Activist judges: the real threat to English liberty

A response to 'The Obsolesence of the Jury'

This article is a response to ‘The Obsolesence of the Jury’ (February 2026).

The following is a respectful reply to an excellent article written by an anonymous contributor earlier this month. The argument of that article was that the jury system grew up in the context of a homogenous, monoracial society, and that as we transform (for better or worse) into a multiracial, multiethnic society, the jury system will become increasingly ineffective. The author, therefore, concluded that we should not dismiss out of hand the Lord Chancellor’s recent proposal for the curtailment of trial by jury.

The article was particularly prescient, as the day of its publication coincided with the acquittal by a Woolwich jury of six defendants associated with the now-proscribed group ‘Palestine Action’. These individuals were filmed (indeed, much of the footage used at their trial they filmed themselves) driving a van through the door of a factory in Bristol in order to gain access to the premises; having done so, they proceeded to destroy expensive pieces of engineering equipment with sledgehammers they had brought along for the purpose. When the police arrived and attempted to arrest these ‘activists’ (as doubtless they would prefer to be called), one of them, an autistic Oxford mathematics graduate (if that is not a tautology) named Samuel Corner, struck a woman police sergeant named Evans in the base of her spine, fracturing one of her lumbar vertebrae. This was caught on camera, and Corner did not deny striking her. Rather, he (or perhaps she or they) claimed he was defending his fellow sledgehammerers from the impertinent attentions of the peelers. Corner was charged with causing grievous bodily harm. He and the other five were also charged with aggravated burglary and criminal damage.

The actions of the six were said to be connected with a ‘genocide’ that one group of Levantines were alleged to be perpetrating against another group of Levantines in another country some 3,000 miles away. The factory was the UK subsidiary of an arms company registered in one of the combatant nations, but it was exclusively concerned in the manufacture of arms for the British military (it has now shut down as a result of this visit by the Smashing Six). The actions of the six were said to be in some way designed to prevent deaths in this intra-Levantine bloodletting — albeit the mechanics of how this might have worked do not appear to have been explained.

The six were acquitted unanimously by the jury of the aggravated Burglary charges. The jury was hung on the criminal damage charges and on the GBH charge against Corner. This is to say they could not reach unanimity on an acquittal, nor could they reach the threshold required for a majority verdict. The Crown Prosecution Service has now successfully sought a retrial on the criminal damage and violence charges.

On the face of it, the failure of this jury to convict these people for being caught red-handed in the commission of serious crimes for which they offered no defence beyond a sixth-former’s rant on geopolitics is an alarming indictment on the continuing viability of the jury system. Nonetheless, this article pleads that we should not be too quick to dispense with the institution.

Last week’s article provided a succinct but erudite history of the jury system that the author will not substantially add to. Whilst the reader is encouraged to read the previous article, for present purposes let us recapitulate that, as the prior article set out, there is a good deal of evidence that members of racial and confessional minorities tend to vote in juries along racial and confessional lines. The author does not demur from this; however, it is important to keep in mind that since the sixties, it has been possible for juries to return what is known as ‘majority verdicts’. Like apostles, or the members of a Canadian rules football team, juries sit as panels of 12 (albeit in some circumstances, such as when a juror browses Rightmove during a rape trial, up to three jurors may be discharged before the jury is discharged and the case becomes a mistrial). In an intact panel of 12 jurors, if 10 jurors agree on a conviction, and two do not, then the judge may allow a majority verdict in favour of conviction. This means in practice that the blocking minority required to prevent a conviction is three jurors, or 25%.

The last census (performed in 2021) found 6.5% of the British public to be adherents of the Religion of Peace. If one assumes (not unreasonably) that Muslims will generally vote to acquit their co-religionists, then nonetheless, they do not quite yet enjoy the blocking minority required to make crime legal for the Ummah. That said: Muslims are not evenly distributed throughout the country, and in some jury service regions, Muslims may be very close to, or perhaps may even have exceeded, the blocking minority threshold. In such demographic circumstances, it may only require the presence of one loony non-Muslim juror to block a conviction.

Yet there is, as of 2026, little evidence to suggest that Muslims are given a free hand to commit crime by jurors. When grooming gang perpetrators are brought to trial, they are generally convicted. Barely a week seems to go by in which one of our heroic Afghan interpreters is not sent down for some fresh outrage. This may falsify the notion that Muslims enjoy local blocking minorities, or indeed that Muslims on juries vote exclusively along confessional lines. Furthermore, even if a conviction can be ‘blocked’, the jury will be ‘hung’, and the prosecution will be entitled to seek a retrial. That said, our Muslim minority is growing, and if their emerging voting behaviour is anything to go by, they see themselves as a nation apart from the mainstream, which poses an obvious threat to the institution of jury trials. But for now at least, it seems that a far bigger problem than juries blocking the conviction of obviously guilty criminals is the failure of the justice system to bring obviously guilty criminals to trial in the first place, and the extremely lenient sentencing of many of those who are eventually convicted — neither of which can be attributed to jurors, diverse or not.

Now, let us look at the alternative to jury trials. In jury trials, the jurors are the arbiters of fact, and the judge is merely concerned with refereeing the conduct of the trial and, if the jury convicts, decides punishment. With juries eliminated, it logically follows that a judge (or a panel of judges) would be the arbiter of fact.

How are judges likely to perform in this role? The best evidence of this is their approach to sentencing. Excessively lenient sentencing, as mentioned above, is one of the biggest problems in the British justice system today. This article could take pains to adduce sentencing decisions made by judges, where on the one hand serious sexual offenders are given lenient custodial or even suspended sentences, whereas those who engage in rough protest or intemperate speech against government policy are treated like the defeated of Sedgemoor. However, if the author were to do so, a haunted porcelain rabbit would limp up to explain that it was all the will of the Sentencing Council, whose prophecy was recorded on tablets known as the Sentencing Guidelines.

But readers will know roughly what happened in the aftermath of the rioting of the summer of 2024, which followed the murder of three toddlers at the hands of a young Welsh chorister named Rudakubana. Whilst many engaged in violent riot, which caused damage to property and injury to police officers, some were arrested for offences falling well short of violence, and nonetheless had the book thrown at them. Two drunken homosexuals returning home from a bingo hall, who stumbled upon riotous protests in Hartlepool, were arrested after taunting and swearing at the police and egging on the crowd. They were denied bail and pleaded guilty. Under the beak of His Honour Judge Laird, KC, they were shown no mercy and given sentences of 26 months apiece. The case of Lucy Connolly is well known. A ‘Live Laugh Love’ childminder, of tragic personal history, tweeted her indifference to the immolation of hotel-dwelling migrants and politicians, deleted the same three hours later, and was arrested. She pleaded not guilty, was denied bail — a truly puzzling decision — and then changed her plea to guilty in a bid for earlier release and was given 32 months for her trouble.

Of those who pleaded innocent and maintained their plea (thereby getting before a jury) the author understands that none were convicted.

All of this is to say that whilst the jury system creates the possibility of the larger religious and ethnic minorities from gaining a blocking minority over convictions for their co-religionists or co-ethnics, the jury system also protects the majority from oppression at the hands of an increasingly politicised and bloodthirsty judiciary.

This article therefore rests its case on the following thought: Whilst the growth of religious and ethnic minorities who see themselves as apart from the national mainstream may augur problems for the jury system now and increasingly in the future, until the Right has regained power and decisively addressed the politicisation of the judiciary, why on earth would we want to hand this extraordinary power over our very freedom to judges?

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This article was written by Dogbox, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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