A wise man once said that “jury trials are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement. Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea.” High office has a habit of deadening such wisdom, and now David Lammy, the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, is proposing to abolish the ancient institution he had once defended for all but a few crimes.

It would be one thing if, having decided that the jury was an institution not adapted to modern conditions, the Justice Secretary made the principled decision to abolish it. This view is not without supporters. Lord Bramwell, one of the most distinguished jurists of the Victorian period, once said that, “If juries had to give reasons for their verdict, trial by jury would not last five years.” In fact, it is a crime in England to disclose the deliberations of a jury, which to cynics only confirms the truth of Bramwell’s quip.

But this is Britain in 2025. Lammy needs to abolish juries because there is no money for the legal system, which means that courtrooms sit empty while criminal trials are scheduled for the next decade.

Juries are expensive and time-consuming; hiring judges is also expensive, but they aren’t messy like juries. They won’t collapse trials by going home and looking up the defendant online. They won’t acquit people who throw monuments into a river or people who post threatening things online about asylum seekers. For a Prime Minister who thinks ID cards are a sure vote winner, abolishing juries must seem like a quite clever thing to try.

The other advantage of abolishing jury trials is that they aren’t in the European Convention on Human Rights, the jury being for the most part not a Continental institution. At one point, there was even a challenge against the legality of having jury trials, but even the Eurocrats of Strasbourg would not go that far.

Lammy gave the game away by saying that there is no right to a jury trial. On the surface, this is a stupid thing to say. Outside of a few circumstances, almost everyone accused of a serious crime has the right to a jury trial under English (and Scottish, less so in Northern Ireland) law. What he really meant was that it is not in the Big List Of Human Rights in the ECHR. It used to be said that everything that is not prohibited was allowed in England. This government believes that all rights are determined by the Strasbourg court.

You can see how this appeals to a government which needs to save money. But it is nonetheless a silly thing to do. For every jury-hater — mostly lawyers and Lee Kuan Yew fans — there are 1,000 voters who have fuzzy and warm feelings toward the jury. The Right likes the common law because it’s British, and what is more British than juries? Lord Chancellor, don’t do it.

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Yuan Yi Zhu is an academic and writer.

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