IN 1992, writing for Socialist Lawyer, the man who is now our Prime Minister made a powerful defence of one of the oldest rights in our constitution.

“The right to trial by jury is an important factor in the delicate balance between the power of the state and the freedom of the individual. The further it is restricted, the greater the imbalance.”

Three decades later, this government is flirting with tearing up that very safeguard. The Prime Minister’s words feel less like a principled statement and more like a painful reminder of how quickly convictions can evaporate once in office.

The current proposals to restrict jury trials amount to one of the most drastic rewrites of our justice system in living memory. Ministers themselves are reportedly preparing to resign, backbench rebellion is mounting, and we could see Downing Street bracing itself for yet another humiliating U-turn.

I’m urging the government to abandon this dangerous plan now — before irreparable damage is done to public confidence, to racial justice, and to the very foundations of democracy.

Trial by jury is not a technicality or an optional extra that can be dispensed with for administrative ease. It is a historic constitutional safeguard, embedded from Magna Carta to the present day, ensuring that the power of the state is balanced by the judgement of ordinary people.

Community participation in justice is one of the few protections we have against the concentration of power, and once it is eroded, it is exceptionally hard to restore.

The Bar Council, the Criminal Bar Association, the Law Society, circuit leaders and virtually every other criminal justice stakeholder have been united in their opposition to these proposals. They are unnecessary. They are unjust. And they would do nothing to resolve the crisis in our courts.

This reform would also deepen existing racial disparities — a reality the government cannot pretend not to know. The 2017 Lammy Review showed starkly that ethnic minority women were more likely to be convicted in magistrates’ courts compared to white women — highlighting that juries appeared to be the only part of the justice system consistently free from racial bias.

The 2022 Racial Bias and the Bench report revealed institutional racism within the judiciary, and we cannot ignore the fact that only 12 per cent of judges come from ethnic minority backgrounds.

In that context, removing juries for thousands of cases is not simply a procedural shift. It risks deepening disproportionality, further entrenching mistrust, and undermining the legitimacy of the entire justice system — particularly for communities who already experience unequal outcomes. At a time when trust needs rebuilding, these proposals take us in the opposite direction.

The government’s central argument for the scrapping of jury trials is that they are too slow, and that abolishing them for certain cases will somehow magic away the Crown Court backlog.

The claim collapses the moment you examine the evidence. A letter signed by 100 senior lawyers makes clear that removing juries would simply shift the backlog elsewhere, creating new court structures that would cost millions and solve nothing.

The real causes of the backlog are well known. They stem from years of sustained underfunding and neglect, coupled with the closure of courts, the decay of those that remain, and a legal aid system hollowed out to the point of dysfunction.

Ministers cut judicial sitting days for years, and the profession is still suffering from the failure to recruit and retain barristers after a decade of pay erosion and chronic underinvestment.

The backlog — now hitting 80,000 cases, with some trials in London listed as far away as 2030 — is a crisis of successive governments’ own making. Justice delayed is justice denied, but justice manipulated for political convenience is no justice at all.

It is worth remembering the warning issued — this time in 2020 — by the man who now serves as our Justice Secretary: “Dispensing with juries will damage our democracy.”

Those words were true then and they are true now.

The government must rediscover the principles it once claimed to champion, scrap these dangerous proposals, and invest instead in rebuilding a justice system that has been allowed to crumble for too long. To remove the right to trial by jury would be a catastrophic mistake.

For the communities I represent who already feel the weight of racial disparities in the justice system, this cannot be yet another policy the government stumbles into before reversing at the eleventh hour.

Ministers once defended juries as a shield against state overreach — they shouldn’t now be the ones swinging the axe. With the very real risk of a Reform government, removing checks and balances on state power could have devastating and far-reaching consequences.

It’s time the Prime Minister remembered his own words of wisdom, before he’s forced into yet another U-turn that everyone else saw coming.

Kim Johnson is Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside.