JohnBoy

🧵 “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, well, I have others.” For more than a year, Rupert Lowe made trial by jury one of his signature causes. When the Labour government proposed moving most Crown Court cases to judges sitting alone, few politicians were louder in opposition. “Jury trials help to protect the British people from an increasingly two-tier justice system,” he posted in July 2025, asking why the government was “so terrified of decent British people sitting on juries”. In November: “We must defend the jury trial. That is absolutely vital.” In December, scrapping jury trials was “pure legal vandalism” and “a thundering disgrace”. In January 2026 he praised the Labour MP Karl Turner for “leading the way on jury trials”. In March he announced: “I just voted in Parliament to protect jury trials.” He also put his name to something more considered. On 26 November 2025, Lowe was among the signatories of a letter to David Lammy, led by Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, urging the government not to abolish the right to be tried by one’s peers. Juries, the letter argued, are “a safety valve in a free society”. Without them, “communities will feel judged by a distant establishment”. And then the line that matters most: “When a jury speaks, the public accepts the verdict even when it is unpopular, because it is their neighbours who have decided.” Three months later, Lowe co-authored Restore Britain’s policy paper “Retaking the English Castle”, which commits the party to preserving trial by jury in all criminal cases. The paper praises juries for keeping the law “responsive to the ordinary conscience”, and singles out a jury that acquitted a former Royal Marine charged after the Southport murders “within a mere 17 minutes, showing heroic contempt for the prosecutors”. On 19 October 2026, Tommy Robinson went on trial at Southwark Crown Court, charged with two counts of harassment causing fear of violence. Opening the case, prosecutor Ben Holt told jurors that Robinson had used “bully-boy, intimidatory tactics” against two journalists, Andrew Young and Jacob Dirnhuber, after the Daily Mail reported on him holidaying in Cyprus while riots spread across Britain in August 2024. The jury heard that Robinson sent messages including “I’ll be knocking at your door” and “let your bosses know I’m coming to all of your houses”, and that photographs of Young’s wife and children were posted on his @X account. Dirnhuber had to move house. Young was given a close protection officer. The judge, Mr Justice Cavanagh, was explicit with the jury: “This is not a trial about or an assessment of the defendant’s political views.” On 28 October, after more than eleven hours of deliberation, nine men and three women convicted Robinson on both counts by a majority of ten to two. He faces up to ten years in prison and will be sentenced on 16 December. Robinson called the verdict “insane”. Lowe’s response came within hours: “it is my view that the system has, again, treated him unfairly. We live in dark times.” Robinson, he added, “has not been treated fairly by our establishment for many years, and today is the latest example of that.” Restore Britain’s paper celebrated a jury that acquitted in 17 minutes as heroic. This jury took more than eleven hours, and Lowe called the result unfair. The wording is careful. Lowe never mentions the jury. He blames “the system”, “our establishment” and “the state”, abstractions that let his readers hear “the verdict was unfair” without him ever criticising the ordinary people who reached it. Yet the letter he signed made the opposite case: juries are what stop communities feeling judged by a distant establishment. Robinson was not convicted by a remote official or by the kind of “Left-liberal” judge Restore Britain’s paper warns about. He was convicted by twelve of his fellow citizens, through the very safeguard Lowe spent a year defending. Continued...