IS REMOVAL OF JURIES COCK UP OR CONSPIRACY?

What was once considered just another of the reasons that this country could hold its head up high in combining social cohesion and centuries old tradition was people`s and parliament`s faith in the jury system; a system that has been copied wherever justice is based upon the common law.  However bigwigs such as Lord Sumption have questioned the near sacred status it enjoys. The Court of Appeal, in Webster & Ors v The King [2026] EWCA Crim 9, has reminded us that jurors have an immunity from punishment for their verdicts rather than any positive right to defy the law, a distinction which, as the Vice-President of the Criminal Division acknowledged, may be lost on some.   Is it possible or perhaps credible that  part of the political calculus behind proposals to reduce jury trials be a concern, unspoken and perhaps unacknowledged even within government, about the composition of juries in an era of demographic concentration and, in particular, about the attitudes of certain communities to Jews, to Western legal values and to the obligations of civic life? Having been a magistrate for seventeen years and reaching conclusions based on the evidence presented this post will attempt to find an answer to the preceding question. 

First some statistics published here a couple of months ago.

 Top 5 areas by number of Muslims (England & Wales) are

1. Birmingham        341,800

2.Bradford               166,800

3.Tower Hamlets    123,900

4.Manchester           122,900

5.Newham                122,100

Top 5 areas by percentage Muslim  population

1.Tower Hamlets                                    39.9%

2.Blackburn with Darwen                     35.0%

3.Newham                                                34.8%

4.Luton                                                     32.9%

5.Redbridge                                             31.3%

Nationally Muslims are about 6.5% of England and Wales so all above areas are far above average. The top 5 wards by % Muslim population exhibit even higher concentrations of Muslims.

1.Bastwell (Blackburn with Darwen)        73.5%

2.Shear Brow (Blackburn with Darwen)  70.3%

3.Whitefield (Pendle)                                   67.1%

4.Toller (Bradford)                                       64.3%

5.Small Heath (Birmingham)                     62.1%

Trials begin with the selection of a jury.  Jurors are drawn from the electoral register of the crown court catchment area. Consider the London area.  Inner London Crown Court, Woolwich, Snaresbrook and  Wood Green Courts  draw their panels from populations that have, in a generation, been transformed in ways that are demographic fact rather than editorial opinion.  As listed above London is not the only area transformed in a generation.  The Policy Exchange report of 2024, drawing on fieldwork conducted by a reputable polling organisation, found that a significant minority, around a quarter,  of British Muslims did not consider themselves bound by British law in matters where they perceived it to conflict with their religious obligations. A separate survey, conducted by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, found that Muslims in Great Britain held antisemitic attitudes at rates substantially above the national average with around forty percent agreeing with at least four of a battery of antisemitic propositions. These are not fringe findings plucked from partisan websites. They are peer-reviewed and methodologically defensible data points.

A jury of twelve is selected at random. In a catchment area where one in four or one in three residents holds the views described above the statistical probability of those views being represented on the jury panel is not negligible.  In any of the areas listed above in a trial touching however loosely on facts or allegations concerning Jews and/or Israel who is to say that a verdict would be based solely on evidence presented and not influenced by prior prejudicial opinions.  Indeed on Islamist protest activity or on any matter which might engage religious or communal solidarity, the risk of a verdict driven by something other than the evidence is real. The Webster appellants were environmental activists, predominantly white, middle-class women. What happens when the defendant is a young Muslim man charged with a knife offence and three jurors share his background and his community? What happens when a Jewish complainant gives evidence of fraud against a Muslim defendant in East London? 

One need not posit conscious bias. The Court of Appeal in Webster cited Lord Devlin's observation that the jury system is "an insurance that the criminal law will conform to the ordinary man's idea of what is fair and just." The insurance pays out only if "the ordinary man" shares certain foundational commitments about the rule of law, about equality before the courts and about the irrelevance of the complainant's faith or ethnicity to a verdict. Where those commitments are not universally shared the insurance policy begins to look rather threadbare.

Those who designed the current proposals to move either way offences into the magistrates court, to expand judge only trials in fraud cases and to revisit the thresholds for crown court election will not say this. A minister who watches perverse acquittals accumulate in certain court centres, who reads the survey data and who understands that the problem can only worsen as demographic concentration deepens, has a powerful incentive to reduce the jurisdiction of the jury without ever providing the real reason for doing so. The official justification; court backlogs, costs, efficiency,  is real enough in itself. It need not be the only reason for a policy to nonetheless serve its unsaid purpose.

However strange, unusual, unexpected or unexplained events are not necessarily the basis on which to establish a conspiracy.  These  could be  adequately explained by incompetence, fiscal pressure and institutional inertia:  features hardly unknown within British governments of recent decades.   The criminal courts backlog is, by any measure, a genuine catastrophe. The average wait from charge to crown court trial stands at over five hundred days in many jurisdictions. The remand population is swollen. Witnesses disappear, memories fade, complainants withdraw. The government's proposals to divert either way offences downward have been advanced by every administration since at least the Auld Review of 2001. They require no ulterior motive. They are the default response of Treasury dominated governments to a justice system  chronically underfunded since 2010.

Moreover, if demographic concern were genuinely driving policy, one would expect the government to be restricting jury trial in precisely those courts and for precisely those offences where the risk of communally influenced verdicts is highest. It is doing nothing of the sort. The proposals are blanket, bureaucratic and generic. They are the work of officials who think in spreadsheets rather than of politicians who think in community relations statistics.

There is also a logical objection to those who would tend to believe in conspiratorial avenues of belief. The magistracy, to which these diverted cases would flow, is itself drawn from the same communities. It too is subject to the same demographic pressures, the same communal solidarities and the same survey findings. If a religiously motivated juror troubles the government, a religiously motivated lay magistrate should trouble it equally.  The distinction between twelve random citizens and three sitting magistrates may matter considerably less than is supposed, particularly as the magistracy has been actively recruited from previously under represented communities over the past two decades.  Problem is that this government refuses to publish details of magistrates` religious affiliations if any. A Freedom of Information request on this topic was refused as per below:-

Information on the religion of those recruited to the magistracy was collected for applications to the magistracy made from January 2022, following the launch of a revised recruitment process. MoJ does hold information on the religion of magistrates who were subsequently appointed via this revised process, however this information is exempt from disclosure under section 22(1) of the FOIA, because it is intended for future publication. This is a qualified exemption which means that the decision to disclose the information is

subject to the public interest test. When assessing whether or not it was in the public interest to disclose the information, we took into account the following factors:

Public interest considerations favouring disclosure

• Disclosure would improve transparency in the operations of Government, and of the justice system in particular.

Public interest considerations favouring withholding the information

• It is in the public interest to adhere to the existing publication process for official statistics, which includes time for the data to be collated and properly verified.

• It is in the public interest to ensure that data used in the compilation of official statistics comply with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics and that resulting outputs are produced to the highest quality.

• Statistics of high quality are produced to sound methods, with all users having easy and equal access that is fair and open and are managed impartially and objectively in the public interest. Premature publication would undermine the principle of making the information available to all at the same time through the official publication process. We reached the view that, on balance, the public interest favours withholding this information under section 22 of the FOIA at this time.

The official magistrate trend data over roughly the last decade is by ethnicity, not religion. Using available statistics a plausible estimate is that Muslims likely comprise somewhere in the low single digits of the magistracy overall,  probably materially below their roughly 6.5% share of the England & Wales population.

The proposition that the removal of jury trials furthers a long term intention to curb the possible increase in perverse verdicts driven by beliefs or religious affiliations assumes a degree of strategic sophistication on the part of this government which its record does not obviously support. Governments which could identify a problem this subtle and design a structural response this elegant would not also have produced the Rwanda scheme, the Post Office Horizon legislation or the procurement disasters of recent years. Hanlon's razor* applies. What looks like cunning is usually muddle.

To the original question in my opening paragraph the honest answer is that I do not know.  The judiciary, the Bar, the Law Society and the academic commentariat have discussed proposals to restrict jury trial almost entirely in terms of efficiency, cost and delay.  The demographic transformation of English jury pools combined with survey evidence of attitudes among certain communities that are genuinely difficult to reconcile with the neutral administration of justice, represents a question that the legal establishment is as yet unwilling to ask in public.

The jury system survives because the public trusts it. That trust rests on the assumption that twelve random citizens will, broadly speaking, share certain irreducible commitments to evidence, to impartiality and to equality before the law. If that assumption is becoming less universally reliable then the debate about jury trial reform is considerably more serious  and considerably more uncomfortable  than the official conversation currently admits.  A sturdy unimpeachable justice system is an essential pillar of a society`s confidence in a  nation`s democracy.  

As Shakespeare wrote in King Henry VI, "Confidence once lost is not easily recovered."

* a philosophical rule of thumb that states: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or incompetence/ignorance)."

BELIEVERS ONLY

HMCTS  latest information on "turbo charged" national recruitment is available here.  Those who have confidence this programme will be totally successful without the dilution of standards possibly have confidence that the aeronautical abilities of porcines have been underrated. 

YOUTH JUSTICE OR INJUSTICE?

There are myriad aspects of society which can be used as indicative of the how or why that society is changing, developing, achieving or failing. The blunt truth exploited by those who rule over us is that anything can be proved by anyone with the tools available for the task and government exploits those tools invariably to its own advantage. The degree, depth and direction of such manipulation is dependent upon the tendency or otherwise of authoritarianism within that government. In simple terms the greater the transparency shown by a government the more likely its democratic functions are firmly entrenched and more resistant to control from above. There is little doubt that the greater the open mindedness of statistical analysis of youth criminality the greater is the likelihood of meaningful action of processes in its reduction.



The seeds of serious law breaking in adulthood have often been established within the youth justice system. England has amongst the lowest age of responsibility in Europe and where shoplifting is a concern in the high streets from Plymouth to Carlisle. The legal, social and moral path of magistrates faced with offending children is fraught with difficulties between retribution and rehabilitation. Last week at Highbury Corner magistrates court a bench led by a senior magistrate, Alexia Fetherstonhaugh, opted for the latter pathway for a teenager who pleaded guilty to a two year shoplifting spree of £116,000. A report is available here.



There is a particular brand of English self-flagellation that surfaces whenever crime statistics are published. We are, it is implied by headline writers and opposition spokesmen alike, uniquely delinquent. Our young people, we are told, are feral in ways that would dismay the good burghers of Copenhagen or Hamburg. Before those of us who have sat on the bench and seen something of what courts actually deal with are tempted to accept this grim verdict it is worth pausing to ask whether the evidence actually supports the conclusion being drawn.
The question is a specific one: are the children of England and Wales stealing more than their counterparts elsewhere in the developed world? It is, on the face of it, a simple empirical matter. In practice it is anything but, and the caveats that attend any honest answer to that question are not merely statistical pedantry. They go to the heart of how we understand and misunderstand the youth justice landscape.



To begin with The Youth Justice Board`s most recently published annual statistics, covering the year ending March 2025, record approximately 35,600 proven offences by children aged 10 to 17, a figure that has remained broadly static following two years of modest post-pandemic recovery. Theft and handling, which had fallen to as little as 7% of all proven offences in 2020/21, has crept back up to 14% of that total representing something in the region of 4,900 to 5,000 individual proven offences. That recent uptick merits attention. But it must be viewed against the longer arc: over the preceding decade youth theft in England and Wales fell by approximately 86%. That is not a rounding error; it could be classed as a structural transformation. On the other hand it could also be affected by the reluctance of victims to report criminal acts against them.



With regard to the situation in Europe the caveats begin in earnest. Anyone who tells you they can produce a clean, like for like comparison of youth theft rates across European jurisdictions is either badly informed or being less than candid. The obstacles to meaningful comparison are formidable. England and Wales as mentioned above sets the age of criminal responsibility at ten years old one of the lowest thresholds in the developed world. Germany, Italy and most of the Nordic countries do not criminalise children under fourteen. The French age of criminal responsibility sits at thirteen. When a fourteen year old shoplifts in Düsseldorf no conviction is recorded; the same act in Wolverhampton enters the statistics. The edifice of comparative data is built on foundations that are not remotely uniform.



Prosecution policies diverge further still. Whether a young person is cautioned, diverted or brought before a court; whether shoplifting below a certain value is treated as a criminal matter or a civil one; whether police recording practices emphasise detection or diversion; all of these variables contaminate the official figures before a single comparison is attempted. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law have been admirably direct on this point noting that official crime rates simply do not lead to valid international comparison owing to variations in crime definitions and prosecution policies. I suppose we should be grateful for that scholarly candour even if politicians and commentators rarely heed it.



The more reliable instrument and one that has gained significant traction in criminological circles, is the self-report survey. The International Self-Report Delinquency Study now in its fourth iteration and covering some forty countries asks young people directly about their own behaviour, bypassing the distorting lens of the criminal justice apparatus. These surveys suggest that England and Wales sits, broadly speaking, in the middle of the European pack. We are not Sweden. But nor are we Serbia. Self-reported rates of shoplifting and petty theft among British adolescents have historically been comparable to those in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany when age groups are properly matched. The hand wringing headlines about uniquely degenerate English youth are not, on this evidence, well founded.



What is rather more striking and rather more important is what has been happening across the whole of Western Europe and North America simultaneously. The youth crime drop is one of the most significant and least publicly understood social phenomena of the past thirty years. From the mid 1990s onward youth offending of almost every kind declined dramatically in country after country: the United States, Sweden, Spain, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and yes, England and Wales. The proportional reductions were in many cases between 50% and 75%. Property crime, including theft, led that decline. The causes remain genuinely contested; declining unstructured socialisation between young people, reduced alcohol consumption, the growth of digital entertainment keeping children off the streets but the fact of the decline is not in dispute.




What is now also apparent is that the decline has, since approximately 2015 and more visibly since the pandemic, begun to level off. Self reported property crimes have been rising in at least five European countries. Shoplifting offences across England and Wales, for all age groups, have reached record levels. That the recent uptick in recorded youth theft in this jurisdiction is matched by similar trends elsewhere should at least prompt us to consider whether we are dealing with a locally generated problem or a shared European one. The evidence rather suggests the latter. The cost of living, the contraction of retail security investment during the pandemic years and the changing social routines of adolescents appear to be common drivers.



There is one structural feature of England and Wales that genuinely distinguishes us from most European comparators and it deserves more attention than it typically receives. The low age of criminal responsibility means that children who in Germany or Denmark would receive welfare or educational interventions are, in this jurisdiction, processed through the criminal justice system. A ten year old cautioned for shoplifting in Nottingham is a statistic; the same child in Nuremberg is a welfare case. This is not merely a question of nomenclature. It shapes the trajectory of a young life, the composition of our proven offence data and arguably the reoffending rates that subsequently haunt our statistics. Children with a theft index offence, we are told, reoffend at a rate of over 44%. One might enquire whether that reflects the criminogenic character of young thieves or the criminogenic character of early criminal justice contact itself. Several decades of research across European jurisdictions point rather firmly toward the latter.

Those of us who spent years on the bench know something that statistics struggle to capture: the extraordinary ordinariness of most of them. They are not a different species. They are children making poor decisions in circumstances that adults have frequently had a hand in creating eg inadequate housing, fractured families, failing schools and communities starved of youth provision. The Youth Justice Board notes that the average time from offence to completion at court now stands at 230 days, the highest ever recorded. Whatever one thinks about the merits of swift justice the idea that a fourteen year old connects a court appearance eight months after the event with the act that prompted it strains credibility.



The conclusion that honest engagement with the evidence compels is an uncomfortable one for those who prefer simple narratives. The youth of England and Wales are not uniquely delinquent. They are part of a Western pattern that rose, fell dramatically and has recently shown signs of modest reversal. The data that purport to show otherwise are built on definitional foundations too shaky to bear the weight of confident assertion. That is not a counsel of complacency. It is a demand for intellectual rigour, something which, in the discourse around youth crime, has rarely been in plentiful supply.

FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY OR PUBLIC ANONYMITY?

It was in Tokyo 1880 that the first conviction based on finger printing took place. In due course the technique spread and its development and implementation in the first years of the 20th century led to high profile convictions in UK in 1902. Around this time Scotland Yard had built massive data bases which revolutionised the conviction rates of police forces throughout the country.

It was 10 September 1984 at Leicester University that the world's first genetic fingerprint emerged. Since that Eureka moment DNA has revolutionised the science of criminology amongst many medical and other scientific innovations which have benefitted millions of people worldwide. However both these aids to police enforcement initially met with some scepticism as did the introduction of new techniques throughout history from the bow and arrow to the steam engine or spinning jenny.


Today it`s almost impossible for a week to go by without news of some controversy on the subject of police using facial recognition AI. As with the argument employed over a century ago enhanced crime solving is at the root of the argument for those charged with enforcing the law but finger printing was applied mainly to those whom police suspected were in some way connected to an offence however remotely or for the elimination of their involvement. Mass facial recognition can rapidly match suspects to CCTV footage, cold case evidence, or wanted databases cutting investigation times from weeks to hours. Socially, communities with high crime rates might welcome the tool but over time risk normalising pervasive surveillance as a permanent feature of public life. Proponents of facial recognition technology [FRT] argue the technology can flag known terrorists at airports, stadiums or large events before an attack occurs. FRT has been used to identify trafficking victims and missing children giving it a strong humanitarian framing. If this argument prevails it becomes politically toxic to oppose the technology outright forcing critics into a defensive posture. Socially it creates a permissive norm "if it saves children" that can be extended to far broader applications. The question is how far can or should the technology be extended.


There are classic arguments against the use or wider use of FRT. Perhaps the most persuasive is what effects does mass surveillance have on civil liberties. Even when accurate the knowledge that one's movements are tracked in public fundamentally alters behaviour. People might avoid protests, places of worship or political gatherings. Political success of this argument energises civil liberties coalitions across the left-right spectrum (libertarian conservatives and progressive liberals often unite here). Socially, if the argument fails, democracies quietly cross a threshold into infrastructures of control previously associated with authoritarian states with little prospect of reversal. Currently there is a lack of legal framework and accountability. In some jurisdictions police have deployed FRT with no specific legislation governing its use, data retention or oversight. In such a scenario the precedent is set that novel surveillance technologies can be adopted by executive agencies without democratic consent weakening legislative authority over policing.


There is the old adage; "Give the devil a finger and he will bite off your arm". In many cases the government is that devil. Technology introduced for serious crime quickly migrates to minor offences, immigration enforcement and political monitoring. The political repercussion of ignoring this argument is substantial: governments that promise limited use rarely deliver it and once infrastructure exists successive administrations inherit and expand it. Socially, this gradually redefines the relationship between citizen and state moving from presumption of innocence in public spaces to presumption of identifiability.


Studies have shown FRT systems have significantly higher error rates for darker-skinned faces and women, meaning black and minority communities face disproportionate risk of wrongful identification. If this argument gains political traction it can lead to legislative restrictions or outright bans (as occurred in several US cities).


Most FRT systems are built and maintained by private companies raising questions about who ultimately controls the data. Political success of this critique can lead to data sovereignty legislation and restrictions on private-sector involvement.


The core tension is fundamentally one of collective security -v- individual liberty; a perennial democratic dilemma. What makes FRT particularly consequential is its scalability: unlike a stop and search, it can surveil millions simultaneously, meaning the stakes of getting the policy wrong are unusually high in either direction. Facial recognition technology is being deployed on British streets by British police forces operating largely outside any statutory British framework. Parliament has not legislated; the courts have not settled the boundaries and the public has not consented. A technology capable of identifying every person in a public space demands primary legislation, not policy guidance. Government must decide: is anonymity in public a right, or merely a convenience it has the authority to withdraw? Do we want more or do we demand less?