Juries are an archaic and inefficient feature of Britain’s collapsing justice system. They survive only in some English-speaking countries as quaint relics of medieval jurisprudence. They deserve dispatch to the world of ducking, flogging, drawing and quartering.
That’s Sir Simon Jenkins. So, now we know what te wrong answer is we can proceed, right?
Sir Simon better convert to Islam in a few years then…
Maybe, maybe not…
But I know for a fact that the dutch system doesn’t really believe in the actual usefulness of a prison sentence, other than taking people out of circulation for a bit.
Our system is meant to hit people where it hurts: The Wallet through fines, compensation/impoundment, and court costs.
And good-oldfashioned indentured labour , sorry “community service”. In public.
We tried that community service but I guess we just did our usual golden plated bureaucraticisation and made it too expensive to implement because we don’t hear much about it nowadays.
As for jailing too many people, change the law and/or sentencing guidelines. Throwing people in jail for not paying the BBC tax or sending hurty tweets might be a good place to start
The problem with community service is likely that anything these guys (and it’s mostly men) can do in public isn’t worth more than the cost of ensuring that they do it and they don’t escape.
So there’s no “restitution” involved, they don’t learn new skills that are worth anything after they serve their sentence, and people see them and get indignant about how the poor lambs are mistreated.
If they’re released with a promise to do that community service instead, I think that most of them never will do anything. And as above, if they do it will be things like being a greeter at the thrift shop (can’t put them on the till), i.e. something that doesn’t really need to be done.
The idea was that it was in place of prison with time spent at weekends and evenings to make up the allotted time. Someone had to decide on what work and than ensure it was supervised, which is where the problems start.
A “woke” version of being put in the stocks
He’s making the mistake of assuming that everyone in prison is a Briton.
Yes… Pretty hard, since actual Britons went extinct/got “integrated” somewhere around… 2500-ish years ago…
ducking, flogging, drawing and quartering
He makes them sound like bad things.
Not so much with ducking and flogging, but here’s a lot of work involved in drawing and quartering. How much simpler to hang people from construction cranes, behead them, burn them or throw them off the tops of buildings, as is done in more advanced non-English speaking countries devoid of medieval jurisprudence.
F*ck me. We are on our way to the “cartridge box” end of the four box progression…
UK is in early collapse in the prosperity-decadence-collapse cycle. As your economy declines, things will have to go, because you simply cannot afford them anymore. Perhaps juries will be viewed as decadent extravagance. As you decline, the choices made on what has to go will be made by people you have no control – or even influence – over. The decadent are in charge. Their foolishness that has brought you to collapse will continue in their choices as you decline.
Y’all have a nice day!
Alas, you are probably right. But after your next presidential election will you chaps be able to avoid a similar fate, given that you will be ruled by “liberals”? Seen today:
“As the great Joe Sobran used to say, “In their mating and migratory habits, liberals are indistinguishable from members of the Ku Klux Klan.” He also used to say: “The purpose of a college education is to give you the right attitudes towards minorities, and the means to live as far away from them as possible.””
If you are ruled by such scum for how long can you flourish?
The rift between Americans and Democrats is extreme. America haters, with the press and institutions on their side, could win.
Eternal vigilance required.
The Tree of Liberty is hongry, Seymour
the prosperity-decadence-collapse cycle
Total bullshit, unless you think indoor plumbing and central heating is “decadence”, as Ed Miliband does.
My grandparents raised their first children in a single room “house” with an outdoor toilet shared with the neighbours. Stomach bugs must have been fun.
I grew up in the comparative “prosperity” in a council flat on the kind of housing estate they always used to be driving to on The Bill. We couldn’t afford electricity, so the power card meter was always clicking off and we were sold to the experiments.
The vast majority of Britons have never lived in decadence, they get up at 6 am to get a bus to go to their shitty, poorly paid jobs, go home to their cramped, expensive houses, and still get arse raped with taxes. Our current troubles have nothing to do with too much wealth. Wealth is a solution and not a problem.
Wealth causes its own problems. It enables people to afford luxury beliefs. Peace also causes problems; it enables people to forget whey sometimes men must fight.
Decadence follows. Gamecock is right. There’s a cycle. Next for us: the caliphate.
BTW, one of the luxury beliefs is that of camel-riders and Pakistani peasants thinking they can continue to enjoy Western things like phones, food and healthcare whilst striving to return to the Middle Ages. Allah will not look kindly on them for this.
Hard disagree, North-man. This is an ancient moan, that “kids these days” have it too easy and “it wasn’t like that in my day”, and “real men” were happy to live in a damp shoebox in the middle of t’road. Lazy thinking. Echoes of puritanism?
There’s 99 ways societies can go rotten, but having more stuff ain’t one.
I’ve been poor and I’ve been well off, let me tell you – being poor is absolutely shite. Luxury belief – i.e. memetic pathogens – don’t require affluence to propagate. The most dangerous luxury beliefs of the 20th century arose from poverty instead, and led to the bloodsoaked tyranny of Communism.
You’ve got the brains, I’ve got the looks. Let’s make lots of money.
No they didn’t. They arose from Hegel, Marx and Engels, solidly middle-class all. That Marx spent most of his life as a poor sponger was a consequence of his total dipshittery.
Not Hegel. He is one of the greatest conservative philosophers.
Hegal? Like all philosophers ,he should have been dealt with with some firewood & a match. Like economists..
Shit! I left out priests…
My dude, you have to look at the other side of the coin: there were seething, writhing masses, willing to do bad things to their existing regimes. Specially in backwards countries like Russia, where serfdom persisted into modern times. But also in Britain and Western Europe. Ever see the Red Army choir and their soothing Slavic baritone rendition of “I owe my soul to the company store?”.
It do be like that, Mr Stancil.
Let us not romanticise the progress of technological capitalism. “Chav scum ye are, and chav scum ye shall remain” has been English aristocratic policy towards its own peasant and soldier stock since they murdered the hero Wat Tyler. Plus, weird Kraut philosophe-rapper Knee-Ché metaphysically unaliving Divinity had consequences and one of those was the religion of Science. Well, Marxism was a Science. A very attractive and complex word game that’s irresistible to impressionable but bright minds.
The commies had a lot of material to work with is what I’m saying. It’s mainly thanks to 1920’s and 30’s fascists, royalists and nationalists that the whole of Europe wasn’t devoured by Marxism. But do we ever thank Caudillo Franco? No, we only think of ourselves.
The worst, most soul rotting thing about poverty is the humiliation. Can’t afford a ting on TV. No car, only bus. Always the arsehole who can’t buy a round. Scrounging for a kettle in a pawn shop. Buying the cheapest shit from Iceland with coins. Breeds resentment and voting for Labour. Saint Margaret, pray for us!
She remembered that money inside a man’s pocket had the power to turn to confidence inside his mind
Steve, this is an economics blog, and the first law is that everything is a trade-off. Everything. So wealth, and peace, involve trade-offs. I merely point out some of them. There are others.
That said, as BiSD and dearieme point out, the history of most revolutions and all of socialism is of the “educated” middle-class hating their position in life and using sentimentality for the poor to disguise their entirely selfish grab for money and power.
Why are there so many rich Marxists? Why has Labour spurned working-class gammon in favour of the “educated” metropolitan middle-class? Why are all those blue-haired XR trannies/feminists called Jocasta, rather than Sharon or Tracy?
+1000
I’m with Norman on this one.
Communism, political correctness, support for mass third-world immigration, all the other things undermining western civilisation – none of them came from the working class, they all came from the newly-wealthy middle classes, using the working class to gain power for themselves.
Once they start getting a bit of money and status as some sort of middle-class professional, they realise that they aren’t as high up the tree as it looked from the bottom, that other people have much more money and social status than them, and they hate that because it’s taken them so much effort to find that they’ve only climbed into the lower branches.
Same with anti-colonialism, always the native middle class who kicked out the British Empire, so that they could grab that power and status for themselves.
“they all came from the newly-wealthy middle classes”
If you look at who fomented the French Revolution it was people like provincial lawyers and defrocked priests who were disappointed by their lot in life. They thought they deserved better.
Here’s an interesting analysis of the current USA and a comparison with the Finnish Revolution.
https://www.profstonge.com/p/college-grads-turning-into-communists
Norman – Steve, this is an economics blog, and the first law is that everything is a trade-off. Everything.
No, no, no. The first law of economics is that man’s wants are unlimited.
So no, everything is not a trade off. Because, not everything is a zero sum game, no? Economic growth teaches us that. It’s rather charmingly Calvinist to assume “aye, but we’ll pay for it.”
the history of most revolutions and all of socialism is of the “educated” middle-class hating their position in life and using sentimentality for the poor to disguise their entirely selfish grab for money and power.
For sure so let’s eliminate the poor. Enrichify the bastards so they can’t be used as lumpenvotenfodder by the bad guys. The Guardian reading twat class, by itself, isn’t big enough to win elections. If not having to work in a coal mine and owning a house and a car and a pension is “decadence”, we need more of that, Sheridan.
And Steve, when you look at our lords & masters – not just the evil politicians but the whole lanyard-wearing class – how can you object to using “decadent” to describe them?
BiSD – because I think you’re misdiagnosing a crisis of wealth where the Reverend Doctor Steve says “everybody lies”, and our sociointellectual rot stems in fact from a spiritual and moral, not physical, crisis. Although the one presentiments t’other. For one thing, as a society we accepted pretty lies for too long. Look on the unravelling sociomedical scandal of “transgender” as a vignette. Money didn’t make people want to castrate teenagers.
I sometimes play role-playing games. There was a book of various parallel universes that the referee could use as settings.
For instance there was one where the American revolution never happened.
The one that I remember was where Islam had taken over. The author had the delusion that this would actually have resulted in more high technology than our own. And this was by someone who was normally careful to get the numbers right!
I can only blame our education system, and the author had taken the “Andalusian” delusion and extrapolated from that.
It’s the myth of Islamic learning. Heads on coins stuff. Islam took over the remains of the Roman empire. Which meant the Roman civilisation continued under new bosses. The learning was with the people, not the camel jockeys. Europe could have been the same if it hadn’t been ripped apart by factional disputes.
It’s the myth of Islamic learning…Islam took over the remains of the Roman empire…The learning was with the people, not the camel jockeys.
It’s not a myth. The caliphates heavily subsidised scholarship, translations and research. Greek learning reached medieval Europe via Latin translations of the Arabic translations of the original Greek texts. Moreover, the “camel jockeys” made significant advances in algebra, calculus, trigonometry, statistics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry….And they introduced paper (a chinese invention) to Europe as well as crops like rice…
They gave us zero.
/applause!
Theo, why did the learning and education stop around 1000 years ago?
Because islam decreed that everything was explained by the koran and there was no need for men to try to figure things out because it was all “inshah allah”.
There is no more backward ideology / totalitarian belief system (it’s not a religion) than islam.
p.s the number zero is of Indian origin (not the red sort obvs).
“Learning and education” did not “stop around 1000 years ago”. That’s a bizarre claim.
From c.800ad-1250ad, the Islamic world was more advanced than Christendom, even though Islam was and remains a vile totalitarian belief system.
Our word zero derives from the Arabic Sifr which is a translation of the Sanskrit word śūnya. Islam brought the term though not the concept to Europe. (Ptolemy used the concept of zero c.150ad. IIRC.)
Early Islam doesn’t seem to have been quite as absolutist as many of today’s varieties. Omar Khayyam’s (OK a Shi’a) most famous verse was about wine drinking, which would have got him into serious trouble in many Islamic countries today. (Some Islamic scholars argued that only distilled drink was haram.)
“nothing more serious than grievous bodily harm” – so not *quite* murder is trivial in the opinion of the Grauniad columnist.
Juries are an archaic and inefficient feature of Britain’s collapsing justice system. They survive only in some English-speaking countries as quaint relics of medieval jurisprudence
– man who claims to be a knight
The quality of Sir Simon’s argument is dire. Yes, years of mismanagement, alleged underfunding and the crippling Covid backlog, have left the court system on the verge of collapse. But cutting jury trials would achieve only minimal savings: 2023-4 spending on jury costs was a mere £36 million, a fraction of the total court budget of £2.5 billion. And the relatively high rate of imprisonment in the UK compared to other jurisdictions is irrelevant to the cutting of jury trials.
Moreover, who would prefer to be tried by a potentially politicised and politically correct judge (or tribunal) rather than a “little Parliament” [Lord Devlin, pbuh] of 12 of your peers?
Potentiallyprobably. FIFY.The prosecutors and the judge both get paid by the state. How could that be unfair?
I suspect the relatively high rate of imprisonment in the UK compared to other jurisdictions is because juries are more likely to convict people who are then jailed (because judges have to follow guidelines which say ‘jail them’), whereas in many other systems judges and magistrates are cut from the same bien pensant cloth as our own judiciary and pick and choose who they want to find guilty.
Conversely as per my comment above juries do act as a bulwark against the wanker state run wild. Without them Sir Two Tier would be able to instruct his employees whom to jail and whom to free.
I suspect the relatively high rate of imprisonment in the UK compared to other jurisdictions is because juries are more likely to convict people who are then jailed.
Hard to say, Interested. AFAIK, there’s little empirical data directly comparing conviction and/or imprisonment rates for the exact same type of case and circumstances across jury and non-jury systems.
Data for England and Wales shows a 71% conviction rate in magistrates’ courts versus 56% in the Crown Court, but then Crown Courts deal with more serious offences for which imprisonment is more likely. However, one U.S. study found that while the conviction rate for juries was 84%, the rate for judge-alone trials was 55%…
if we get away with juries then we don’t need prosecution and defence, just present the facts to the judge.
of course the CPS wouldn’t bring a case unless there was enough evidence so we could cut the last strip and have the CPS convict.
The rozzers wouldn’t arrest someone unless they thought they were guilty so we could cut out the CPS step too.
Judge Dredd here we come!
Consider two recent cases.
Lucy Connolly – says something obviously not criminal about asylum seeker hotels – ‘set fire to them all, for all I care’ – but is advised by her state-funded ‘defence’ lawyer to plead guilty to some bullshit ‘hate crime’, having been held on remand for an absurd period of time by the state, despite having a disabled husband and a young daughter, and believing that the state-employed judge will look kindly on her guilty plea. Sent to prison for 31 months.
Note btw: the state-backed BBC lies in this report about the case, when it says she ‘called for people to “set fire” to hotels housing asylum seekers in the wake of the Southport attack in July 2024’, when as above she did no such thing. It’s a long piece, that BBC piece, but they seem to have run out of pixels before they could accurately report what she said.
Mark Heath, who was charged with publishing “threatening, abusive or insulting” posts on X with the intent to stir up racial hatred, under the Public Order Act 1986.
He pleaded not guilty, stating his posts were “strong opinions” and “did not encourage violence” or were intended to stir up hatred. He told the court he viewed X as a “safe space” for freedom of speech.
The state held him on remand, presumably to break his spirit, but he stuck to his guns, and was found not guilty.
By a jury.
What would a state-funded judge have decided, I wonder?
Don’t forget Ricky Jones, caught on camera explicitly calling for members of a free palestine march to slit the throats of ‘facists’. Pleads not guilty, gets let off.
Would that be labour councillor Ricky Jones?