King John placing his seal on Magna Carta 810 years ago is widely held to be a low point for the monarch and a boon for the rest of us. Now all those centuries later his work is about to be undone by none other than David Lammy who arrived in the House today to announce the partial abolition of trial by jury.
The Sage of Tottenham makes an unlikely tyrant; his air is of someone who should be losing control of a children’s birthday party somewhere. Yet John wasn’t exactly a man of steel either – though he at least had a sort of animal cunning. We have gone from Lackland to lackwit.
Lammy is easy to paint as a clown but today he achieved something which most of Britain’s more corrupt and tyrannical leaders could only dream of
The Justice Secretary began proceedings by assuming a sad and serious voice, the kind you might use to tell a small child their pet had died. ‘Victims face agonising delays’ he intoned. ‘Behind the statistics are real people.’ Lammy trotted out a series of stories designed to get the tear ducts working. Government by anecdote has become the norm in the House of late; now we have full on government by penny dreadful. It was immensely cynical. As with everything these people do, the creep of authoritarianism and the erosion of ancient liberties were dressed up in the language of #BeKind.
‘These reforms are bold,’ Lammy told us. He is someone for whom even basic tasks are presumably so challenging that they are always ‘bold’. Brazen might have been a more accurate adjective. Lammy is easy to paint as a clown but today he achieved something which most of Britain’s more corrupt and tyrannical leaders could only dream of. Indeed, a few MPs asked whether the measures would at least be temporary, lasting only until the backlogs were reduced. The Justice Secretary replied that, owing to smartphones and cyber-crime, the changes would be permanent.
Lammy announced the introduction of ‘swift courts’; a sort of fast food replacement for the courts of justice. There are of course some things you want done as quickly as possible – changing a nappy for instance. There are others that you do not. Open heart surgery, cooking a boeuf bourguignon and the deprivation of the liberty of one’s fellow citizens are just a few examples. Lammy assured the House that opposition to the bill was in fact just a series of ‘misconceptions’. These were quite widely-shared ones if they were – not much unites Richard Burgon, the Gaza Independents, Plaid Cymru and Robert Jenrick but somehow opposition to this did.
Jenrick listed a few of Lammy’s recent catastrophes: having only been in post a few months and he’s already managed to release a load of criminals and threaten the rule of law. ‘The Lammy Dodger’ he called him, which seems a little unfair on the biscuits. One is a dense, jammy feature of modern Britain, and the other is a strawberry-flavoured shortbread. ‘My ambition is to continue breaking records by the end of this parliament’. Lammy announced. I think we can be pretty sure he’s going to succeed in that aim. The session finished with a gold-standard Classic Lammy moment. After the Justice Secretary claimed that the victims’ commissioner supported his proposals, Kieran Mullen reminded the House in a point of order that the victims’ commissioner had in fact died two weeks ago.
Of course there were a few standard Labour dignity-phobes who supported Lammy. Barrister Cat Atkinson made a particularly fawning attempt at justifying the bill, again using the victims of violent crime as if they were just convenient bait to trot out to justify an erosion of rights.
Yet there was comfort in the midst of it all. The suspension of trial by jury is a pretty fail-safe guarantee of a panicked, cynical and collapsing regime. It is a textbook example of the increasingly desperate grasps for power by a ruling class which understands that people are finally turning against them. Still, good news for King John – we now have some candidates for the history books less competent and more despised than he.
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