The Telegraph has discovered a timeless truth of British politics: if something once worked for me personally, it must never be changed for anyone else. Richard Holden was acquitted by a jury, therefore juries are sacrosanct, judges are suspect, and any attempt to unclog a court system smashed to pieces under fourteen years of Conservative rule is an attack on liberty itself. Case closed. Verdict reached. No appeal.
The sleight of hand comes early. “A jury acquitted me of a crime I didn’t commit” sounds reassuring until you remember that acquittal does not mean innocence was proven, only that guilt was not. That distinction matters in law, but it is inconvenient for column inches. The article leans heavily on the romance of “12 ordinary people”, as if magistrates, judges and recorders were plucked from some alien priesthood rather than being, inconveniently, ordinary people with training.
What is quietly avoided is why this debate exists at all. Jury trials are not under threat because Labour ministers woke up one morning with authoritarian urges. They are under strain because Conservative governments starved the courts, gutted legal aid, let buildings rot, and presided over a backlog so severe that justice now routinely arrives years late. Delay is not neutral. It punishes the innocent and the guilty alike, and it corrodes public confidence far more effectively than a judge sitting without a jury ever could.
The Telegraph wants this framed as lawyers versus the people. It is not. It is a question of whether a justice system should function at all. Judges already decide guilt every day in magistrates’ courts, appeals, and specialist cases, without the sky falling in. Pretending that modest, targeted reform is an assault on liberty is not a defence of justice. It is nostalgia as policy, deployed by the same political class that broke the system and now objects to anyone trying to fix it.
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