Lammy blames Jesus for jury trial abolition. Jesus says nope.

David Lammy, previously an appalling foreign secretary, now an appalling and direly misnamed justice secretary, says Jesus is to blame for his attack on UK justice.

Lammy is a disgrace.

Lammy cites Jesus in jury trials decision

He told the BBC Sunday programme that his faith was the reason he wants to deprive the vast majority of people of a proper trial, because it:

calls me to centre the victims of crime. It calls me to centre the mother in my constituency who’s just lost her son to knife crime, waiting three, four years for a trial and victims falling away. It calls me to centre the 16-year-old girl who might be raped this year, waiting for justice and her trial. And it’s for that reason that you reform.

Right.

Mr Lammy has been slammed by legal experts and justice campaigners for his plan to slash the number of jury trials by making most people facing prosecution undergo a ‘judge-only’ process. He also plans to allow magistrates to decide cases with maximum sentence of up to 18 months instead of the current 12. This latter plan puts the freedom of potentially innocent people in the hands of a capricious system that could imprison them and ruin the rest of their future.

Barrister Chris Daw KC put it succinctly, saying that magistrates’ courts:

are and always have been a lottery at best and a kangaroo court at worst.

[Lammy’s plan] would be yet another nail in the coffin of basic and long-established rights in our criminal courts.

Fellow barrister Ed Henry, who represented victims of the Post Office scandal, agrees. He said that Lammy’s plan:

is profoundly dangerous …Everyone accepts that justice in the magistrates’ courts can be hit and miss.

Even a 12-month sentence can leave those wrongly convicted facing a lifetime of blighted prospects and ruined reputation.

Lies can ruin lives in the judicial process

Then-Labour MP Claudia Webbe was wrongly convicted of threatening to throw acid at her fiancé’s girlfriend. On appeal, the court found that the Met Police had withheld evidence and that Webbe’s accuser had lied repeatedly.

Crucially, the appeal judge found that there had never been any kind of acid threat – another lie by the accuser. But racists continue to use it against her and newspapers’ ‘corrections’ were, as usual, tiny and well hidden.

But worse, any trials for supposed offences with ‘likely’ sentences of under three years will be decided only by judges – people not known for a readiness to challenge police or government. Verdicts, like in magistrates’ courts, will be a roll of the dice with five sides of the dice saying ‘Guilty’.

As foreign secretary Lammy refused to acknowledge that Israel was committing genocide as it slaughtered hundreds of thousands. He met with Israeli war criminals and gave them immunity to visit the UK without fear of arrest. As justice secretary, he claimed he had never heard of anti-genocide activists on hunger strike against their political imprisonment without trial.

That was, of course, a lie.

Overexplaining his ‘reforms’

One of the key tells that someone is lying is that they over-explain in an attempt to convince. And that’s exactly what Lammy did in his BBC interview, when he tried to claim his curb on jury trials is about justice:

The foundation for me of justice is that idea that whoever you are, you deserve justice. In my office, I have a photograph of Martin Luther King with Rabbi Heschel marching and campaigning together for civil rights on behalf of groups of people

As so often, Lammy exposed his nonsense in trying to defend it. If ‘whoever you are, you deserve justice’, that applies to just trials leading to verdicts reached by a court of our peers. The solution to a logjammed court system is to expand and resource the court system, not to abolish due process.

In reality, no one can honestly be in much doubt that Lammy’s ‘reform’ is yet another move to protect Israel and its interests. Keir Starmer and his home secretaries have been deeply frustrated at juries acquitting anti-genocide activists because they agree the accused were trying to prevent mass murder. Judges are far less likely to be swayed by ideas as simplistic as right and wrong.

And with more than 2,000 people arrested for expressing their opinion that Starmer’s ‘terror’ ban on Palestine Action and journalists facing trials for supporting Palestinians’ legal right to resist occupation, he and Lammy want a smooth path to convictions for offences ‘likely’ (that key word again) to lead to sentences of less than three years. Though the ‘guilty’ could, of course, be punished with up to fourteen years at the whim of the judge.

Jesus says nope

So much for process. But as a Christian, I have a few other points to make to Mr Lammy about his attempt to blame Jesus for his war on justice. Not my points, you understand, but of the first-century Palestinian rabbi he is defaming – and a few from his Dad.

Lammy has refused to meet the hunger-striking political prisoners and is clearly prepared to let them die rather than give them justice. Jesus is big on visiting prisoners. So big, in fact, that he told his listeners that it would be decisive on the Day of Judgment and that he would send them away if they didn’t do it.

His words are recorded in Matthew 25:

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

Jesus also told a parable about a corrupt judge who wouldn’t do the right thing because it was right, but eventually did the right thing for a victim because she wouldn’t leave him alone. Lammy is far worse than that judge: despite calls from tens of thousands of people, along with human rights groups and the United Nations, he still won’t do the just thing.

Jesus’s father has a few things to say, too. Deuteronomy 10:

17 For the Lord your God…shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. 18 He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing.

In Deuteronomy 16, he told his mate Moses to tell the people:

You shall not distort justice; you shall not show partiality to the poor nor give deference to the great.

God’s prophets likewise had a harsh word or two. Like Isaiah and Micah, who condemned corrupt leaders who “judge for a bribe” and “deprive the poor of justice and deny the rights of the needy”.

There is nothing just, merciful or faithful about Lammy’s war on justice – as Jesus would know

Back to Jesus for the finale. In his famous denunciation of the pharisees, Jesus told them that they were splitting hairs and making rules, but “neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness.” Jesus told the parable of Lazarus, in which a rich man who neglected the poor and vulnerable sat in hell desperate for “even a drop of water to cool my tongue” and could not get it. And he famously overturned the money-men’s tables and told the people to distance themselves from their rulers who:

tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.

There is nothing just, merciful or faithful about Lammy’s war on justice; much less in his collaboration in Israel’s genocide and his and his boss’s grovelling to the rich. Lammy the liar and genocide-enabler blames Jesus for his actions, but another of Jesus’s warnings seems to apply:

You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

If Mr Lammy seriously believes in a day of judgment, rather than just posturing to justify his war on ordinary people, he needs to pay a lot closer attention.