Wantage may seem an unlikely birthplace for England’s greatest gift to the world. Yet as well as being the site of King Alfred’s birth, it gives its name to the legal code of the 990s, in which Aethelred the Unready laid down the right of an Englishman to be tried by a jury.
Fast forward a millennium or so and Lammy the Unavailable seems to be determined to smash that right. Robert Jenrick had asked an urgent question of The Sage of Tottenham, but Lammy couldn’t even be bothered to turn up. ‘Do we need to send out a search party to Savile Row?’ Jenrick asked, referencing a past excuse of Lammy’s. I suspect a local soft play might have been a better bet.
This might be the most Starmer government thing ever; overturning something enshrined in Magna Carta because a quango of lawyers told them to
Instead, the government had dispatched courts minister Sarah Sackman. Sackman is clearly of the ‘keep digging’ school of hole management. She came out swinging, saying that the whole thing was essential to clear the backlog.
Sackman kept on repeating that the Labour party were on the side of ‘modernisation’ as if that were a good thing and not that the entire recent history of that odious word has been synonymous with the trashing of anything worthwhile in Britain. Of course, this wasn’t even in the manifesto of the government but the result of an audit by Sir Brian Leveson. This might be the most Starmer government thing ever; overturning something enshrined in Magna Carta because a quango of lawyers told them to.
The House was not happy. Sir Edward Leigh made an exasperated plea to try and explain to the brick-wall-in-a-purple-jacket opposite the basics of why people might need jury trials. To no avail; more meaningless waffle from Sackman suggesting she neither knew nor cared about the foundational principles of the legal system. She conducted the whole thing with the interest of someone stuck in a lunchtime queue at Greggs.
Army veteran and MC recipient Lincoln Jopp asked why, if the minister believed that ‘justice delayed is justice denied’, she favoured legislation which could see elderly veterans being dragged through the courts decades after their military service. Sackman twitched, said ‘in relation to’ a lot (always a sign of a lawyer under pressure) and finally declared the NI Troubles bill to be ‘a fair piece of legislation’ which she ‘stood by’ – without saying why.
Both Richard Tice and Jeremy Corbyn made basically the same point – which shows you quite how broadly unpopular this idea is. Both pointed to investment rather than the demolition of ancient liberties as a preferable solution. Sackman just made patronising faces at them and said she agreed but there was a backlog to deal with, dontcha know. Grandee after grandee stood up and was simply patronised by the minister. Corbyn and Leigh between them, for all their differences, have been MPs for nearly 85 years. Sackman has been one for 18 months.
There were, of course, the usual legion of Bottom Crawlers armed with questions of a ‘does my Right Honourable friend agree with me’ variety. Jack Abbott, the Invertebrate for Ipswich, did the classic ‘isn’t everything the fault of the wicked, evil Tories?’ question. I would say that Mr Abbott should be ashamed of himself, but I suspect that that’s an emotional, possibly even a biological, impossibility.
Of course, the tragedy with this government and all its destructive idiocies – from the Chagos to Assisted Suicide – is that people like Abbott outnumber all the thinkers of any side, they outnumber even the members with a conscience. Lammy, Sir Keir and the rest have a pliable crowd of dunderheads who can be forced through a lobby to inflict untold damage on the country and wipe away a millennium of liberty with all the thought they’d give to picking their nose.
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