Remember when politicians promised to “tread more lightly” on our lives? Yeah, me neither – at least not anymore.
Back in the summer of 2024, the new Prime Minister stood in front of the cameras and assured the country that things would feel different. Less heavy-handed. More respectful of personal freedom. Seventeen months later that promise looks almost comical. The direction of travel is now unmistakably clear, and it’s not towards lighter government. It’s towards something that feels uncomfortably close to a surveillance state with the democratic guardrails quietly removed.
The Quiet Erosion of Ancient Rights
Let’s start with the one that ought to have caused nationwide outrage but somehow slipped past most front pages: the plan to dramatically reduce the right to trial by jury.
For almost a thousand years – literally since before the ink dried on Magna Carta – being judged by twelve ordinary citizens has been a cornerstone of English law. It wasn’t just tradition. It was the people’s last defence against an over-mighty state. And now the government wants to confine it to only the most serious crimes.
The official excuse? Court backlogs. Fair enough, the queues are horrific. Over 78,000 cases waiting in Crown Courts is no joke. But here’s the thing nobody in power wants to say out loud: those backlogs didn’t appear overnight. They’re the direct result of fourteen years of deliberate underfunding, court closures, and caps on sitting days. Fixing the cause would take political courage and cash. Scrapping jury trials is quicker and cheaper.
What “Swift Justice” Really Means in Practice
The new proposal creates “intermediate” courts where a single judge – or sometimes a panel of two judges and two magistrates – will decide both guilt and sentence for any offence carrying less than three years in prison. Complex fraud cases? They’re gone too. Only murder, manslaughter, and rape will automatically keep the jury.
In theory this only affects a small percentage of cases. In practice it removes the jury from the exact kinds of prosecutions the state loves to bring against protesters, journalists, and political irritants. You know, the ones where public sympathy might run against the government line.
“The right to trial by jury is an important factor in the delicate balance between the power of the state and the rights of the individual.”
– A much younger Keir Starmer, 1992
Funny how principles age, isn’t it?
Jury Nullification – The Real Target?
Call me cynical, but I suspect the quiet target here isn’t really court waiting times. It’s something called jury equity or jury nullification – the centuries-old principle that ordinary citizens can refuse to convict even when the law has technically been broken, if they believe the prosecution itself is unjust.
We’ve seen it repeatedly in recent years. Climate activists walking free despite admitting the acts. People accused of criminal damage while protesting arms sales to conflict zones – acquitted. Even the famous 1985 case where a civil servant leaked documents exposing government lies about a war and was cleared because the jury decided the public interest outweighed the Official Secrets Act.
Those verdicts drive prosecutors and ministers absolutely spare. And now they have a neat solution: just take the jury out of the equation.
Financial Crime Gets a Quiet Bonus
Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising part of the plan is that complex fraud and financial cases will also lose juries. Think about that for a second. The same country that gave the world Libor rigging, PPI mis-selling, and London as the money-laundering capital of Europe is deciding that ordinary people are too thick to understand financial crime.
Some defence lawyers quietly agree that certain derivatives frauds are mind-bendingly complicated. Fair point. But the answer isn’t to hand the keys to a single judges who lunch with the same bankers they’re supposed to police. The answer is specialist juries or expert assessors sitting alongside ordinary ones. Anything else just smells like another favour to the City.
Free Speech? Only If It’s Approved Speech
While the jury story simmered, another front opened on expression itself.
Last year saw thousands of arrests for social-media posts under laws originally designed for harassment and bomb threats. Perfectly peaceful pensioners found themselves in cells for sharing opinions about overseas conflicts. One woman faced years in prison for tweets that simply repeated established principles of international law on the right to resist occupation. The prosecution openly argued that stating those principles could amount to supporting terrorism. Let that sink in.
She was eventually acquitted, but the message was sent loud and clear: certain topics are now effectively off-limits if the government says so.
The state now considers it unlawful to repeat what international law explicitly states about occupied peoples and the right to armed resistance.
When a former senior human-rights lawyer turned prime minister oversees that kind of argument in court, you know something fundamental has shifted.
Cameras Everywhere, All the Time
And then there’s the hardware.
Live facial-recognition cameras – the ones courts have repeatedly ruled were being used illegally – are about to go nationwide. The Home Office wants them in “every city, town, and village”. Your passport photo, driving-licence image, every picture the state already holds on you, will be fair game for real-time matching the moment you step outside.
Civil-liberties groups warn this turns the whole country into what one campaigner called “an open-air prison”. The error rates, especially for women and ethnic minorities, remain stubbornly high. But accuracy seems secondary to coverage.
Local councils are already pushing back. Some have banned the tech on their patch. Good luck enforcing that once the national framework is in place.
The Digital ID That Isn’t Mandatory (Yet)
All of this dovetails neatly with the slow-motion rollout of digital identity. The line is still “voluntary”, but try renewing certain benefits, opening some bank accounts, or proving age online without one in a couple of years and see how voluntary it feels.
- One login for government services
- One login for age verification
- One login for travel, banking, healthcare, maybe even voting one day
Every step sounds reasonable in isolation. Put them together and you have the skeleton of a Chinese-style social-credit system wearing a polite British smile.
Nearly three million people have already signed a petition demanding the plans are scrapped. The debate in Parliament this week will be interesting – though don’t hold your breath for a U-turn.
Why Now?
None of this is entirely new. Successive governments have nibbled away at privacy and protest rights for two decades. But the pace under the current administration feels different – almost frantic.
Perhaps it’s the polling. The Prime Minister is already the least popular in modern history. The budget broke multiple manifesto pledges. Public trust is in free fall. When legitimacy drains away, governments throughout history have reached for greater control rather than greater consent.
Add rapidly advancing surveillance technology, a civil service that increasingly sees dissent as a management problem, and a political class terrified of the next election, and you have a perfect storm.
Where Does This End?
That’s the question that keeps me awake.
Because every measure I’ve described above is being presented as temporary, pragmatic, or simply catching up with technology. Yet each one locks in capabilities that any future government – perhaps one far less squeamish about using them – will inherit ready-made.
Imagine a genuinely far-right administration in five or ten years’ time with facial recognition on every corner, digital ID tied to benefits and travel, protest criminalised as “disruption”, and jury trials a quaint historical footnote. They wouldn’t need to pass a single new law to round up opponents. It’s all there waiting.
Some will say I’m being alarmist. I hope they’re right. But when a government starts dismantling Magna Carta rights while simultaneously building the most sophisticated civilian surveillance network in Europe, forgiving them the benefit of the doubt feels… optimistic.
The Britain of 2030 might still have red postboxes and warm beer. But if we’re not careful, it could also have checkpoints, approved speech, and justice dispensed by algorithm and lone judges. And once those things arrive, history suggests they’re very hard to shift.
So maybe the real question isn’t “How dystopian could Starmer’s Britain become?”
It’s “Are we going to let it?”
