King’s Speech

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, a little while ago, I became aware of the case of a young man charged with multiple counts of rape. He was arrested late at night in front of his weeping parents and taken away in a police van. It was five years before he came to trial.

The trial itself lasted five days. When it finished, the jury—nine of whom were women—took less than five minutes to find him not guilty. The jury was so distressed that, afterwards, they waited for the young man out in the street. One by one, they embraced him on the pavement because of the terrible injustice that he had been put through—five years of a young life wiped out, reduced to cleaning portaloos. In their turn, every member of that jury wanted a hug from him, to help soften their own pain from being part of the process.

Our system is not only blind but, nowadays, deaf—and it is dying. Hyperbole? No. Hillsborough, bad blood, the Rotherham grooming gangs, Grenfell Tower, the Post Office—they were scandals in which thousands of people died, many by suicide, with tens of thousands of other lives ruined. That was because public servants ticked their little boxes and left it at that. No one took responsibility.

Rape is a terrible crime—and it is a terrible accusation. Yet neither the police nor the CPS reviewed the defence material. No witnesses were interviewed. The prosecuting lawyer had not even finished reading the file when the trial began and did not even know there was more than one charge to answer—that is justice today. This was a dereliction of duty by public servants on an inexcusable scale, and it happens every day.

Who is responsible? Ultimately, we are. We wake up in the morning, read terrible headlines and say, “Something must be done!” We wave our magic wands, write a manifesto and pull out dead rabbits from a hat. We make new laws and issue more orders that overwhelm the system—good intentions that have paved the way to hell. In every corner, instead of the sound of justice, we hear the echoes of files being shuffled, statistics being manipulated, lawyers gaming the system, boxes being ticked and hands being washed.

The only semblance of justice given to this young man came from the jury, yet, ironically, the Government are threatening our jury system. My noble friend Lord Wolfson of Tredegar powerfully pointed all that out. The Government must think again. British justice was once regarded as the fairest and finest in the world, yet nowadays we find her lying face down in the mud. It is our fault and our duty to fix.