https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/dont-trust-government-abolition-most-jury-trials

PUBLIC anger moves MPs. The government’s retreat on the two-child benefit cap reflects pressure from campaigners and trade unions.

But if Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have had to temper their attacks on the poorest, they have not let up in their administration’s extraordinary authoritarianism.

This hit a new low with David Lammy’s proposal this week to abolish jury trials for anything other than rape, murder, manslaughter and certain offences passing a “public interest test;” and to allow judges to determine guilt on their own where the sentence is anything less than five years in prison.

…

[I]t is logical to assume that people who are happy to bully, ban and fix their way to power within a party will behave in a similar way in government.

And they have done: Labour has accelerated the erosion of citizens’ protest rights, granting police still greater power to obstruct peaceful demonstrations — and, following the ludicrous ban on direct action group Palestine Action as “terrorists,” presides regularly over mass arrests of people sitting down holding signs.

Protesters facing jail for breaching often arbitrary and confusing police conditions, activists taking action over the climate emergency or in international solidarity, would lose the safeguard of a jury of ordinary people who may judge the justice or otherwise of their actions.

The mysterious replacement of the judge due to hear a legal challenge to the Palestine Action ban — the same judge was removed earlier this year from a hearing on the legality of certain arms sales to Israel — reinforces suspicions that this is a government that will fix trials when and where it can.

The fightback against attacks on our liberties must gain the same profile across the left as the fight against government cuts. The two are linked: and the government can be defeated.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/dont-trust-government-abolition-most-jury-trials