24th May 1999
JUSTICE FOR ALL (OF US).
When New Labour were landslided into power two years ago, there were those who suspected that behind
the appeals to Middle England, the marketing strategies and Mandelsonian foppery,
an aged radical beast was waiting for the moment to open its sleepy eyes and pounce. "It won't happen overnight," they said, "see what happens in five years."
How we sniggered. "Radicalism is dead," we argued, "this is the post-modern age; politics
is dead; despair and smug apathy reign over the minds of a defeated populace."
Actually I don't know anyone who talks like that, not even when they're using semi-colons,
but you get the idea. Margaret Thatcher was the last radical. Her life's work was
to win the conflict between capital and labour, and she did a very, very good job
of it. Trade Unions are a cross between the Women's Institute and a building society,
the destruction of working class pride and dignity has been turned into
a Channel-4-sponsored comedy starring Robert Carlyle's bottom, and they're still
dragging Tony Benn out whenever they need someone to complain about the latest war.
Well folks, radicalism is back. Jack Straw, the dope-smokin' left-leanin' demo-organisin'
redbrick rabble rouser of thirty years ago is on the march again - the march for justice. Specifically, he
has decided (with the unilateralism that a massive parliamentary majority allows)
to reform the legal process. Trial by jury is now a privilege, and no longer a right.
From now on, magistrates will try all but the most heinous of crimes. The option
of undergoing scrutiny by twelve of ones peers will become a piece of quaint English
history, to be filed alongside benefit-of-clergy and witch-ducking in the (doubtless forthcoming)
Old Bailey Virtual Experience.
It makes sense. The jury system is inefficient, expensive, and anyway what the hell
do twelve ordinary people, some of whom haven't got a GCSE to their name, know about
the labyrinthine technicalities of the law? I have known people who work on assembly
lines to be called up for jury service - what possible expertise could they have? So
it will be left to the Experts. The uneducated, the poor and the lazy will no longer
be dragged screaming into the courtroom to hear the evidence and make up their undisciplined, untrained minds. Criminals will be made to stand before a panel of their betters,
not their lowly equals.
OK, it hasn't happened yet, but it will. The next time someone starts a war and we're all too busy beating our chests or wringing our hands to notice, they'll sneak in another reform. That's what wars are for.
From four hundred years distance, witch trials seem rather amusing - at least to me,
an insensitive male with a taste for macabre fiction. The trouble
is, they happened. Teenage strumpets and doolally old dears were ritually humiliated,
tortured and murdered by religious maniacs terrified of (respectively) female sexuality
and Alzheimer's disease. Why? Because the judges were men. The accused were not. The further removed the accused
is from the judge - by sex, class, race, culture, education - the easier it is to condemn her. Juries make it difficult. Juries are democracy in action; not putting an
X in a box to decide which member of the élite will represent you, but actual participation.
Of course it fails. In America, where you can practically pick your own jury, it
is laughable; a black jury, OJ gets off; a white jury, the cops who beat up Rodney
King get off. But that is a failure of a particular jury, not of the system. Our
ancestors fought for democracy so that the people could make their own decisions
and their own mistakes.
But who cares, eh? Most of you reading this will be just like me: middle-class products of the relatively
egalitarian post-war comprehensive schooling system; literate, fairly sophisticated, prosperous
enough to own a computer, or educated enough to have access to a university terminal. We have inherited this country. Our governors are our peers. Tony Blair
is one of us - part of the pluralistic culture we share, familiar with both Big Star and Mazzy Starr; with Animal Farm and Emmerdale Farm;
with Virgil and Virgil Tracy. New Labour is where Richard Branson
meets Posy Simmons over a nice chianti with Germaine Greer and Ben Elton. There are
even some blacks in parliament, quite a large tiny minority of women and several
homosexuals, so no need to worry. Soon, committees of right-thinking intellectuals,
just like us, will run the whole shebang without the democratic interference of football hooligans, mini-skirted
future welfare-spongers and the awkward, cantankerous old. The ugly white working-class male
is on the scapheap along with the doddering remnants of the aristocracy; the young white middle-class male is firmly, irrevocably in charge. It is our country now. God help it.
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