Ep 38: UK on the Brink: How a Broken Justice System Is Killing Free Speech with Ed West

Kat Kuczynska (0:02)

Welcome to Wisdom Rebellion, where we are figuring out how to improve our health, relationships, and family life, with the help of the world's leading experts in how we get there. One challenging conversation at a time.

Today's guest is Ed West, journalist, author, and unapologetic history obsessive. Ed is a former deputy editor of Unheard and the Catholic Herald, and a former columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. He's also written widely for outlets across the political spectrum from The Guardian to Spiked. His latest book, Small Men on the Wrong Side of History, reflects his both fascination with how societies decay, and his wry awareness that his own views are rarely in fashion. Ed brings a rare mix of deep historical perspective, cultural critique, and dry realism to everything he touches. And this conversation is no exception. In this episode, we take a hard look at whether some of Britain's most sacred civic institutions are quietly breaking down. The conversation begins with Ed's reflections about jury service, and quickly widens into a much broader examination of justice, bias, and how culture now shapes the courtroom in ways few people want to admit. From there, we range across some of the most combustible issues in the UK public life. The expanding public sector, the strange power of diversity bureaucracies, the collapse of trust in government, the paralysis around immigration, and why mental health has become entangled with work, politics, and policy. We also discuss whether free speech itself is becoming a liability rather than a foundation. This is a fast moving and sparing conversation about a country that feels stuck, and the reforms that might be necessary to unstick it. If you care about the future of Britain, justice, and whether liberal democracy can survive its own contradictions, you will want to hear this one. Without further ado, I give you Ed West.

I find it fascinating. I didn't know that you could literally just random person from the street that might not even understand English particularly well to sit as a juror. It doesn't sit right.

Ed West (2:41)

I mean, this is one of the stories I mentioned, that I met someone who I kind of knew, a friend of a friend, who said that they had been picked as the foreman, you know, the head of the jury, because they spoke English. Now it sounds phrased, you know, because I didn't think, well, shouldn't they all speak very good English? But it used to be quite enforced, but in the 90s and noughties, they just basically stopped them, you know, ensuring that all jurors spoke clear English. And the real change was in 1974, I think, when the rules about jury service, you before then you had to be a taxpayer, and I think you had to be a property owner. And the idea was that way, you will kind of increase the probability that the person is like intelligence, diligence, pays attention, and doesn't sympathise with criminals. And the common problem, and the kind of scare stories we hear is about some jurors who obviously don't pay attention, who sometimes risk mistrial. There've been cases where the jury members have been blowing kisses to the defendants, all sorts of stuff which makes the whole thing kind of a mockery. And clearly, if anyone's in that situation where your life is potentially ruined, you want to have for 12 moderately intelligent people, at least, who can understand it, not very emotional people who might not be upstanding citizens, as the phrase usually has. And that has seriously undermined the jury system. And that is part of that reason that there's been repeated attempts to restrict it in various forms. I mean, there are already some restrictions on financial crimes, for example, where the judge has said, listen, 95% of the population don't understand how this works. So it's an easy, detailed, technical fraud issues that I wouldn't understand. So you just have to say, well, in those particular instances, you have to have someone like a judge or someone who understands the issue to make the decision. But in all other cases, the jury system in England is very, very deep rooted. It has its origins in basically the reign of Henry II in the 12th century. And it rose out of origins even older, even around the turn of the first millennium, when people started.

A suspect would bring along 12 character witnesses, and that evolved eventually to have 12 random members.

Well, not random because at first they had to be of certain status who was basically, because there wouldn't have been much evidence in most cases and in kind of homicide cases, most of which weren't prosecuted. It would basically be they would analyze the suspect and just decide if he was a good guy. And obviously, and then they'd start taking account more into evidence about what they actually knew about it. But the idea is that you can have a judge, you know, a judge will know much more about the law and that will be more intelligent than the population at large, but the risk is higher of a very biased judge, a crooked judge, or a judge that's being got at by the family of the suspect, especially if it involves organized crime or stuff like that. And if you imagine, I mean, in Britain, if you imagine a judge who comes from a particular minority community, where there is intense pressure for them to side with relatives and extended families, and if you have them presiding over a case in which a fellow member of that community is up for uncharges, the possibility of corruption or community pressure is huge. The whole idea of the English system is you're tried by your peers. And peers means people who are members of society, but you're not related to them. They're not related to the person against you. They are just random members of society who you should not have a bias either way against. It doesn't really work once you start developing kind of different communities with their own loyalties. And this is the point I came to with Singapore, which just abolished the jury system because the founder, the first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, just said, he was a lawyer. And he said, in all his cases, if there's a Malay on trial and they have a Chinese jury, they will just convict him and vice versa. And it was impossible to have a system of your peers when there are three basic different groups who tend to side with their own kind. So he just said, well, just replace them with judges. And his thing was, you know, that suits the Anglo-Saxons, but it doesn't necessarily suit all people.