Jim Allister, the Traditional Unionist Voice leader and MP for North Antrim, is often prone to a touch of bombast in the House of Commons. But at other times, such as his contribution in Tuesday’s debate over abolishing jury trials, he can be disarmingly deft.
MPs were debating proposals by the UK’s justice secretary, David Lammy, to abolish jury trials in England and Wales for all but the most serious cases with likely sentences of three years or more. Crown courts are creaking under the weight of a backlog of 78,000 cases expected in coming years to hit 100,000. Some cases now may not be heard until 2029.
The UK government says restricting juries will speed things up. Lammy’s proposal, echoing a recommendation in a report from retired judge Brian Leveson, is for a new level of court where judges decide cases that would have gone before a jury.
He has rowed back on earlier suggestions that he might abolish jury trials for cases with sentences of five years or less. But many MPs on both sides of the house still complained about the potential for a three-year threshold to erode a tenet of British justice.
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There was much cross-party chest-thumping from MPs about the Magna Carta of 1215, which developed the concept of a jury trial. Lammy, meanwhile, said he had to do something or the backlog would engulf the courts: “Justice delayed is justice denied.”
Allister rose to his feet. He told the Labour justice secretary, a barrister, that he too was a barrister, having been called to the bar almost 50 years ago.
Allister has long practised criminal law in the North and has been a king’s counsel for almost 25 years. Northern Ireland, he said, had significant experience of jury trials and non-jury courts for terrorist offences.
“Whatever the intellectual capacity of a judge, they do not have the practical life experience, collectively, of 12 jurors,” said Allister. MPs who had been whispering to each other stopped and a hush descended to hear the TUV man’s wholly original point.
“It is that [collective life experience] which brings superior credibility to a jury verdict. So could I suggest to the justice secretary that to dissipate juries is to strain the quality of our justice,” he said.
Allister suggested this risk would be compounded by presiding judges ruling on the admissibility of evidence. Then they would have to excise from their minds the inadmissible evidence they had already seen, before deciding the cases.
He suggested all of this collectively posed a risk to the tenet of justice that holds that the public must be satisfied that justice had been seen to be done.
Normally, Allister would be no favourite of the so-called Gaza independents, MPs who represent heavily-Muslim constituencies in England’s midlands and north. But three of them – Ayoub Khan (Birmingham Perry Barr), Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Bately in Yorkshire), and Adnan Hussain (Blackburn) – were conspicuously vocal in their support of the north Antrim MP as he made his points.
Khan looked like he might develop neck problems, he was nodding that hard in agreement with Allister.
Lammy responded with a rambling, incoherent, irrelevant answer about how he was the father of an adopted daughter, and how this was somehow related to the fact that judges had to make difficult decisions all the time.
Liz Saville-Roberts, the leader in Westminster of the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru, told Lammy it wasn’t simply juries that were holding up criminal trials, but the shoddy state of many court buildings with “the roof leaking and [where the] heating doesn’t work”.
Lammy’s radical proposals will have to pass future votes in parliament. The Labour government may be hoping there isn’t more backbench trouble ahead.
