Lord Devlin, one of the greatest English judges of the last century, wrote:  Each jury is a little parliament.  The jury sense is the parliamentary sense.  I cannot see the one dying and the other surviving.  The first object of any tyranny in Whitehall would be to make Parliament utterly subservient to his will;  and the next to overthrow or diminish trial by jury, for no tyrant could afford to leave a subject’s freedom in the hands of twelve of his countrymen.  So that trial by jury is more than an instrument of justice and more than one wheel of the constitution:  it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.

In 1985 I wrote:  The concept of jury trial is under siege.  In recent times attacks have been made upon its efficiency by eminent people, and the present Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, would like to see the right to jury trial abolished in cases involving only small amounts of money and in complicated cases involving commercial frauds.  When, as a result of a recommendation from the James Committee, the government attempted recently to include a provision in a Criminal Justice Bill to limit trial by jury for what they termed “small” cases, a sufficiently large number of Members of Parliament were scandalised and the government was forced to withdraw it.  So they have tried a different tack.  At the end of 1983 they appointed a Committee to consider if juries were appropriate to consider the facts.  One of the chief aims must have been to get a recommendation to abolish jury trials in such cases.  It made sense, therefore, for the Lord Chancellor to appoint as its chairman Lord Roskill who had earlier in 1983 publicly voiced his opinion that trial by jury should be restricted.  Lord Hailsham, too, in his 1983 Hamlyn Lecture let his view be clearly heard:  “Personally, I would welcome an experiment on these lines limited … to the longer type of contested commercial fraud.”

… Lord Roskill restated his views in the guise of the Fraud Tribunals Committee Report and the government has pledged itself to introduce legislation during the next session to implement the Committee’s proposals.

Opposition was such that it did not take place.  But gradually politicians are chipping away at our liberties and we stand idly by and watch it happen.  It seems that governments, spurred on by the media, are more concerned with a scapegoat than with justice;  better to be seen to do something and risk an innocent person being convicted.   Incessantly we see attacks on our basic rights:  a suspected person no longer has the right to remain silent without risking an adverse inference;  bad character may be used by the prosecution to assist its case;  hearsay evidence may be adduced in criminal trials, and so it goes on.

Last week for the first time in hundreds of years, a judge sitting alone in a criminal trial convicted four men of serious criminal offences.  His verdicts may well have been right but it is the thin end of the wedge.  What next?  Any government, properly advised, can construct arguments in individual cases to support its oppressive measures.  This government has shown contempt for its people and for its laws.  If this is allowed to continue, how much longer will it be before someone expressing these views is locked up for daring to show dissent?   It may sound ludicrous now, but who a few years ago would have dreamed that in this country people could be convicted by a judge sitting without a jury and then face heavy sentences of imprisonment at the hands of the very same judge.

It seems that every day the lamp which showed that freedom lives grows progressively dimmer.