On 4 February a jury acquitted six pro-Palestine protesters of aggravated burglary and three of violent disorder. On all other counts they failed to deliver any verdict. This was the first of a series of trials of the Filton 24, who have been held on remand since 2024. This is a huge victory for the Palestine solidarity movement and also tells us exactly why the British state is so keen on limiting the right to trial by jury in the future. The below article first published in FRFI 310 describes the government’s current attack on jury trials and other historic examples of activists being acquitted by juries.
On 2 December 2025, Justice Secretary David Lammy announced planned reforms to the justice system which would remove the right to trial by jury for criminal cases involving offences with a sentence of less than three years. A new ‘Swift Court’ system would be created where a single judge can conduct trials for these cases. The move is a further attempt by the British state to erode democratic rights and to repress, in particular, political protest.
While the raft of changes has been marketed as a way of clearing the 80,000+ backlog of cases in the Crown Court, the Institute for Government has found that in reality, court time would be reduced by only about 2%, describing it as a ‘marginal gain’. Time would be better improved, the Institute found in a report, by raising court productivity. Staff shortages, crumbling infrastructure and a shortage of space are among the reasons Crown Courts now hear 20% fewer hours a day compared to ten years ago. Eight Crown Courts and 162 magistrates’ courts have been shut down since 2010. Nor do the changes represent a substantial cost-saving measure – the estimated £31m savings represent just 0.2% of the Ministry of Justice’s budget.
The erosion of democratic rights
So it’s not about the backlog and it’s not about the money. Rather this proposal is an attack on the democratic right to be tried by a jury of your peers – a right that dates back to the Magna Carta of 1215. In 1670, a group of jurors who withstood threats, hunger and imprisonment after they refused to convict two Quaker preachers, enshrined the absolute right of a jury to return a verdict according to their conscience. Juries come from a diverse and largely working-class background and are an important check on the punitive power of the state. So-called ‘perverse’ verdicts where they have voted against the repressive interests of the state include:
• 1985 civil servant Clive Ponting acquitted of breaching the Official Secrets Act after allegedly leaking classified documents showing that the British sinking of an Argentinian ship during the Falklands/Malvinas War was a war crime;
• 1991 peace activists Pat Pottle and Michael Randle acquitted after admitting helping Soviet spy George Blake escape from prison;
• 2022 four activists acquitted after toppling a statue of 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston during the Black Lives Matter protests.
Small wonder the ruling class does not trust juries. Lammy’s proposals are the latest in its attempts to prevent protesters and activists appealing to their peers to understand why they acted as they did. Already we’ve seen in March 2024 the Court of Appeal remove the right of defendants to rely on any political or philosophical beliefs in their defence. Environmental activists have been denied the right to speak of the climate catastrophe and most recently we’ve seen six of the Filton 24, on trial for smashing up a factory of the Israeli weapons company Elbit, refused the right to speak of the war crimes it is responsible for. This attack on jury trials is the latest attempt by a repressive state to silence political protest. It must be resisted.
