Joanna Pennyfeather
The UK Government is now openly moving to abolish jury trials for most offences, keeping them only for violent crimes carrying more than five years in prison. This is a direct breach of more than 800 years of legal tradition, enshrined in the Magna Carta: one of the few safeguards that survived kings, revolutions and world wars and one of the oldest protections ordinary people have against state abuse. Yet it is presented as a harmless efficiency upgrade, a way to ‘cut the backlog’.
As always: never take a politician at their word. The stated reason is almost always a lie.
The real purpose of removing trial by jury is not efficiency. It is not about modernising the courts or protecting victims. It is about making it easier to punish political dissidents: anyone who dares to think or speak in ways that challenge the official narrative. Juries inject common human judgment into a system otherwise run by political actors and that is precisely why governments want them gone. A jury of one’s peers is unpredictable, independent and often sympathetic to those who challenge authority. A politically appointed judge is much easier to control.
This proposal is best understood within the broader context of how governments maintain their power. Historically, they rely on three things: the sword, propaganda and money.
The sword represents coercion: essentially the power to punish. But raw punishment cannot be used constantly and overt force tends to backfire. The more visible the violence, the more the public begins to sympathise with the victim. So governments complement force with propaganda, which is narrative control through censorship, education, media alignment and psychological pressure. And the whole machine is funded through taxation, debt and money creation, which allows the state to perpetuate its power without ever asking permission.
The move to abolish jury trials fits perfectly into this pattern. The goal is not to fill prisons with people who speak their minds. In fact, the goal is the opposite: to create a climate where the state scarcely needs to act at all. Once the legal architecture is in place, they need only select a few individuals, preferably high-profile, and ideally for trivial ‘crimes’, and make an over-the-top example out of them.
The point is not justice – it is fear.
A couple of carefully chosen sacrificial lambs, sentenced by a compliant judge for thought-crimes or speech-crimes, will be enough to terrify the rest of the population. After that, people will censor themselves. They will warn their friends what ‘not to say’. They will police each other to avoid trouble. This kind of internalised censorship is far more effective and far less dangerous for those in power than open repression.
This is how modern authoritarianism works: not through mass arrests, but through mass intimidation.
When a jury is involved, this strategy collapses. Ordinary people are far less likely to convict someone for expressing forbidden thoughts and speech, especially if ‘the current thing’ is distrusted or unpopular. A government seeking total narrative control cannot tolerate that kind of unpredictability. Hence, the suggestion to remove the jury.
Make no mistake: this is where the trend is heading. New Zealanders and Australians should pay close attention, because these policies increasingly roll out in coordinated waves across Western nations. It does not matter what justification they use, whether it is efficiency, safety, convenience or protecting children. The surface excuse is always a lie. The underlying motive is always the same: to centralise power, control narratives and scare people into submission without ever having to show the sword.
Or as the saying goes: How do you know a politician is lying? Their lips are moving.
The author Rod Dreher wrote an excellent book by the title Live Not By Lies. The book teaches people, mostly Christians, how to survive the rising soft totalitarianism in the West by showing how people, again mostly Christians, survived the hard totalitarianism of Soviet communism.
While the book is mainly targeted to Christians, the lessons in the book apply to everyone. In a particularly striking passage, Dreher tells us that:
It is up to us today to take up this challenge, to live not by lies and to speak the truth that defeats evil. How do we do this in a society built on lies? By accepting a life outside the mainstream, courageously defending the truth, and being willing to endure the consequences.
And he reminds us that we must stand for
truth and justice not out of an expectation of achievable victory in their lifetimes, but because it [is] the right thing to do.
I want to leave you with the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, words that now apply more than ever before:
Live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.
When governments try to abolish jury trials, they are not seeking justice, order or efficiency. They are seeking obedience. And if the public doesn’t push back now, the ability to speak freely, even to think freely, will not be taken all at once. It will simply fade, replaced by a quiet, fearful silence that the state no longer even needs to enforce.
If we accept the lie, and let it triumph through us, we will lose everything our ancestors fought to preserve. But if we refuse it, it can have no power over us, and the state will be left powerless.
