The British state has for centuries hated jury trial, which grew up here by accident and is a great obstacle to naked power. Without a jury, a criminal courtroom is just a chamber full of state employees, trying to work out how long the defendant should go to prison for.

With a jury, it is a place where the Crown has to prove you are guilty beyond reasonable doubt. If it can’t, you stay free.

This is why it is absolutely true that it is better that ten guilty men should go free than one innocent person should be cast into a prison cell. The jury puts strong limits on whose life can be destroyed by the authorities.

All states, I am sorry to say, yearn to be able to lock up people they don’t like. Politicians may force declarations of love for free speech between their teeth when they appear on TV, but they don’t really mean them, and in private they explode with vengeful rage when publicly criticised or thwarted.

Our state, which has its roots in the Middle Ages and savage one-sided courts such as Star Chamber and High Commission, is repressive at heart. But it can’t be an actual tyranny, because of the Jury. Every part of the justice process – from arrest to imprisonment – is transformed where there is an independent jury. Most countries do not have them.

The severe weakening of English juries in recent years, by allowing majority verdicts and getting rid of rules that ensured that jurors were experienced and mature people, have already hugely increased the danger of the accused being wrongly convicted. Why do you think there are now so many serious miscarriages of justice?

Jury trial is a much more reliable limit on government than democratic elections, which can be, and are, quite easily manipulated to get the result the elite want. This is why there have been so many recent ‘reports’ or ‘commissions’ that trot out weak, miserable arguments for getting rid of jury trial, or restricting it so that most people do not benefit from it.

In 1963, Home Secretary Henry Brooke set up Lord Morris’s ‘Committee on Jury Service’, which ended the old property qualification – which was reasonable – but put nothing in its place, which was not reasonable. Since 1974, 18-year-olds who know nothing of the world can sit on a jury and ruin your life for you.

The jury puts strong limits on whose life can be destroyed by the authorities as its members have to have guilt proven beyond reasonable doubt, writes Peter Hitchens

Though, in 1922, Lord Justice Hewart had ruled that unanimous verdicts were vital, Home Secretary Roy Jenkins claimed in 1967 that majority verdicts would overcome an alleged problem of ‘jury-nobbling’ for which there was little evidence. And he got his way, despite strong opposition from experienced legal figures such as the great judge Lord Denning.

In 1986, the Roskill Committee recommended creating special tribunals with a judge and two expert lay members for the most complex fraud cases. In 1999, the Criminal Justice (Mode of Trial) Bill tried and failed to limit a defendant’s right to choose a jury trial.

In 2001 the Auld Review proposed (much like Sir Brian Leveson) creating an ‘intermediate court’ with a judge and two magistrates to handle less serious Crown Court cases, effectively removing jury trials for some offences. It was wisely rejected. The Ministry of Justice has since then held at least three studies and evaluations, not to mention the Leveson report.

Resist these arguments, especially the latest one from Sir Brian, which is already getting quite a lot of positive coverage. The key point here is that powerful people want to get rid of juries, and they are, rather cheekily, using them as a scapegoat for problems in a justice system that have a completely different cause.

You may think that this is about more efficiently putting criminals in prison. It isn’t. Our police and prosecutors are useless at preventing crime, detecting it, catching the culprits or convicting them. I doubt whether it has ever been easier, in modern times, to be a professional criminal and live undisturbed by the law.

Proper crime figures are no longer kept. This is partly because there is now so much crime. Take shoplifting, vandalism or the possession of illegal drugs. Do you think the police have any idea how often these crimes are committed? Do you think they even care? The statistics are meaningless partly because there is so much crime, partly because its victims, mostly poor and weak, have no hope of being helped or rescued by the law.

Instead, we have to rely on a yearly ‘Crime Survey’, which is basically an opinion poll, and on those records that the police from time to time bother to keep.

As has been thoroughly proved, they are very good at reducing the numbers of recorded crimes when politically necessary – i.e. when governments want lower crime figures. When the police are trying to get more money, and the party in power is keen to oblige, police and state might co-operate to give the impression that crime is rising.

When the government of the day is anxious to show that its ‘crackdowns’ are working, then the figures will be massaged to show that crime is falling.

In the UK, juries consist of 12 people chosen randomly from the electoral register

A rare beam of bright light was briefly shone on this dark underside of official figures at a meeting of Parliament’s Public Administration Committee back in November 2013. This heard credible evidence that crime figures were routinely massaged by police trying to show that they are making the streets safer. Police were accused of downgrading crimes to less serious offences and even erasing them altogether by labelling them as accidents or errors.

If crime is out of control, it is because the police are not controlling it. If the courts are overwhelmed, it is because dozens of them have been foolishly closed. The House of Commons Library discovered in 2019 that the Government had closed half the magistrates’ courts in England and Wales (162 out of 323) in the previous ten years. As for Crown Courts, 8 out of 92 of them have been shut in the same ‘efficiency’ drive. It is ridiculous and wicked to respond to weak policing and closed courts by making it easier to convict the innocent.

No doubt a lot of this pruning of courts was done on the back of ‘restorative justice’ and other ‘out-of-court disposals’, by which the English justice system endlessly seeks to persuade victims of crime to make informal deals with those who have offended against them.

Well, this may keep them out of court, but it does not cut crime. Criminal types notice these soft techniques, along with automatically reduced sentences, early release, tagging and the general absence of the police from the streets. They deduce correctly from them that they now have an even bigger chance of getting away with their misdeeds.

To blame the resulting mess on juries is perverse and absurd, and an insult to their intelligence. Far from further weakening jury trial, we need to ban dangerous majority verdicts, found in many miscarriages of justice, and at the very least have a higher minimum age for jurors than 18. Perhaps 30.

Defend and strengthen the jury. It may one day stand between you and a miserable life behind bars.