The Starmer regime plan to strip us of 800 years of trial by jury, because suddenly jurors are the problem, but its been tried before - and failed badly. Right, so you always know the country’s in trouble when a government starts calling a constitutional right an “efficiency problem”, because that’s how you sell something you’d never dare say plainly. And that’s what’s happening now with jury trials. They’ve taken a backlog they created through court closures, CPS collapse and a decade of cuts, and decided the real issue is the public being in the room. So instead of fixing the system, they’re cutting the public out of it. And the pitch is almost impressive in its shamelessness: this isn’t the erosion of a centuries-old safeguard, it’s just “modernisation”. It’s Diplock logic without even the honesty of acknowledging it, and you can see exactly where it leads. Because once ministers start deciding who gets a jury, you’re not protecting justice. You’re protecting power from scrutiny. Right, so you can always tell when a government is about to do something that would never survive a straight conversation with the public because they stop talking like politicians and start talking like middle managers. And that’s exactly what’s happening right now with jury trials. Nobody in government is willing to say, plainly, that they’re removing the public from criminal justice. Nobody is willing to say they’re taking a right that has existed for centuries and turning it into a privilege. Nobody will say they’re rewiring the justice system so the state can judge the public without the public being in the room. So instead they call it “modernisation”, “efficiency”, “reducing the backlog”, as if justice is a logistics chain and the real problem is that twelve ordinary people have the audacity to want to participate in it. And when you strip away the managerial gloss, the reforms are brutally clear. They want a new Crown Court division where a judge and two magistrates hear either-way cases that currently go to juries.