Expensive Justice Is Worth It

Boris Johnson has always received far too little criticism for what he did to Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Although we should have just paid the debt, which was not very much and which there was absolutely no doubt that we owed, thus bringing home Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Anoosheh Ashoori, Murad Tahbaz, and all the rest. If that had not worked, then someone sufficiently prominent should have flown unannounced to Tehran, smartphone in hand, and tweeted only as the plane was landing that they would not be leaving without our people. One of those whom I approached would still have been an MP if he had done that, and another would have become Prime Minister.

But Peter Hitchens confirms that not even in Iran could you be convicted and imprisoned by the same State employee sitting alone. He is too sentimental about our own criminal justice system, which has clearly yet to come from him, and about a pre-1960s Britain that was in fact extremely violent in ways with which that system did not then concern itself, but rightly does now, which is not the only reason for much higher crime figures, but which is no small factor. The description of David Lammy as a “Leftist” would be as ludicrous to the people who were on course to deprive him of his seat as the same of Roy Jenkins would be to George Galloway, who did take Jenkins’s seat. Yet Hitchens is broadly right here:

Arrest in most countries is a bit like dying. Your former life ends, as stone-faced men conduct you down a series of staircases to a room like a tomb. You are powerless beyond belief Stupid people can insult you (and quite possibly beat you up) without any fear of consequences. You are as cut off from help as if you were in Antarctica. And don’t put too much hope in having your ‘day in court’. Your only hope of getting out is to co-operate with the people who are trying to crush you.

This has been the case all down the ages, in most places. People in this country have almost no idea how lucky they are to be safe from it. For, with the mighty defence of trial by jury, the innocent have less to fear from the state here than in any other part of the world. But the British state, like some huge, blind, indestructible worm lying beneath the foundations of Whitehall, has an instinct for unlimited power, and has never given up trying to weaken and get rid of jury trial.

Last Sunday, many of us watched the BBC drama Prisoner 951, in which the innocent Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe (played by Narges Rashidi) is seized at Tehran airport by sneering agents of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, a fanatical state within a state. If you are like me, you watched the whole process with your heart in your mouth, especially her eventual arrival in a slum prison in a remote corner of Persia, totally cut off from all help. In juryless states such as the Islamic Republic of Iran this is what happens. Your ‘trial’ will be a committee of people debating just how guilty you are. Yet Iran itself is, on the surface, a modern country with all the appearance of civilisation. Its injustices may seem far away in space and time, but I would not be too sure. What struck me about the TV portrayal of Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s ordeal is that some aspects of it could already happen here. And it won’t take much before a lot more of them will do so.

You may not much like the former MP George Galloway, and I have many disagreements with him. But a few months ago, he and his wife were stopped and held on arrival at Gatwick airport. It is still not clear why. Police acted under schedule 3 to the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019, one of a battery of new laws using ‘terrorism’ as the pretext for demolishing former freedoms. It allows an officer to stop, question, search and detain a person entering the UK, to find out if they have engaged in ‘hostile activity’, whatever that is. Crucially, nothing has to be proved against them, nor any charge made. But they can be held, and police can invade their privacy. Those detained can be required to provide passwords to electronic devices (I was struck by the way the Iranian heavies made the same demand of Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe). Mr Galloway said he had been held for nine hours of interrogation, and was eventually released without further action. He complained: ‘Not a single effort was made to show cause for having detained me... with armed officers in public in an English airport.’

If I were you, I wouldn’t let this pass just because you don’t like George Galloway. Sooner or later it will happen to somebody you like – and then what? After all we are all too familiar with police descending on individuals who have said something they don’t like on the internet. All this would be far worse if we did not still have the remnants of jury trial here – but alas they are remnants, and soon they will be sparser still if the Starmer Government has its way. Personally, I agree with Justice Secretary David Lammy who, in an earlier incarnation, tweeted on June 2020: ‘Jury trials are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement. Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea. The Government need to pull their finger out and acquire empty public buildings across the country to make sure these can happen in a way that is safe.’ But now he says in an internal Whitehall document that only rape, murder, manslaughter and ‘public interest’ cases should continue to be heard by juries. Some guess that as many as 75 per cent of trials would then be heard by a judge instead of a jury. And most defence lawyers will tell you that judges tend to be prosecution-minded. The excuse for this is that our system cannot keep up with all the trials it needs to hold, and the whole thing has become too expensive. Well, justice is expensive.

It is also worth it. A society without justice is a perilous slum, where the government is too powerful and the citizen is a serf. My guess is that, if the excuse of saving money is accepted and acted on, jury trials will be gone altogether within 20 years. It’s not just money, of course. In recent times it has been Leftists such as Mr Lammy who have done the most damage to justice. They think they are so nice that the rest of us just have to trust them to be good. The gravest assault on our crime and justice system was made by the 1960s Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, the liberal’s liberal. Jenkins, like most of today’s elite, believed in the phantom of ‘rehabilitation’ instead of punishment. He was seduced by a belief that crime was a disease that would be cured by better living conditions. So, under him, deterrent beat policing, and stern orderly prisons quietly vanished – a disaster that his successors, Labour and Tory, would complete by abandoning any effort to deter illegal drugtaking. Jenkins rejected the sound, old idea that crime was a voluntary act, which should be deterred by visible police and punished by the courts in stern, tightly-run, austere prisons.

In 1960, before he got going, the peace was kept in cities and in the countryside by just 73,000 police officers (there are now 148,000, who obviously don’t keep order). They were mostly in small forces that did what their local taxpayers wanted. They believed their job was to prevent crime, not chase about after it had happened. It is almost incredible to note that at the time we had a prison population in England and Wales of 27,000 (now it is 87,500). But we were locking up the right people, before they had become habitual offenders, which is how you make prison work. Similarly, there were in those days only 807,000 recorded crimes a year, when crime was so rare that it was actually reported properly, as it long ago ceased to be. And like many self-admiring liberals, Jenkins could not see the point of juries. Perhaps he thought with people as ‘civilised’ as him in charge, there would never be any danger of the state growing too powerful. He got rid of the requirement for unanimous verdicts, a grave blow. But this is worse. If we are sensible, we will all work together to kill Mr Lammy’s plan, or a surprising number of us will live to regret it.