On The Turn

Last night, I wrote that, "Tomorrow, I shall be holding my annual Thanksgiving for the fact that the Puritans left England. It may have to be a heavy one to prepare me for Question Time after the Budget, the abolition of trial by jury, and whatever had come next, since they do say that things come in threes." It turns out that they do, indeed.

Well-lunched in Thanksgiving for the fact that the Puritans left England, I discover that the Government has reneged on its manifesto commitment to do better than either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown by enacting at least part of John Smith's signature policy that employment rights should, "begin with employment, and apply regardless of the number of hours worked." This reversal is at the hands of Peter Kyle, who is, among other things, a sometime protégé of Smith's old PPS. Still an active Labour parliamentarian, what has she to say about this?

A political party is not a charity, so a company does not donate to it. It makes an investment, on which it expects a return. Companies that invested in the Labour Party have enjoyed a return of £138 million in public contracts, although there may well already be far more than that, and there certainly will be in the course of this Parliament, as we see today. Only the trade unions pay to be abused by a political party that was forever our ungrateful adolescent progeny. That union leaders, in a long and ignoble tradition, are supporting this capitulation is one of the many very good reasons to replace them.

Elsewhere on the U-bend, David Lammy did not attend the House of Commons this afternoon. Among hundreds of freshers with no lives outside politics, no careerist backbencher could be found to ask a planted question this time. So Lammy is letting it be whispered that he might now consider limiting bench trials to cases "likely" (according to whom?) to receive a maximum sentence of three years. Three years.

Lammy will now present this or any other rowing back as a reasonable compromise. It is not. His whole original proposal still needs to be rejected, and previous erosions, under all parties and going back several decades, need to be reversed. It is irrelevant whether or not something is in Magna Carta, or in the European Convention on Human Rights, or in anything else. We must save our right to trial by jury, and our right to appeal, for their own sake, which is for ours. And we must take back our liberties for their own sake, which is for ours.