, but because there is no judge available to preside.

The second is the state of the court estate. Across the country many criminal courts operate in buildings that are outdated and poorly equipped. Trials are frequently disrupted by unreliable technology and inadequate facilities. These are not problems created by jury trial, and they cannot be solved by limiting it.

Thirdly, there are continuing operational problems with prisoner transport and custody arrangements. It is now far from unusual for proceedings to be disrupted because defendants arrive late, or occasionally not at all. Juries are left waiting, witnesses are sent home, and valuable court time is lost.

Finally, there is the growing strain on the criminal bar. The system increasingly struggles to secure suitably experienced advocates to prosecute and defend serious cases. Delays arise not from inefficiency but from the gradual erosion of the professional capacity on which the system depends.

Taken together, these factors suggest the backlog is primarily a problem of capacity. In that context, curtailing jury trials risks treating the symptom rather than the cause.

There are also questions about the practical implications of the proposals themselves. Sir Brian Leveson envisaged alternative tribunals including lay magistrates as 'wing members', preserving an element of public participation. The government’s proposals do not adopt that aspect of his recommendation. At a time when magistrate recruitment itself presents challenges, it is legitimate to ask how the system will absorb the additional caseload these reforms envisage.

Trial by jury has endured for centuries not simply because it is ancient, but because it commands public trust. It ensures that the immense coercive power of the criminal law is exercised not only by the state, but with the participation and consent of the community.

If we are to change that balance, we must be confident that the change will genuinely strengthen the justice system rather than merely rearrange its pressures.

Efficiency is essential in any modern justice system. However, efficiency must never come at the expense of the constitutional principles that give that system its legitimacy.

Dominic Casciani writes:

More than 3,200 lawyers including 300 top barristers and retired judges have called on the government to drop a plan to abolish some jury trials.

The letter to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions, says there is no evidence the "unpopular" plan will solve unprecedented delays in criminal courts.

The proposals, which return to Parliament on Tuesday, would replace juries in England and Wales with a single judge in cases where a convicted defendant would be jailed for up to three years.

Justice Secretary David Lammy says changes to jury trials and other reforms can help turn around the Crown Court backlog, which has reached record levels of 80,000 cases.

The delays mean some defendants charged today may not face trial until 2030.

Labour MP Karl Turner, who is opposed to the plan, has told the BBC he held a "constructive" meeting with Lammy in which the deputy prime minister promised a "meaningful" review period to scrutinise how the reforms are working if approved by Parliament.

MPs will debate and vote on the overall principles of the measures in the Courts and Tribunals Bill during its second reading on Tuesday.

While some MPs have voiced concerns, potential Labour rebels may choose to abstain rather than vote against the bill as a whole - seeking to make changes when the bill returns for further debate in the House of Commons on specific amendments.

The bill will still have to clear the House of Lords before it can become law.

The right to jury trial - in which ordinary people decide on the guilt or innocence of defendants brought before Crown Courts - is a cornerstone of the constitution dating back more than 800 years.

The letter organised by the Bar Council, which represents all barristers in England and Wales, says the plan is an attempt "to force through an unpopular, untested and poorly evidenced change to our jury system".

The signatories include:

• Three hundred KCs - top barristers who act in the most complex cases
• Twenty two retired Crown Court judges with first-hand knowledge of the backlogs and their causes
• Former Director of Public Prosecutions Sir David Calvert-Smith
• TV lawyers Rob Rinder, Shuan Wallace from The Chase and two barristers who have featured in The Traitors 

'Bulldozing' jury trials claim

"We have long warned that the criminal justice system is in crisis.... Juries have not caused this crisis," says the letter.

It urges ministers to focus on delivering reforms and steps to modernise criminal justice, set out in a major independent review by former senior judge Sir Brian Leveson.

Sir Brian also called for jury trials to be restricted - but his proposal included volunteer magistrates deciding affected cases alongside a professional judge in order to keep a link to communities.

Kirsty Brimelow KC, the senior criminal lawyer who heads the Bar Council, said: "This letter and its more than 3,000 signatories demonstrate the unequivocal principled and practical opposition to the restriction of jury trials from not only the Bar, but the legal profession as a whole.

"There is very little evidence to support even basic rationality of the government's decision to rush through this legislation which unnecessarily removes jury trials from thousands of people.

"It's not too late for the government to listen to us as experts and as a profession and stop before bulldozing our jury system."

Shadow justice secretary Nick Timothy has urged Labour MPs to join the Conservatives in voting against the changes, adding that juries provide a "safeguard between the citizen and the state".

He said: "Parliament has a clear choice. It can stand up for one of the oldest rights in our justice system or let Labour take a sledgehammer to our constitution."

Speaking to BBC Breakfast on Tuesday, Justice Minister Sarah Sackman said "jury trials will remain a cornerstone of British justice" but argued that there was "no point in having a jury trial if it takes years to get there".

"We have to have all three levers - the reforms, modernisation and investment," she added.

"Only all three will bring down the backlog in our courts."

Study casts doubt on plan

A study of the court backlogs by the Institute of Government, a think tank, projected that cutting jury trials would save less than 2% of court time, assuming that the cases would be dealt with more quickly.

Research carried out by Lammy in 2017, before he was a minister, revealed that juries were particularly trusted by ethnic minority defendants. 

He says many comparable criminal justice systems, including Canada's, have introduced similar reforms to speed up justice with no loss of confidence in the courts.

The Ministry of Justice said that more than 90% of criminal cases were already heard fairly without a jury. 

A spokesman said: "With victims facing unacceptably long waits for justice after years of delays in our courts, we make no apologies for pressing ahead with our plans to reform the system based on Sir Brian Leveson's independent review, alongside modernising it for the 21st Century with record investment."

Sonia Sodha writes:

Later today the House of Commons will have its first opportunity to vote on the government’s plans to cut access to trial by jury. In order to browbeat sceptical backbenchers into toeing the government line, justice secretary David Lammy has entreated us to think of the victims of crime, such as the women who’ve experienced sexual assault. How could we deny them the speedier justice that would supposedly result if we charged a judge rather than jury with deciding on the accused’s guilt? His deputy Sarah Sackman has invoked the career criminals who she says “game the system” by electing for jury trial to delay their reckoning with justice. Meanwhile, the government says removing the right of some defendants to elect for a jury trial will “bring the courts more into line with other public services - where it is the experts… who do that triage.” As if a defendant wrongly accused of a crime is in the same boat as someone who goes to their GP expecting to be referred to the right specialist.

It is a deeply cynical attempt to ram through a rollback of civil liberty safeguards. We are supposed to believe this is at once an incremental reduction in rights for those who stand accused of committing a crime, and that it will also deliver a transformation in outcomes for victims. This is an insult to voters’ intelligence.

Justice needs juries

Trial by jury is the fairest way of determining the criminal liability of defendants whose liberty is at stake. Unlike in civil cases, in which the facts of a case are usually decided on the balance of probability - what is more likely than not to have happened - the criminal standard of proof requires juries to be sure that a defendant is guilty of a crime in order to convict them. Almost certain isn’t enough. This standard means we quite rightly let probably-guilty people walk free. That is the price of minimising the number of innocent people locked up for a crime they didn’t commit.

Putting the decision about whether or not someone is guilty into the hands of one judge increases the risks of miscarriages of justice, because it requires just one person to be “sure” of someone’s guilt rather than twelve (or in the case of majority verdicts, ten). That feels like a significant watering down in how we practically apply the criminal standard of proof. Judges are learned individuals highly expert in the law. But when it comes to deciding the facts of a case, they are as human as the rest of us: there is no such thing as an unbiased individual.

Juries provide a triple safeguard. Ten to twelve fellow citizens, not a single judge, must agree someone is guilty based on the evidence. The process of deliberation helps iron out human bias as jurors can challenge each other’s understanding of the facts. And jurors have not seen case after case in the criminal courts, heard the same defence run over and over, and sentenced countless criminals to prison, like judges have. This helps them put themselves in the shoes of the defendant as well as the victim, and to appreciate just how much is at stake on all sides.

The government’s proposals

Not everyone charged with a crime has the right to a jury trial. The vast majority of criminal charges brought are for minor, “summary” offences that are tried by three volunteer lay magistrates, or a single legally-trained magistrate. For mid-tier “either way” offences such as burglary or intent to supply drugs, defendants pleading not guilty have the right to choose a jury trial or to be tried in the magistrates’ court. The most serious indictable offences, are always tried in the crown court by a jury. Until relatively recently, magistrates were only able to sentence individuals to up to six months in prison; back in 2022, the government extended this to 12 months.

The government is proposing three radical shifts. First, it wants to dramatically increase the sentencing power of volunteer magistrates so they will now be able to send someone to prison for up to two years, a quadrupling of the maximum sentence in just four years. Second, it wants to remove the right of those accused of “either way” offences to choose a jury trial. Instead, a single judge will charged with deciding whether or not to convict someone of a crime that comes with a prison sentence of up to three years. Only individuals charged with crimes that carry sentences of more than three years will have the right to trial by jury. The government estimates that as a result, the number of jury trials in England will halve from 15,000 to 7,000 a year. 

Third, it is planning to remove the automatic right of appeal for people convicted by magistrates, at the same time as extending their sentencing powers. Volunteer magistrates are unrepresentative of the population at large and often have limited experience of the chaotic lives of those before them. More than 40% of appeals against magistrate verdicts and 47% of appeals against magistrate sentences are successful. And while juries are no more likely to convict ethnic minority than white defendants, black women are 22% more likely to be found guilty by magistrates than white women.

Why mess with our civil liberties in this way?

The government has put increasing the efficiency of the courts system, and reducing the backlog of cases that has steadily grown as a result of fifteen years’ of underfunding, front and centre of its arguments for reform. 

The court backlog is indeed terrible for justice: years-long delays in cases coming to trial mean it is less likely to be served, harming not just victims but innocent defendants. But the Institute for Government has assessed the impact of these reforms on court delays, and its verdict is that they would only result in “extremely marginal gains”. It concludes the government would do better to focus on their other, uncontroversial reform proposals, such as increasing the number of court sitting days.

But ministers have also implied that even if there wasn’t a major backlog, they would still be considering these reforms. Sackman has claimed the reforms are “ideological” and part of a “modern justice system”. Lammy seems to intimate trial by jury is somehow antiquated, writing “in Canada, I felt like a visitor from the past as I toured their modern justice system, where judge-alone trials are an everyday occurrence”.

“Old-fashioned civil liberties!” might seem like an odd strapline for a government led by none other than a human rights lawyer. But it hints at a couple of unattractive traits in Starmer’s politics.

The first is about vantage. On a range of issues, Starmer seems to understand the concept of “human rights” from the perspective of those who have more power in society, who are more easily heard, and whom the system is less likely to envelope in Kafkaesque nightmare. We see this not just in his approach to jury trial, but to assisted dying, where the rights of affluent campaigners with excellent social support who want the right to state assistance to end their own lives matter more than the rights of those who are vulnerable to being coerced into asking their doctor to prescribe them lethal drugs. Or in his inexplicable reluctance to make clear before 2023 that allowing men to self-identify into women’s spaces, services and sports would undermine their privacy, dignity and safety.

The second relates to how he sees ordinary citizens. Voters are not especially keen on politicians who they sense looking down on them. It is a bit of a tell when ministers move from promoting judge-only trials on the basis they reduce the backlog, to notions of modernity. It suggests Starmer actively prefers the idea of justice done by the learned judges in his social network over the little people who sit on juries. That plays straight into the anti-elitist rhetoric of populist politicians like Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski.

This is not a government generally characterised by a reforming zeal or a passion for change. It is remarkable to me that two of the most radical - and ill-conceived - shifts backed by Starmer are the risky legalisation of medically-assisted suicide, and curtailing citizens’ rights to jury trial. Are they really what he wants his premiership to be remembered for?

And Matt Dathan writes:

A wrongly convicted sub-postmaster has warned David Lammy there will be “many more miscarriages of justice” if he goes ahead with his plans to curb jury trials.

Jo Hamilton has written to the deputy prime minister, urging him to rethink the controversial change in the law that would replace jury trials in England and Wales with a single judge in cases where the defendant is likely to face up to three years in jail.

She warned that without the “safety net of a jury”, the changes will further erode trust in the establishment and the justice system.

Hamilton, whose story featured prominently in the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, has urged wavering MPs to vote against the government in the House of Commons on Tuesday night, when they will debate and vote on the proposals for the first time in parliament.

Hamilton was one of more than 900 sub-postmasters prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for offences including theft, fraud and false accounting. This occurred as a result of incorrect information from the Post Office’s faulty Horizon accounting system, built and run by the Japanese firm Fujitsu. More than 230 sub-postmasters were sent to prison and 2,800 were asked to pay back money to escape prosecution.

Hamilton said she was coerced into pleading guilty to 14 cases of false accounting in order to avoid the more serious charge of theft and was sentenced in 2008 at Winchester crown court. Her conviction was finally quashed in 2021 by the Court of Appeal after years of torment and campaigning.

In her letter to Lammy, Hamilton, who won an OBE for services to justice last year, wrote: “As one of 900 sub-postmasters wrongly prosecuted by an arm of the state, I feel compelled to write to you about restricting jury trials for criminal cases with a likely sentence of less than three years.

“I was coerced into pleading guilty and was sentenced in 2008 at Winchester crown court. I did not have a jury but having experienced the might of the criminal justice system I can see how this could go horribly wrong.

“There is no trust in the establishment and the justice system, and this will erode things even further. Crimes that would carry a three-year sentence will be serious ones (like mine) and I can see many more miscarriages of justice (like mine).”

She added: “Almost nobody has access to legal aid any more and as such vulnerable people could find themselves in court without the safety net of a jury.

“As somebody who has received an OBE for services to justice, I cannot let this go without telling you how strongly I feel and there are thousands more who feel the same way. I urge you to rethink this and share my letter with anyone who is undecided.”

The government is confident of winning the vote but Sarah Sackman, the courts minister responsible for the reforms, accepted that a significant number of Labour MPs would rebel.

The plans to abolish some jury trials form part of Courts and Tribunals Bill, and the wider provisions have widespread support.

However, Karl Turner, the veteran Labour MP who has led efforts to defeat the changes to juries, said he would attempt to force the government to dilute or scrap the proposals altogether at a later stage of the bill, when it returns to the Commons for its report stage, which is when MPs debate and vote on specific parts of the legislation.

He has told The Times that he already has 67 Labour MPs willing to back his amendments. He would need at least 80 Labour MPs in order to defeat the government’s majority in the Commons.

In a sign of the concern among ministers about the size of the rebellion, Lammy met Turner for last-minute talks in an attempt to quell dissent.

Turner said he would abstain in Tuesday’s vote because Lammy had promised to publish an assessment of the impact the curb on jury trials is having on reducing the court backlogs after a “meaningful review period”, and also offered to give a Labour MP opposed to the reforms a seat on the committee of MPs that will scrutinise the legislation line-by-line.

Turner said he was likely to offer the seat to a female critic as it would be more powerful to have a female voice on the bill committee. However, despite the concessions offered by Lammy in the meeting on Monday night, Turner still intends to table amendments to the legislation when it returns to the Commons in order to protect jury trials.

Sackman said the government was confident of avoiding a defeat in Tuesday’s vote. She told Times Radio: “I know that there will be some MPs that will vote against this, but I also know, as we saw from a letter yesterday containing the signatures of 40 women MPs from the parliamentary Labour Party, that there is strong support. Their message was clear. The changes in this bill cannot come soon enough for women and girls in the criminal justice system. And I’m listening to their voices as we go through the lobbies tonight.”

There is also widespread opposition to the jury curbs in the legal sector. More than 3,200 lawyers, including 300 top barristers and retired judges, wrote a letter to Sir Keir Starmer urging him to scrap the proposals. They argued there was no evidence that the “unpopular” plan would deliver the government’s goal of reducing the crown courts backlog, which stands at 80,000 and is on course to hit 200,000 by 2025, according to Ministry of Justice modelling.