Sensitive and Official

Is the abolition of trial by jury so bad that is has had to be leaked hours before the Budget, or will the Budget be so bad that the abolition of trial by jury has had be leaked hours before it? Both. Of course.

The Budget has already been published in The Times, so MPs should instead look up where in the world it was possible to be both convicted, and then sent to prison for five years, by the same single State employee sitting alone, and pondering whether anywhere that that was not the case would order extradition to anywhere that it was. Mr Justice Chamberlain had just been removed from the judicial review of the proscription of Palestine Action, and replaced with a panel of three other judges for a case that will begin tomorrow. Think on.

Far from clearing a backlog, this change would send vast numbers of additional people, many of whom would have been found not guilty by juries, to a prison system that was already at or beyond breaking point. The automatic right of appeal is be scrapped, and magistrates empowered to imprison for up to two years. All of this will create an American-style penal servitude class, providing politicians' corporate sponsors with prison slave labour and with a barely costlier pool of the otherwise unemployable who had been nominally freed.

What switch in the brain will a judge be expected to press in order to erase the evidence that that same judge would hitherto have ruled inadmissible? If only murder, manslaughter, rape, and cases where it was determined by someone or other to be "in the public interest", were to be tried by juries, then what would there be to stop an assailant from killing the victim in the hope of putting a defence before a jury? And like all the previous attacks on civil liberties, none of this will be incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.