Jurors are temporary actors in a judicial system designed to protect property and profit. At the same time, they are admitted into that system in a role that accords them real powers as well as access to privileged information that exposes the workings not just of the British state’s legal apparatus but also of the world it serves.

It could be argued that someone doing jury service in the UK briefly wields more public or civic power than they are likely to do at any other time in their life. For the duration of the service, they have the authority, shared with 11 others, to decide the outcome of a criminal trial, possibly a number of different trials if they are short enough. Some cases can involve directly the interests of government, of corporations and of wealthy people who stand to lose a lot if things go against them. Juries may reach decisions that reinforce reactionary and repressive laws, but they can also use the powers of the state temporarily invested in them to make decisions in the interests of ordinary people, and it is this second possibility that has made juries the subject of countless government reviews, reports and laws over the last two centuries and the last fifty years in particular.

The idea of the right to trial by one’s peers or equals has been traced back as far as Magna Carta (1215); some argue juries have their origins earlier still in the Saxon period.1 But jury trial as a contemporary juror might recognise it was first defined by the 1825 Juries Act, which codified the previously complicated and sometimes surprisingly informal arrangements. It stipulated that in order to serve on a jury you would have to be a property-owning man between the ages of 21 and 65, entitled to be addressed as ‘Esquire’. This broadened the jury pool to include the growing class of bankers and merchants. There were further Juries Acts in 1862 and 1870 - the first sequence of many anxious tinkerings, leading up to the proposals of the Leveson Report of July 2025.

The specific form of the contemporary jury dates from 1974, when the requirement that a juror had to own property was removed. In 1970, 20% of people in the UK rented privately and a further 29% lived in council housing, meaning that up to that point, the working class had been effectively excluded from jury service. Women had theoretically been included in the jury pool since 1918 but, rarely named on legal documents as property owners, they were greatly underrepresented on juries.

The current qualifications for jury service are: to be a UK citizen registered as a voter; to be aged between 18 and 75; to have been resident in UK for 5 years. These requirements mean that juries are more generally representative of the UK population than they have ever been, though some groups are less likely to be registered to vote than others and lawyers can deselect individuals once the case comes to trial and a jury is being formed. Around 200,000 - 250,000 people serve on juries each year - a considerable number, and three times as many people will have been called in order to arrive at this number. There are many appeals, postponements, and exemptions.

Lawmakers and lawyers tend to be fulsome in their praise of the jury system. In the words of one previous High Court Judge, Lord Devlin, “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.” (Trial By Jury, 1956)

Yet over the course of a century juries have slowly been excluded from most cases. In 1933 the Administration of Justice (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill removed the right to trial by jury in civil cases except those involving libel, slander, malicious prosecution, seduction and breach of marriage. Libel and slander were removed from this list by the Defamation Act of 2013. A bare 1% of criminal trials is now heard before a jury. These consist of indictable (serious) offences including murder, manslaughter and rape, criminal damage, and a diminishing number of ‘either-way’ cases where the defendant may opt for a jury trial.

Why then do juries preoccupy UK governments to the extent that they do?

The answer lies largely in the type of case that can still be tried before a jury. Not so much the murder or rape cases, but others more potentially troubling for the state. One such category of criminal case that has exercised governments for decade is serious fraud. There have been repeated attempts to remove complex fraud cases from juries on the grounds that they are too long and too difficult for juries to understand. The first review addressing this question was in 1983, a mere ten years after jury qualification was widened to admit the working class, and the most recent report is Brian Leveson’s. Leveson states unambiguously, “I recommend that serious and complex fraud cases should be tried by judges alone. Eligible cases should be defined by their hidden dishonesty or complexity that is outside the understanding of the general public.”

Complex accounting can be hard to follow. Where it involves highly skilled professionals facilitating fraud, it is labyrinthine by design. The whole point is to escape detection and understanding. This does not mean that twelve members of the public cannot arrive at an understanding of properly presented evidence that exposes what has been concealed. Bypassing juries in such cases would remove sophisticated fraud from the public realm, leaving it in the hands of those who can be safely trusted to bring the right verdicts. It would also close down access to rare lessons in how financialised capital works at the highest and most profitable level. The concern is less that juries are too stupid to follow the evidence, but rather that, hearing such a case, they are likely to discover how difficult it can be to distinguish between spectacular fraud and the normal workings of the City.

The determination of successive governments to remove juries from these cases is testament to the fact that serving on a jury can be an education not only in the machinery of state but also in the workings of capital.

Juries deliberate in secret and are not obliged to explain their verdicts. This means they retain the power to decide matters of law and, most importantly perhaps, to decide according to their consciences or convictions. Where they do so, against the instructions of the presiding judge, they return what is known as a perverse verdict.

The outcome of one of the earliest and best known perverse verdicts is recorded on a plaque mounted in the entrance to the Old Bailey (see photo). In 1670 two Quakers were charged with preaching to an unlawful assembly in the City of London. The jury hearing the case rejected the judge’s direction to convict and was then held for three days without food in order to bring it to heel. When the jurors stuck to their guns and refused to pay the fines imposed on them, they were imprisoned. Their success in regaining their freedom through a writ of habeas corpus is commemorated in this plaque, which has been the subject of renewed attention in recent years since a retired social worker, Trudi Warner, sat outside the Inner London Crown Court on 27th March 2023 holding a placard inscribed with its closing words.

Warner was reminding the members of the jury on the Just Stop Oil case underway inside that they had the right to acquit the four defendants no matter what the judge told them to do - just as a jury had done two years earlier in April 2021 when, against the judge’s direction, it acquitted Extinction Rebellion protestors. The then Tory Attorney General started contempt proceedings against Warner after the judge accused her of trying to influence the jury. When the High Court refused permission for the case to proceed, the new Labour government chose at first to appeal the refusal, only abandoning its appeal in August 2024 after more than 250 people had sat outside courts in different cities holding identical placards.

There have always been perverse verdicts - Victorian juries, for example, sometimes refused to find defendants guilty where fines they had no hope of paying would have been imposed. Some more recent examples include the acquittal of Clive Ponting, the civil servant who revealed the government had lied about the circumstances of the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands war. It is in the last five years that acquittals have become more frequent and more problematic for the forces of law and order. In January 2022 the Colston 4, charged with criminal damage after they had dumped the statue of slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol’s harbour in June 2020, were acquitted. The defendants were allowed by the judge to make their case freely to the jury. Other judges since then have refused to allow defendants the same freedom, preventing them, for example, from arguing they were acting in the public interest.

The numerous Palestine Action cases have taken things a stage further. There have been 2,700 arrests of supporters of the group since its proscription as a terrorist organisation. In addition, the Filton 24 are set to be imprisoned on remand for over 2 years before trial over the alleged causing of £1m criminal damage to an Elbit Systems site. There will be four trials involving the Filton defendants in total, the first of which began on November 17th 2025 at Woolwich Crown Court, where the first six defendants are charged with aggravated burglary, criminal damage and violent disorder. While this trial is taking place, the judicial review of the government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action will arrive at its judgement - probably sometime in January 2026. If the proscription is upheld and Palestine Action is confirmed as a terrorist organisation, the immediate consequences for the Filton defendants and their supporters will be grave, as will the implications for future political protest in the UK.

There is recent precedent for the removal of juries altogether where criminal charges for ‘scheduled offences’ relating to terrorism are brought, namely the Diplock courts in Northern Ireland, which ran from 1973 until 2007, trying up to 300 cases a year. Since then, the Justice & Security (Northern Ireland) Act 2007 allows the DPP to certify a non-jury trial for an indictable offence as long as it was committed by or on behalf of a group proscribed under the Terrorism Act 2000. As has so often been the case, draconian laws are first tested in colonial territory.

As juries begin to receive more government attention, the media have a role to play in moulding opinion. It is no accident that the first TV programme focused on juries was run as a 4-part series by Channel 4 in 2024. ‘The Jury’ featured two juries made up of volunteers, each unaware of the other’s existence. The two juries watched the re-enactment of an actual murder trial, with actors using a transcript of that trial to play the roles of judge, barristers etc.

The tone and purpose of the series were set at the beginning when, accompanied by dramatic music, a voiceover asked: ‘Can we trust our justice system?’, ‘Is the jury fit for the 21st century?’ and ‘7% of jurors cannot remember points of law they’ve been instructed on.’ Trial by jury was referred to as ‘pot-luck’, a casino process ‘spinning the wheel of justice’ and throughout the first episode jurors were edited so as to be seen as a collection of emotional people driven by personal histories rather than by reason. The participants were aware of the camera and inevitably played to it in a way that, in the protected privacy of the real jury room, a jury does not have to.

The reason for having two juries became clear at the end when they returned different verdicts, demonstrating the supposed inherent unreliability of the jury system. A TV series of limited use and interest then - and widely ridiculed as sensational nonsense by lawyers. Nonetheless, it encouraged a way of thinking about juries that undermines belief in their competence and fairness. As barrister/journalist Catherine Baksi wrote in the Law Gazette, “The programme plays into the hands of those who would seek to limit the right to trial by jury, at a time when some argue that it is already being undermined in the cases of climate change protesters who are prosecuted as a result of their actions. Only last week, a judge threatened jurors with criminal charges if they sought to try climate change protesters charged with causing criminal damage to JP Morgan on the basis of their conscience rather than the evidence.”

Not all states have jury systems - many European states do not, China does not. They are not necessarily, as some would have it, synonymous with justice. They are, however, an interesting anomaly in the UK justice system and possibly now too expensive an indulgence for the ruling class.

The Leveson Review addresses directly the question of the right to a jury trial in the context of literal cost and efficiency and what he calls the risk of ‘total system collapse’. In doing so he holds the jury system largely accountable for the backlog of cases that has built up over years, where people charged last year may well have to wait until 2029 for their case to be heard. He rejects the fact that trial by jury is an entitlement or that it has a basis in common law, arguing that it is merely ‘tradition’. If Secretary of State for Justice David Lammy accepts this view along with the other proposals made, as he has said he is minded to do, it paves the way for more than just further restrictions on the type of case juries can hear.

The dilemma for the establishment, however, remains. As Humphrey Malins MP argued in Parliament 25 years ago after the Auld Report of 2001, which also called for a reduction in the number of jury trials, “If we have fewer jury trials and more professional judges, it will bring us more into line with the systems of our European partners, but it will result in the citizen gradually and subtly being removed from the judicial process. It is the place of the citizen in the judicial process for so many years that has created a sort of confidence in the system.”

Lord Justice Auld himself said something very similar in the body of his 700-page report, noting, “the powerfully symbolic effect of the jury as a means of enabling citizens to participate in the trial process and the public confidence that, rightly or wrongly, it engenders in the system.”

Juries are seen to shore up belief in the whole system and for this reason strong voices in the legal profession and in government are loathe to do away with it. Some go so far as to call juries the cornerstone of British democracy.

While juries may generally reinforce consent in the population to being governed by a state that operates solely in the interests of capital, there are also times when they don’t, when in fact they both reflect a withdrawal of consent and strengthen the feeling that injustices are being perpetrated. There are signs that we are currently in such a period. Juries appear to be ready to defy judges’ instructions, returning ‘not guilty’ verdicts in cases involving civil disobedience, climate protests and direct action of all kinds (4). If juries are becoming more of a liability for increasingly an unpopular and authoritarian government, we can expect their room for manoeuvre to be narrowed down to almost nothing, while ministers and judges will continue, of course, to sing their praises.

Like the Hydra of Greek myth, the British state has countless heads whose purposes and powers are unified at root. Some wield power directly; others, sometimes known as ‘arms-length organisations’, act on behalf of the ruling class in less visible ways.

The bourgeois state reaches into all aspects of life; it constantly develops its forms and methods; it responds ruthlessly to serious challenge, however small. In a period like this one, where a huge transfer of wealth away from the working class to an ever-smaller section of the ruling class is well underway and a major war is being prepared, the state has to work harder to stifle opposition.