Normal, Healthy, Ordered, Living

David Lammy’s punishment was the sack, but Sarah Sackman’s is to keep her job. There seems to be nothing yet on the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court, but see here:

The Chair of the Bar Council has welcomed Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s indication that he may scrap controversial plans to reduce access to jury trials.

Speaking at an event at a leisure centre in Sheffield on Friday, the new Prime Minister said he wants to “look in detail” at the proposals - but that his instincts are “not to reduce access to jury trial”.

He said he has drawn on his own personal experience, particularly relating to the Hillsborough disaster, and indicated that he is “probably looking for changes” on the plan he inherited from former PM Sir Keir Starmer.

Kirsty Brimelow KC, Chair of the Bar Council, said: “Relying on a bit of my own Northern bluntness, it is encouraging if common sense is prevailing. One of my first actions was to write to the Prime Minister urging him to back away from the jury reduction course of the previous administration.

“Examination of the evidence shows that reducing jury trials is not required to reduce the backlog of cases and, in fact, could be counter-productive.

“The Prime Minister’s recent comments give me hope that he is listening. Disappointingly, a letter to the previous Prime Minister, signed by 3,200 barristers and retired judges, went unanswered.

“Trial by jury is one of the defining features of our justice system and a constitutional safeguard that has stood the test of centuries. It embodies the principle that justice is not administered by the state alone but with the participation of 12 citizens. They bring independence, collective wisdom and a diversity of experience to their deliberations, helping to ensure that verdicts command public confidence.

“The Bar Council stands ready to work constructively with the Prime Minister and his government to reduce the waiting for those in the criminal justice system.

“Crucially, the passage of time is showing that our proposals, including opening empty courts and targeted listing by judges, are reducing the backlog of cases.

“The indications from the new Prime Minister give me optimism that our voices will be listened to.”

The Bar Council of England and Wales - which represents more than 18,000 barristers - launched its ‘Justice needs juries’ campaign in response to the previous government’s plans to curtail jury trials through the Courts and Tribunals Bill.

As part of the campaign, working with the Criminal Bar Association and circuit leaders, the Bar Council has submitted written and oral evidence to the Public Bill Committee, drafted and tabled 28 amendments to the Bill, and have been mentioned at least 73 times during parliamentary debates on the topic.

In March 2026 the Bar Council coordinated an open letter calling on Sir Keir Starmer to stop planned restrictions to jury trials. The letter was signed by more than 3,200 lawyers including more than 300 KCs, 22 retired judges, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, and current and former politicians.

Still, the fight goes on, as George Monbiot writes:

No more resistance in the US. The era of human rights is over, and dissent is once more forbidden. This is what certain billionaires and their concierges want, and this is the model they’re also seeking to project across the world. If we fail to resist, if our new prime minister is as weak and suggestible as the last one, this is what we will get. In fact, we are halfway there already.

Why? Because successive governments in the UK have succumbed to a global campaign to cancel our fundamental freedoms, a campaign led by oligarchs and corporations, the media they own and the junktanks they fund. A campaign that has become definitional for the second Trump presidency.

At a global summit convened by the US government earlier this month, the Trump administration officials Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller and Scott Bessent explained that they were redirecting counterterrorism efforts away from Islamic jihadism and towards “the political left”. Most of the examples they cited to justify this shift were more than 30 years old. Several times they had to dig down to the 1970s to find a sufficiently menacing threat. You could hear the barrel being scraped.

Without producing a shred of evidence, Rubio, the secretary of state, claimed that the Cuban government is “inextricably linked to the far-left groups and movements across and beyond the west”. The following week, his department sought to justify this claim with a report containing a long list of leftwing legislators, journalists and activists that attempted to link them to Cuba in ways that ranged from the tenuous to the hilarious. This is a well-honed tactic, used prolifically by the Nazis among others: they claimed dissenters, by definition, were part of an international communist conspiracy. They insisted, as Rubio did, that “it is time to crush this evil for ever”.

That wasn’t the only crude reminder. Miller, Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, maintained that when you see antifascist protests, “not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way – in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism … their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.” I’m just surprised he didn’t say “untermenschen”. The US government, by contrast, promotes “normal, healthy, ordered living”.

But what hit me even harder was Miller’s attack on “jury nullification”: jurors acquitting people who, he said, were “obviously guilty”. Shutting down this possibility has been an aim of illiberal governments and conservative judges around the world. We saw it in the UK in the prosecution of Trudi Warner and others for holding signs that state an ancient principle in English law: “Jurors have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to their conscience.”

We see it in the astonishing prosecution, being pursued at the moment, of Rajiv Menon KC, who reminded jurors of this right at the trial of the Palestine Action campaigners he was defending. He became, as a result, the first lawyer in English history to be charged with contempt of court for a closing speech. If convicted, he faces up to two years’ imprisonment and will be struck off. Prosecuting lawyers for defending their dissident clients is more or less the definition of authoritarianism.

We also saw it in the assault Keir Starmer launched on jury trials as a whole, greatly curtailing, without any coherent justification, our strongest defence against injustice.

Starmer was a weak man, without a clear vision of his own, who was rolled by any powerful state or corporate lobby. He was no match for a well-funded and highly effective international campaign. A network of groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, funded by corporations and billionaires, has been producing “model legislation”. The groups test these laws in sympathetic jurisdictions. If they are found to work, they then press for their adoption elsewhere. The result is a sustained assault on our rights to protest, to political equality and to a habitable planet.

The globalisation of this attack on our fundamental rights is a key conservative aim. As capital operates everywhere, so should its ability to crush our objections. The long series of vicious anti-protest laws in the UK is an outcome of sustained lobbying by junktanks, the media and other governments. The result is a country that now keeps hundreds of political prisoners, a country in which you can get six months in jail for marching slowly down the street.

These oppressive laws have culminated – so far – in an act of parliament passed in April that enables the police to shut down any protest they deem to have a “cumulative” impact on the community. The only protests that have ever succeeded are those with a cumulative impact. Protest is acceptable as long as it’s useless. Let the people have their say, but only if we can’t hear them.

The new laws have been accompanied by that age-old trick, traditionally associated with fascist regimes, of smearing leftwing dissidents as terrorists. As the rights group Liberty has pointed out, the definition of terrorism here has greatly expanded, to incorporate tactics formerly regarded as civil protest. This is what enabled Starmer’s government to ban Palestine Action.

The judge who referred Menon for contempt, Mr Justice Johnson, was also the first – at the same trial – to use the extraordinary powers quietly inserted by the Conservatives into the Sentencing Act 2020. These enable someone tried for one crime to be sentenced for another. The four Palestine Action protesters were convicted of ordinary crimes. But, without informing the jury, Johnson marked the case as having a “terrorist connection”. He then sentenced them for terrorist offences, which means much more prison time.

Already, his example has been followed by another judge: a different group of pro-Palestine protesters, who sprayed red paint and broke some windows of a branch of Barclays Bank, are about to be sentenced as terrorists, though neither they nor the jurors were told of this possibility during their trial for criminal damage. This means, of course, that they were unable to defend themselves against this far more serious charge.

Nothing is safe from the billionaire assault on humanity. None of our rights, however ancient and familiar, are impregnable. Fight for them now or lose them, perhaps for ever.