The Judge RANTS!
Date: 19/02/26
Juries: Still Out?
Let me run this past you and see if you find it chiming with certain contemporary events:
A group of activists...well...act. As their philosophy runs utterly counter to official State policy and habit, their actions - which harm no persons beyond occasionally inconveniencing or embarrassing some of them - come under scrutiny from the forces of the State; not merely the standard cops but the echelons of the misnomered 'intelligence' services.
In due course, five such activists are arrested and charged. The charge is 'conspiracy', which is a comparatively easy one to 'prove' since you don't need any actual evidence, merely innuendo.
The five are then dragged before a sequence of minor members of the State judiciary who - believing without question whatever the bizzies tell them about the 'bad'uns' up before them - consistently deny bail. The five are therefore imprisoned without trial for several months.
While they are locked up with little or no communication permitted with the outside world, the forces of the State and their ever-compliant media spread rumours, gossip and outright deliberate falsehoods about the five, creating the impression in the minds of the public (or, at least, in the crania of that substantial section of it which still trusts television news and the papers to tell them something approaching the truth) that the five were about to embark on a campaign of bombing and suchlike revolutionary recreations.
Finally, after many months, the five get their time in court. After a ten-week trial during which the jury hears about the continual abuse of power and process by the police - the 'confessions' which the police claim to have obtained (almost entirely verbally and under considerable duress), the generally intimidating conduct of the Plod, and other such officially approved-of methods - the jury cleared four of the five defendants of all the charges against them (convicting one on one charge on the basis of evidence provided by the defendant himself).
In a statement issued after the trial concluded, the cleared defendants made a number of comments about the ways in which their rights - including the rights to non-violent political activity and speech - had been totally disregarded. They also made the point that the jury had refused to believe the testimony provided to them from senior officers from no fewer than four police forces.
Included in their statement was the following:
"Had we been tried in Northern Ireland, all of us would undoubtedly been found guilty in a non-jury Diplock Court. As it was, we had the protection of trial by jury. Even then, considering how enormous are the powers and resources of the State, justice is not certain. We were fortunate to have twelve courageous and independent-minded people to weigh up the 'evidence' against us.
"But there are moves afoot to abolish trial by jury in at least some cases in Britain. Indeed, during our trial a Lord Justice in the Appeal Court delivered a speech in Cardiff in which he dwelt upon the alleged 'burdens', 'inadequacies' and even 'injustices' of the jury system."
Now, one or two references and phrases in that quote might give the game away, so I'll explain:
As you may well have realised, this is not a report from the ongoing disgrace of the Ukanian State's victimisation of campaigners against the Zionist Genocide in Palestine (and the London régime's active participation in it), which has so far seen the campaigners unilaterally re-designated as 'terrorists', imprisoned without trial for hyper-extended periods of time and in near-torturous conditions, and the insistence of the State that convictions must be obtained by fair means or foul, even to Secretary of State for 'Justice' 'Shabby' Mahmood demanding re-trials of people who have not been convicted, hoping no doubt to find another jury more amenable to being bullshat into so very convenient a conclusion.
(And isn't it a fine example of how well-integrated a society we have become that Mahmood - like her consœurs Patel and Braverman before her - has proven that women from ethnic minority backgrounds can be at least at unprincipled, at least as vacuous and at least as vindictive as any white male? What a triumph for equality!)
No, the material here refers to a trial which took place in Caerdydd in 1983, in which five members of the Welsh Socialist Republican Movement (WSRM) were tried on charges of conspiracy to commit explosions.
I found the report - from the Winter 1983/4 issue of Y Faner Goch ('The Red Flag'), the paper of the WSRM - whilst I was decluttering a cupboard in the back bedroom (more on this painfully purgative exercise some other time). I remember those days, when to be a republican (or even just a vanilla-flavoured nationalist) was to place yourself in the cross-hairs of nakedly politicised policing, establishment harassment and media calumny. It was a time of ferment, and even being on the fringes of it was exciting (with my customary timidity, the nearest I got to the dirty end of it was nearly getting arrested in Abertawe at a demonstration against Prince Big-Ears and Princess Brood-Mare in October 1981).
(The Ukanian State ultimately got what it wanted in this instance, however; under the torrent of official harassment and obloquy, the WSRM disbanded shortly after the conclusion of the trial).
All this is to show that - in the same way that the policing and snooping practices in occupied Ireland later filtered through to this side of the water - the current lawfare against dissent - not merely anti-genocide activists but climate-change campaigners and other 'dangerous radicals' - has its antecedents in the tactics employed in England's colonies in previous times.
And the point made in the quotation above is even more relevant today than it was then. The notorious Diplock Courts of north-eastern Ireland are to be replicated with gusto on the 'mainland' today, with David Lammy - one of the most vacuous members of a Cabinet full of such ethical voids - pushing hard for the removal of the right to trial by jury from almost everyone (and I wonder - given his claim that his policy is informed by his 'Christian faith' - where exactly in the New Testament it says that you should stamp ever harder on the vulnerable and those deemed least able to fight back). His claim that this has to be done to clear the backlog of cases before the courts is, of course, utterly bogus; the piling up of cases is solely because of deliberate under-resourcing of the court system during the entire Age of Austerity since 2010.
The true reason for further curtailing the protections of the consumer-citizen is that juries - comprising as they tend to do a worryingly large proportion of people capable of thinking for themselves - are a terrible inconvenience for those with power, in line with the observation that those who have near-total power are always obsessed with those comparatively small areas over which they do not have absolute control. The stated rationale may be 'efficiency' or some such managerial manure, but the true reason is to further weaken the accountability of power.
This is true several orders of magnitude more whenever the political and ideological assumptions of the power users and abusers are challenged by the more unruly elements of the consumer-citizenry, such as in the cases I have referred to here. And, even if the State can't get convictions, it can make the process itself the punishment by forcing people to endure the equivalent of a two, three or even four-year prison sentence before they even get a trial, and destroy them that way instead, no jury required.
And if you are willing to sit still for this - or even cheer it on - because you think that it will never affect you, and that you disapprove of the people it is being done to, then consider; by allowing this to happen to others, you make it hugely more likely that it will be done in due course to people you agree with, people you know, people like you. If the fundamental right to fairness is removed from one group, however unpopular they may be, then your own such right is inevitably weakened, especially in a legal system which is based substantially on precedent.
In a time of political arrogance, corporate corruption and media complicity with power, juries - perhaps now more than ever - are our last protection against State over-reach. 'Inefficiency' is no justification for removing that protection, which is why we must not allow any further curtailing of our defences against tyranny. Justice is not supposed to be 'efficient'; if it is to mean anything at all, it is expected to be just, and anything which vitiates that must be resisted with all the means at our disposal.
And I'll stand in the dock and proclaim that any time you like, Shabby.
