By Karl Hansen
TRIBUNE
12.27.2025
By restricting jury trials, removing protest rights and expanding surveillance, Labour is entrenching an authoritarian legal infrastructure that a far-right government will not hesitate to exploit.
Labour's authoritarian policies will be inherited by Reform.
(Leon Neal/Getty Images)
In Whigs and Hunters, Marxist historian E. P. Thompson explained how law, though shaped by class power, could also enable resistance, because governing through legal forms bound the state to limits it could not fully control. Those limits sustained a long tradition in which ordinary people could contest abuses of authority from within the law itself, above all through the jury trial.
Responding to critics of government plans to abolish jury trials for all but the ‘most serious’ cases, such as rape and murder, justice secretary David Lammy dismissed opposition as defending ‘tradition for tradition’s sake’. But, as Lammy knows, having once described jury trials as a ‘fundamental part of our democratic settlement’, this tradition has for more than three centuries provided a means by which citizens have restrained the reach of state power.
That role has been most visible in overtly political trials. Across modern British history, defendants have admitted their actions, and juries have nevertheless refused to criminalise them where those actions were driven by conscience. This includes anti-war activists who damaged military equipment, like the Seeds of Hope activists who vandalised a Hawk fighter jet bound for Indonesia’s murderous war in East Timor, and the Trident Ploughshare defendants acquitted after sabotaging aircraft used in the Iraq War. In both cases, juries treated admitted damage as justified efforts to prevent greater crimes.
More recently, juries have acquitted climate protesters, including Greenpeace activists at Kingsnorth who damaged a coal power station and argued they were preventing greater harm, as well as Extinction Rebellion defendants cleared of charges such as public nuisance and obstruction. These verdicts show the jury as the point at which ordinary citizens can exercise judgment over the reach of state power. It is precisely this function that gives jury trial its democratic value, and that has made it a target of political pressure.
The legal basis for this tradition can be traced to 1670, when two Quakers were tried for unlawful assembly under the Conventicle Act, which outlawed religious gatherings outside the Church of England. The jury accepted that the men had preached openly to a gathered crowd, yet declined to convict. When the judge ordered the jury to change its verdict and punished them for refusing, one juror, Edward Bushel, challenged his imprisonment. The Court of Common Pleas responded with its landmark ruling that jurors could not be punished for their verdicts.
By affirming jury independence, Bushel’s Case created space for judgment beyond mechanical application of the law, establishing the jury as the point where law meets popular judgment.
That settlement began to unravel in earnest after the acquittal of the Colston Four in 2022. The defendants were cleared of criminal damage after the jury accepted that toppling Edward Colston’s statue was protected political expression, carried out in opposition to the public glorification of a slave trader. A furious political backlash followed. Then justice secretary Robert Buckland denounced the verdict as ‘perverse’, and the government moved swiftly to narrow the scope of what juries are permitted to consider in protest cases.
The appeal courts were asked to ‘clarify’ the law, encouraging judges to adopt a stricter gatekeeping role over human-rights arguments. Questions of proportionality, political context, and freedom of expression were increasingly treated as matters for judges to resolve in advance, rather than issues for juries to weigh. In practice, this meant many defendants were prevented from putting those arguments before a jury at all, making acquittals far less likely.
This narrowing was reinforced through legislation. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 created new, tightly defined protest offences, including locking on and interference with infrastructure. By specifying offences in granular detail and lowering thresholds for criminal liability, the legislation reduced the relevance of motive or context, further shrinking the space in which juries might refuse to criminalise activism.
Since taking power last year, Labour has extended this approach, most starkly through the proscription of Palestine Action, under which thousands of peaceful protesters have been arrested under anti-terror laws. Once an organisation is proscribed, juries are left with little room to exercise judgment, closing off the kinds of decisions that have historically allowed citizens to refuse to punish political dissent.
Labour’s parallel push for mandatory digital ID, expanded facial-recognition technology, and restrictions on ‘repeated protests’ further enlarges the state’s capacity to monitor, manage, and punish political opposition. Taken together, these measures amount to a significant reshaping of the state’s relationship with protest movements and political dissent.
Labour MPs may regard these expanded powers as benign in their own hands, aimed narrowly at what they see as the more disruptive edges of climate and anti-war activism. Yet there has been strikingly little recognition of the danger of entrenching an oppressive legal infrastructure that will outlast their government. With Reform leading the polls and on course to take power at the next election, the danger is no longer abstract. Powers already being exercised by Labour could be readily expanded and weaponised by a far-right government.
Reform’s senior figures have been explicit in their hostility to trade unions, protest, and activism, routinely branding movements as extremist or illegitimate and calling for outright bans and harsher sentences. The party’s close alignment with big business and fossil-fuel interests, combined with its antagonism towards climate action, gives it a clear incentive to suppress movements that challenge extractive industries and corporate power.
This is what is at stake in Labour’s restriction of jury trials and its narrowing of the political space for resisting state power. The right to refuse and contest abuses of authority will only grow more vital in a Britain shaped by Farage’s politics. MPs supporting these clampdowns should recognise they are constructing a ready-made toolkit for repression. Keir Starmer’s premiership may prove short-lived, but the authoritarian legal infrastructure consolidated on his watch could be his most enduring and consequential legacy.
Contributors
Karl Hansen is editor-at-large at Tribune.
In Whigs and Hunters, Marxist historian E. P. Thompson explained how law, though shaped by class power, could also enable resistance, because governing through legal forms bound the state to limits it could not fully control. Those limits sustained a long tradition in which ordinary people could contest abuses of authority from within the law itself, above all through the jury trial.
Responding to critics of government plans to abolish jury trials for all but the ‘most serious’ cases, such as rape and murder, justice secretary David Lammy dismissed opposition as defending ‘tradition for tradition’s sake’. But, as Lammy knows, having once described jury trials as a ‘fundamental part of our democratic settlement’, this tradition has for more than three centuries provided a means by which citizens have restrained the reach of state power.
That role has been most visible in overtly political trials. Across modern British history, defendants have admitted their actions, and juries have nevertheless refused to criminalise them where those actions were driven by conscience. This includes anti-war activists who damaged military equipment, like the Seeds of Hope activists who vandalised a Hawk fighter jet bound for Indonesia’s murderous war in East Timor, and the Trident Ploughshare defendants acquitted after sabotaging aircraft used in the Iraq War. In both cases, juries treated admitted damage as justified efforts to prevent greater crimes.
More recently, juries have acquitted climate protesters, including Greenpeace activists at Kingsnorth who damaged a coal power station and argued they were preventing greater harm, as well as Extinction Rebellion defendants cleared of charges such as public nuisance and obstruction. These verdicts show the jury as the point at which ordinary citizens can exercise judgment over the reach of state power. It is precisely this function that gives jury trial its democratic value, and that has made it a target of political pressure.
The legal basis for this tradition can be traced to 1670, when two Quakers were tried for unlawful assembly under the Conventicle Act, which outlawed religious gatherings outside the Church of England. The jury accepted that the men had preached openly to a gathered crowd, yet declined to convict. When the judge ordered the jury to change its verdict and punished them for refusing, one juror, Edward Bushel, challenged his imprisonment. The Court of Common Pleas responded with its landmark ruling that jurors could not be punished for their verdicts.
By affirming jury independence, Bushel’s Case created space for judgment beyond mechanical application of the law, establishing the jury as the point where law meets popular judgment.
That settlement began to unravel in earnest after the acquittal of the Colston Four in 2022. The defendants were cleared of criminal damage after the jury accepted that toppling Edward Colston’s statue was protected political expression, carried out in opposition to the public glorification of a slave trader. A furious political backlash followed. Then justice secretary Robert Buckland denounced the verdict as ‘perverse’, and the government moved swiftly to narrow the scope of what juries are permitted to consider in protest cases.
The appeal courts were asked to ‘clarify’ the law, encouraging judges to adopt a stricter gatekeeping role over human-rights arguments. Questions of proportionality, political context, and freedom of expression were increasingly treated as matters for judges to resolve in advance, rather than issues for juries to weigh. In practice, this meant many defendants were prevented from putting those arguments before a jury at all, making acquittals far less likely.
This narrowing was reinforced through legislation. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 created new, tightly defined protest offences, including locking on and interference with infrastructure. By specifying offences in granular detail and lowering thresholds for criminal liability, the legislation reduced the relevance of motive or context, further shrinking the space in which juries might refuse to criminalise activism.
Since taking power last year, Labour has extended this approach, most starkly through the proscription of Palestine Action, under which thousands of peaceful protesters have been arrested under anti-terror laws. Once an organisation is proscribed, juries are left with little room to exercise judgment, closing off the kinds of decisions that have historically allowed citizens to refuse to punish political dissent.
Labour’s parallel push for mandatory digital ID, expanded facial-recognition technology, and restrictions on ‘repeated protests’ further enlarges the state’s capacity to monitor, manage, and punish political opposition. Taken together, these measures amount to a significant reshaping of the state’s relationship with protest movements and political dissent.
Labour MPs may regard these expanded powers as benign in their own hands, aimed narrowly at what they see as the more disruptive edges of climate and anti-war activism. Yet there has been strikingly little recognition of the danger of entrenching an oppressive legal infrastructure that will outlast their government. With Reform leading the polls and on course to take power at the next election, the danger is no longer abstract. Powers already being exercised by Labour could be readily expanded and weaponised by a far-right government.
Reform’s senior figures have been explicit in their hostility to trade unions, protest, and activism, routinely branding movements as extremist or illegitimate and calling for outright bans and harsher sentences. The party’s close alignment with big business and fossil-fuel interests, combined with its antagonism towards climate action, gives it a clear incentive to suppress movements that challenge extractive industries and corporate power.
This is what is at stake in Labour’s restriction of jury trials and its narrowing of the political space for resisting state power. The right to refuse and contest abuses of authority will only grow more vital in a Britain shaped by Farage’s politics. MPs supporting these clampdowns should recognise they are constructing a ready-made toolkit for repression. Keir Starmer’s premiership may prove short-lived, but the authoritarian legal infrastructure consolidated on his watch could be his most enduring and consequential legacy.
Contributors
Karl Hansen is editor-at-large at Tribune.
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