Defend Our Juries

One of the highlights of 2024 for me was the privilege of helping on St James’s wonderful ‘Imagine The World To Be Different’ garden at the Chelsea Flower Show. At the time, I didn’t think about its title much, apart from its relevance to the Wren project, but recently I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

I began thinking about it when, with others from St James’s, I joined an al fresco Quaker meeting outside New Scotland Yard in April. Together with faith groups in London and throughout the UK we were there in solidarity with Westminster Friends after the police raid on their premises. Twenty years ago I would never have imagined a London in which armed police would batter down the door of a Friends meeting house (they could have rung the bell) and arrest half a dozen young people who were enjoying tea and biscuits during an introductory meeting for a group called Youth Demand.

For me, that was the wake-up call. Others had been more preceptive.

Like retired social worker Trudi Ann Warner. Twenty years ago I’d never have imagined her arrest for displaying a placard outside the Royal Courts of Justice: “Jurors you have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience”, words which are displayed on a plaque inside the same building. It commemorates a landmark case of 1670. Earlier that year, two Quakers, William Penn and William Mead had been charged with preaching to a ‘riotous assembly’ in contravention of The Conventicle Act. They accepted the preaching charge, but not the riotous assembly. The jurors agreed, and in spite of the direction of the judge they returned a not guilty verdict. The furious judge then had them locked up for two days and nights without food or drink. Led by Edward Bushell and Thomas Vere, the jurors stood their ground.

Defend Our Juries was a response to Ms Warner’s arrest. Since then it has highlighted other restrictions on fair trials. Because for a juror to have the opportunity to follow their conscience, they need to know the reasons for breaking the law in the first place. Courts now often prohibit this. Recently just the mention of the climate crisis in a court has in some cases been deemed contempt of court, punishable by imprisonment.

Twenty years ago I never imagined a country in which a non violent protest movement like Palestine Action might be proscribed as a terrorist organisation. Those of us who lived through the IRA bombing campaign, or remember the 7/7 bombings in London, know what terrorism looks like. And breaking into a weapons factory, digging up a golf course, and spraying paint on RAF planes are criminal acts, for sure, and the law exists for such acts to be brought to court – but terrorism? No.

Our freedoms and our right to protest are being eroded, little by little, like the frog in hot water, and some of us, like the poor frog, remain unaware of what is going on. If we don’t feel strongly about climate change, or what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, it’s easy to think that this steady nibbling away at our freedoms will never affect us. The trouble is that once the right to protest has been taken away, it is taken away for all situations. And then democracy itself is in danger. A quick look at what is happening across the Atlantic – abortion, trans and gay rights, academic independence and all the rest – should be enough to set alarm bells ringing. It turns out that freedoms that have taken decades, maybe centuries, to achieve, can be unravelled in a matter of months.

Of course, it could never happen here. Could it?

Central to the vision of St James’s Church is the statement that ‘rooted in God’s earth, we envision a just society and a creative, open-hearted church’. This means that: ‘We will advocate equity and open-heartedness in our community, contributing to a more just and inclusive society’. Justice is a key element in our mission statement.

But what does this actually mean? Right now, this country that I love doesn’t always look particularly just, or inclusive. I’m imagining it to be different, just as those brave jurors did in 1670, just as Trudi Warner did, just as Defend Our Juries continues to do. On August 9th Defend Our Juries organised the mass protest in Westminster Square. The ongoing horror in Gaze probably accounts for the hundreds of brave citizens – the majority over sixty – prepared to face arrest on that occasion, but the rights of jurors and the freedom to protest will still need defending when the hideous carnage in Gaza has ended.

Unless we continue to speak out for the freedom of jurors and the hard-won rights to non violent protest, the society we hand on to future generations will surely be less just than it has been, less just than it is now. That is not a future I want to imagine.