King’s Speech

Lord Wolfson of Tredegar Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wolfson of Tredegar (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for her speech outlining the Government’s legislative programme for the new Session in the area of justice and home affairs. I was particularly impressed, if I may say respectfully, that her speech managed both to defend her husband and to revive “Dixon of Dock Green”, a combination not often encountered in modern criminal justice policy. Like her, I look forward to the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, whose route to high office in the Church was assured when she was ordained in Liverpool.

I also look forward, of course, to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Case, whose route to becoming Cabinet Secretary was assured when he had as his doctoral supervisor, I understand, the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield. Like the Minister, I also pay tribute to the noble Lord in what I understand is to be his valedictory speech. He is one of the House’s greatest historians and constitutionalists. His wisdom and scholarship have enriched our political life for many years. According to Wikipedia, which might be accurate on this point at least, when created a life Peer he said:

“I hope I can help the House of Lords a bit on constitutional matters. I’ll certainly give it my best shot”.


I think I speak for the whole House when I say that there are few, if any, better shots.

I am going to focus on the justice and constitutional aspects of the programme, and my noble friend Lord Davis of Gower will have more to say about the Home Office and immigration matters. Before turning to the substance, I cannot help observing that the gracious Speech is admirably confident in declaring what His Majesty’s Government “will” do; in current political circumstances, a little more conditional drafting might have been prudent. One is tempted to suggest that “may” rather than “will” is currently the operative auxiliary verb, because so much of the programme before us bears the unmistakable imprint of the current Prime Minister’s constitutional philosophy, although I doubt those words have ever crossed his own lips.

It is an approach to policy and political life in which the instinctive answer to almost every social problem is not stronger institutions, stronger families, stronger civic culture or greater democratic resilience but instead another statutory duty, another regulator, another criminal offence or another extension of state authority. This Government and their programme speak the language of moderation and pragmatism, but beneath it lies an unmistakably lawyerly belief that society can be reordered from Whitehall by legislative design and managed compliance. It is a vision in which politics becomes litigation by other means, and in which the state readily, steadily and constantly expands, while responsibility is transferred upwards from citizens and communities to officials, regulators and courts.

Before turning to the matters that divide us, I want to turn to a matter which ought to unite us. His Majesty chose to address antisemitism in, I think, the second or third paragraph of the gracious Speech, and with respect, he was right to do so, because the fight against antisemitism goes directly to the themes of justice, public order and national cohesion which underpin this debate. I am sure the whole House joins me in recording our gratitude to His Majesty for his visit to Golders Green last Thursday. It demonstrated moral leadership, solidarity and an understanding that the rise in antisemitism is not some marginal or community-based concern but a direct challenge to the values and cohesion of this country, and that challenge is increasingly visible on our streets.

On Saturday afternoon, London witnessed two very different marches. One march was under the banner of Palestinian activism and the other was addressed by Tommy Robinson, but there was one deeply disturbing point of convergence between them. At the first march, a banner declared, “End Zionist control of the UK government”. At the second march, a banner demanded, “End Zionist occupation of Britain”. They were different crowds and different political tribes, but it was the same ancient poison, the same conspiracy theory, the same obsessive belief that Jews—or Zionists, used as a euphemism—secretly control Governments, societies and nations. The far left and the far right now increasingly resemble two mirrors facing one another, reflecting the same hatred back and forth in slightly different language. One wraps it in the rhetoric of anti-imperialism, the other in the rhetoric of nationalism and racial grievance, but beneath both lies precisely the same antisemitic conspiracy theory.

The overnight news is no better. Police are investigating another violent physical attack in Golders Green in the early hours of this morning. The Metropolitan Police has asked the organisers of the Nova festival exhibition to take down the main sign and keep the location a secret—not as censorship but as a protective measure. The fact that an exhibition commemorating young people murdered at a music festival should require covert policing and counterterrorism precautions before it can safely open in London in 2026 is a disturbing reflection of the climate we face in Britain today.

His Majesty the King has, as I said, shown leadership and moral clarity. We now look to the Government to show leadership and legislative clarity. That means moving urgently to proscribe the IRGC in full. Last Thursday, in the other place, the Security Minister said that the Government would bring forward fast-track legislation “in the coming weeks”. I hope the Minister will be able to clarify later tonight precisely when the Government intend to bring this legislation before Parliament and whether it is intended to commence the Bill here or in the other place.

At the centre of the Government’s programme for justice reform is the courts modernisation Bill. We have been consistently told that these measures are necessary to tackle court backlog and restore confidence in the criminal justice system. We on these Benches do not dispute the seriousness of the backlog. Victims are waiting years for justice and defendants are left in limbo. There is a real risk that cases collapse under the weight of delay. But the fact that a problem is serious is no justification for some of the alarming solutions proposed.

A jury trial should not be viewed as an administrative inconvenience. It is a central safeguard of liberty in our constitutional order. The right to be judged by one’s peers has endured precisely because it protects the individual from the unchecked power of the state. It commands public confidence in a way that no technocratic reform or efficiency drive ever can or will. Indeed, the strongest arguments in favour of jury trial have come from the Government. The Prime Minister, in his previous incarnation as the Director of Public Prosecutions, said:

“The right to trial by jury is an important factor in the delicate balance between the power of the state and the freedom of the individual. The further it is restricted, the greater the imbalance”.


Likewise, the current Lord Chancellor was described as finding juries in his 2017 review into racial bias in the criminal justice system to be

“the only stage … without racial bias”.—[Official Report, 2/12/25; col. 1750.]

He recognised that juries are not obstacles to justice but defenders of fairness and equality under the law.

One point that the Minister did not deal with but that I would ask the Government to think about is this: we have a judiciary in this country of the highest quality, but it is not reflective of the society in which we live. At the moment, we, so to speak, get away with it in our criminal justice system because juries are representative. If we do away with juries, and defendants walk in and see a judge and perhaps two magistrates who do not look like them, nor come from where they come from, speak like them or share the same life experiences, that will to lead to demands for different ways of appointing our judges and, perhaps, for radical reform of our judiciary. I gently ask the Government to think about this very carefully. We might not get what we wish for.

These same figures, the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor, who in the past were so confident in the strength of the jury system, now ask us to accept that juries have become barriers to efficiency. Under this Government, therefore, the proposal reflects not only a change of policy but a collapse in principle.

Let me take on the Minister’s point about the change of offences that go to magistrates and juries. Of course there have been changes over the years, but we are talking about serious cases. Under these reforms, offences that attract sentences of up to three years’ imprisonment may be heard without a jury. Many sexual assault cases will fall within scope, and fraud and theft cases may be heard by a judge alone. Those, if I may pick up the Minister’s phrase, are among the most serious cases. For the Government to suggest that these offences no longer warrant the constitutional safeguard of a jury trial is a profound shift in the balance between citizen and state; it reflects a stripping away of individual citizens’ rights.

That is particularly the case because one of the most alarming elements of the Bill is its retrospective effect: its impact on those already awaiting jury trials. Defendants who have already exercised their lawful right to elect a Crown Court trial now find that right about to be removed, according to the Government’s Bill, after the fact. Parliament is being asked to change the rules midway through the process for individuals who made their decisions based on the law as it stood at the time. That is unfair, and it will be seen throughout the country as profoundly unfair.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this debate is that the evidence, which the Minister did not really touch on, increasingly points against the Government’s case. Last week the chief executive of His Majesty’s Courts & Tribunals Service confirmed that cases are being resolved at a faster rate than forecast because sitting days have increased and courts are operating more effectively. Lifting the cap on judicial sitting days—which the Government should have done when they came into office and not only after the Lady Chief Justice asked for it—has begun to reduce backlogs in key regions across England and Wales.

Of course we need more judges and more IT, but we also need more courts actually capable of sitting. Last week 10% of courts capable of sitting did not sit because there are such problems with the court service and the way courts have been maintained. These are long-running problems, but the answer is not to abolish juries; the answer is to deal with the criminal justice system.

There is a fundamental lack of legislative coherence at the heart of the Government’s policy. When justifying these reforms, the Lord Chancellor claimed that defendants are “gaming the system” by electing Crown Court trials for relatively minor offences. The Minister for Courts in the other place asked:

“Do we think that someone who has stolen a bottle of whisky from a minimart should receive the right to trial by jury?”


Well, I can answer her question: yes, her own Government think that. The Government’s Crime and Policing Act, which received Royal Assent a matter of weeks ago, restored low-value shoplifting offences to the ordinary either way regime, thereby preserving the defendant’s right to a trial by jury in the Crown Court for low-level shoplifting offences. Why were these low-level shoplifting offences sufficiently serious to justify a jury on an either way offence, whereas now we are told that they are so minor that jury trial should be removed?

What makes all this especially troubling is that the basis for this policy has fundamentally changed. When it was introduced, we were told that it was necessary to reduce the backlog; it was all about efficiency. The Criminal Bar Association, the Law Society and the Bar Council said, “Where is the modelling?”, but the modelling was not there. Now we are told something completely different: that it is a matter of principle. Sarah Sackman told the House of Commons that even if there is no backlog, this is what the Government are going to do. It is no longer being advanced as an emergency administrative response to pressure on the courts; it is being advanced as a matter of constitutional principle.

If this really was a principled constitutional change to the relationship between citizen and state, between accused and jury, and between the Executive and the administration of justice, why was there not a word about it in the Government’s manifesto? Indeed, even if the reason for it was to reduce the backlog, I have to tell the Minister that, when we sat on different sides, we were constantly being berated about the backlog by what was then the Opposition—the backlog was not a state secret. So, even if this is an answer to the backlog, it still should have been in the Labour Party’s manifesto. This is an emergency response. I do not know whether it has come from No. 10 or from the Attorney-General. I doubt, however, it will survive under any future Prime Minister.

This matters. The electorate were given no indication whatever that a Labour Government intended to dilute or curtail long-standing rights to trial by jury. Constitutional change in this country derives its legitimacy not merely from parliamentary arithmetic but from democratic consent. It is precisely in circumstances such as these that your Lordships’ House has, I suggest, a particular constitutional duty: not to frustrate government for the sake of opposition but to require Ministers to justify profound constitutional change openly, candidly and before the electorate, rather than presenting it after the event as an inevitable technocratic necessity.

The right to jury trial has endured for centuries because it protects the liberty of the citizen against the power of the state. Once diminished, it will not easily be restored. This House should therefore approach this element of the Government’s programme with the utmost caution. That is assuming, of course, that the next Prime Minister—who might be with us in a matter of weeks, and surely within months—does not conclude that Mr Lammy’s earlier instincts on these matters were rather sounder than his later ones and quietly leave these proposals where they belong, in what the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, has taught us is the long catalogue of constitutional mistakes wisely abandoned before they could do lasting harm.