Episode 17 – Ending Trial by Jury? NHS Chaos & UK’s Broken System

Justine Thomas (00:59)
Hello everybody. My name is Justine Thomas.

GT (01:02)
My name’s Gareth Thomas.

Justine Thomas (01:04)
And this is the T word. Hello Gareth Thomas, how are you? Don’t mention steak.

GT (01:12)
Hello, Justine Thomas. I’m starting to think if this was a mistake.

Justine Thomas (01:18)
Well, I’ve got no idea. What’s a mistake? What about getting rid of trial by jury? Is that a mistake?

GT (01:24)
That could be a mistake. ⁓ Well, I’m just going to say a couple of things on this and then I’m going to get my pillow ready because the legal eagle is going to absolutely kick off. So you’re going to be able to explain all this because you are the you’re the top top top authority on it. But yes, so David Lammy, you know everything about everything legal. You are iron side. ⁓ David Lammy wants to you’re an enthusiast.

Justine Thomas (01:42)
I don’t know, Papa.

I’m an enthusiast, I’m a legal enthusiast.

GT (01:52)
Well,

you’re an ex magistrate, if I’m allowed to say that. You’re an ex magistrate. David Lammy is going to get rid of the jury trials, isn’t it? So my understanding is that we’re going to deny the most fundamental cornerstone of our justice system to save a few quid.

Justine Thomas (01:55)
I am an X-minus straight.

Well, this whole thing is predicated on this report by Brian Levinson that came out in July this year. He was looking at what was going on in the criminal courts and he produced a 388 page report.

which I have to admit, I haven’t read all of, but I have this week started working my way through it again to read it all in its entirety. So he produced a report and one of the things that he suggested in his report was that in order to ease the backlog of what is currently claimed to be 80,000 cases, that if we got rid of trial by jury,

the courts to get through cases more quickly. What I have to say I’m not completely clear on is how not having a jury assists in the main with reducing the court backlog. Obviously, you’ve got the element of swearing in the jury. It cuts a backlog in terms of time taken because

If you can’t opt for a jury trial, you’ll then have to have your trial by another mode. So in a magistrates court or one thing they’re talking about is for complex fraud cases, what was recommended by Levinson that this would be a judge would lead that up and potentially two technical experts in the specific field would be judging it. Which is sounds a bit worrying because

It’s like having two doctors with two different opinions, quite frankly. But then juries have different opinions as well. So you’ve got the complex fraud trials, not so complex fraud trials. And then you’ve got people who are subject to either way offenses who can elect to have a trial by jury. some people, and Lammy’s been talking about this a lot.

is, you know, he’ll say, you know, people are gaming the system. Well, yeah, people are gaming the system because what they want to do is get a jury trial because they think they’re more likely to get off. Now, people have always done that. So there’s nothing new there. The root cause of the problem, which is something I’ve been talking about to anybody who listened for a very long time, is lack of investment in the justice system. So you’ve got situation where

You haven’t got courts running because you haven’t got the people to run the courts. You can’t run a court without an usher, for example. Let’s just make it really, really simple. If you haven’t got enough cleaners in the building for the number of courts you want to hold or all of those types of things. In the Magistrates Court, if you don’t have a legal advisor, you can’t run a court. a court isn’t just one person. It’s not just you need a judge and that’s it. You need many, many different people.

GT (04:48)
you

Justine Thomas (05:01)
So I think the issue is people have always been gaming the system, but if you can get people through the Crown Courts, which is where jury trials are, then people won’t be able to game the system. So you’ve got to look at the root cause of what is it that’s causing all of this delay.

GT (05:05)
.

Well, I just think that regardless of the delay and the reasons that we’ve got such a big backlog, that the whole surely the whole point of a jury is to stop executive overreach or whatever you want to call it. it takes me back to when they had the ⁓ far right as in brackets in speech quotation marks.

they had the far right protests and people were hauled in front of these judges. And I can always, I can’t remember that judge’s name, but literally this guy, you know, sent a tweet and I’ll always remember the judge like looking at him as if he wanted to, you know, kill him. And he was going, this crime of itself is so serious that it must have the maximum possible sentence applied to it. And I thought, well, if this guy had gone, well, actually

I don’t care what you think, George, I’m going to go to a trial and I want to be trialed by my peers. Then potentially he wouldn’t have faced any kind of jail time at all. I’m not sure if it was actually the guy that ended up killing himself. You know, there was a granddad who went to who got sentenced and he ended up killing himself. So I actually looked, I actually took a couple of minutes and I looked at a couple of trials where

Justine Thomas (06:30)
Hmm.

GT (06:39)
the judge, the establishment had kind of ⁓ lent on the jury to go a certain way in a certain verdict. So there’s a case, Crown v Clive Ponting, who was a Ministry of Defence civil servant and he leaked documents to an MP about the sinking of a warship in the Falklands War. And in his trial, ⁓ his defence was a public interest defence.

And the judge turned around and said, the definition of public interest is whatever the government says on the day. So, you know, he was alluding to the jury that, you know, you need to find this guy guilty and they acquitted him. ⁓ And there was another guy as well called Stephen Owen, whose son got killed by, his 12 year old son got killed by a lorry driver who was a consistent.

dangerous driver without a license and he went and shot the guy because he went back driving and he was flaunting his sentence. He went and shot the guy. He was charged with attempted murder and he was actually acquitted by a jury who kind of took the ⁓ the compassionate, common sense view and acquitted him of attempted murder.

I’m not saying whether any of them are or wrong, but all I’m saying is the jury is there, I suppose, as kind of a buffer that doesn’t allow the state itself just to pass judgment on people, I suppose.

Justine Thomas (08:10)
Yes, and I think you’ve highlighted a fundamental point there. I mean, judges are not part of the executive, they are the judiciary. So when you think, you know, you’ve got the separation of powers, the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, and they’re in broad terms, they’re all supposed to be separate, these three arms of the state. And judges are not supposed to be influenced by the legislature, i.e. parliament or the executive.

Ultimately, would like to think judges aren’t biased, but I think

by diluting biases amongst 12 people, what we would hope is that…

in any case where somebody’s guilt is being contested or innocence is being contested, although we’re all, you know, innocent until proven guilty in theory. Another point I want to come back to is that you would hope to dilute that bias amongst a group of people. And, you know, people can have all these little bon mots and say, the juries, you know, usually sort of come to the right outcome. Who knows? Because we don’t actually know always who is innocent and who is guilty. And having sat on trials,

I know, I mean, I’ve sat on many trials, it’s very difficult sometimes to try and decide if the person is guilty or not. And you constantly have to keep coming back to what does the law tell me? What did the person do? And what were they essentially thinking at the time? Because they’re the elements of any offense. You’ve got your guilty act, your guilty mind, and you’ve got to have both. And if you can’t prove both, then the person is not guilty. So you’ve always been…

reminded of technicalities about the law, which is to come back to what you were saying about your judge, in which case was that Ponting? that he or she had said, well, you the public interest test is what the government says on the day, but the judge is duty-banned to say that if that is the law. Now, you might see that as the judge trying to exert influence, whereas I would see that as

Well, if that’s what the law is, the judge’s job is to advise on matters of the law. And if that is the law and if that is the legal test, it’s absolutely right and proper that the judge advises them of that test because that’s what they’re making their decision on. You’ve got to have decisions made consistently on what the different elements of the law are. You can’t just say, well, does he see much? You think he did it? Is it right? He did it. Was he getting his own back? But we would have kind of done the right thing.

I’m sure there’s always an element of that in any group of ⁓ jury members making their decision because that’s just human nature. But ultimately, that’s not actually the way that you’re supposed to make decisions. But how you make the decision, does it always necessarily mean that you come to the right result? Well, we can’t always know. Morally, we might think that the jury has got the right result.

But actually, if you dig down and look at things legally, it might be that based on the legal tests, they went completely against them and ignored them.

GT (11:14)
Well, like you say, it’s hard to say who’s biased, who’s not biased. you don’t know what’s in someone’s heart or someone’s mind, do you? But I mean, my understanding is that most jury trials make up about one or two percent of the legal system anyway. So aren’t they quite a small percentage of their overall tasking, taskings of the legal system? Like literally most things don’t go to a jury trial anyway, do they?

Justine Thomas (11:43)
So David Lammy this morning, I heard him on LBC and he gave a figure of 3%. So 90 % never leave the magistrates court. Yeah, 90 % never leave the magistrates court. And of the 10 % that are left, 7 % plead guilty before the trial anyway, and 3 % ends up at trial. But the fact it’s 3%, the thing is there is clogging up in the court. And one of the things I am aware of is that

GT (11:50)
I was close.

Justine Thomas (12:10)
There’s a lack of sitting days. So I guess it’s a bit like in the healthcare sector where you’ve got ⁓ operating theatre utilisation rates. So again, coming back to what I was saying, If you want to increase the court sitting days, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got plenty of judges available. Have we got enough judges? Have we got the clerk of the court? Have we got the ushers? Have we got all of these other people? And yes, they cost money.

But when you think about what we just heard in the budget on Wednesday and the amount of money that is being spent on ⁓ benefits, for example, you know, we’re just basically handed over billions of pounds in benefits in the next four years, five years, then actually fixing the justice system should be pretty much a drop in the ocean.

GT (12:57)
Yeah, and another thing as well that I hear is it’s quite a lazy system. So a lot of hearings don’t happen before 10am. I hear that a lot of courtrooms like to take their old long extended lunch breaks. There’s a lot of early finishes. the system itself is quite inefficient. Obviously, they don’t work on a Sunday.

The Saturdays, they don’t, there’s not a lot of hearings on a Saturday. So potentially the whole system itself is just, maybe it’s not just a staffing issue. It’s just an efficiency issue. Like it is with a lot of things that are run in the public sector just general inefficiencies across the board. So isn’t scrapping, isn’t scrapping jury trials just a way of taking away

Justine Thomas (13:39)
So, so.

GT (13:45)
a tried and tested ancient way of, sussing out basically someone’s guilt or innocence, taking that away for the sake of just not getting the majority of people who work within that system just to pull the socks up and get on with it.

Justine Thomas (14:03)
Well, I think if you’re talking about efficiency, so I’ve never operated in the Crown Court, I don’t know what happens there, and the cases there are more complex, the trials will be longer because they are more serious offenses. You can have a trial in the magistrates court, there’s only scheduled for two hours. I mean, all the trials are scheduled based on the number of witnesses that there are and the evidence that they’re going to be given and certain things like do we need special…

measures, do we need a screen for somebody because the person who’s giving evidence wants to remain anonymous, for example, or doesn’t want to have to look at the alleged perpetrator of the offence. But in terms of efficiencies in the Crown Court, if they are efficient, if what you are saying, people are having long lunches, finishing early, well, that’s all at the behest of the judge. So if the judge is the only person sitting, I can’t see that that’s going to become suddenly any more efficient because

GT (14:58)
There you go, he’s biased. He’s

biased towards long lunch breaks.

Justine Thomas (15:00)
Because,

you know, but I have to say, in all the time I have sat as a magistrate, I have never had a two hour lunch ever. It’s unheard of. That has simply never ever happened to me. So I don’t know where that’s coming from. I imagine, oh, sorry, extended.

GT (15:15)
I never said two hours. I never said a two hour lunch. I said extended lunch. said extended

lunch. That might just be 15 minutes. Might be 20 minutes, 30 minutes.

Justine Thomas (15:23)
Well,

never had over an hour lunch and all the legal advisors that I’ve ever worked with, they’re the ones who working through their lunch. And in terms of ⁓ delays, there are lots and lots of delays in court and there are proposals within the Levinson report about ⁓ pretrial preparation hearings.

GT (15:28)
I believe that.

Justine Thomas (15:48)
and how they can be more effective and giving longer timescales. Because what you often have is you’ll have the prosecutor and the defense will come to court and they’ll be talking about evidence and somebody hasn’t got some evidence or something’s missing or something was supposed to be served now. It’s not being served. So then you’ve got to adjourn the case again, but then it’ll be, can we just hang on for 15 minutes?

GT (16:08)
or the migrant that went to go and get fish

Justine Thomas (16:10)
in all the courts that I’ve been in, truly, if somebody didn’t appear or had gone out for lunch and didn’t come back, you would just deal with them later. You wouldn’t actually bring them back on another day, But in terms of starting at 10 o’clock, I’ve heard a few people mention this. ⁓ And the reason that the court doesn’t start to sit until 10 o’clock,

is because think about it in a magistrates court, again can’t speak for Crown courts, but think about it in a magistrates court, you’re saying that you’re telling people to get to court for nine o’clock. If you’ve got duty solicitor and there are six people who are coming in who are all entitled to see a duty solicitor but there’s only one duty solicitor, tell me how on earth the duty solicitor is supposed to be ready to start court at 9am. How are they supposed to do that? Well you could say, well they should have prepared.

GT (16:59)
Do overtime the night before.

Do overtime the night before.

Justine Thomas (17:01)
They should have,

well, they don’t get paid overtime, do they? They get paid really abysmal rates. They are very badly paid. They are not well paid. So I think, all of these things all feed into each other because I’m always astonished. I think blimey, you know, it’s taking forever. mean, sometimes it’s taking till 11 o’clock for the court to get started. And there’s something, sometimes you have to be pragmatic and you think, well, okay, well, we could have adjourned that case. The person’s not arrived or.

GT (17:08)
Wow.

Justine Thomas (17:30)
they’re known to have a drug problem or something and they’ve not turned up and the solicitor’s there. And we say, right, okay, well, we’ll leave that case for now and we’ll see if they turn up because you want to get them through the system. And the people in the court…

GT (17:41)
What do you mean by not well paid?

What do mean by not well paid, duty solicitors? That’s just got us, that’s really, that’s really like got me there. What do mean not well paid?

Justine Thomas (17:52)
Well, it’s known for not being a well-paid job.

I think the average starting salary for a CPS lawyer is about 40 grand a year and I think on average it ends up being about 49,000. So, you know.

reasonably well-paid job, but don’t forget these are people who’ve probably studied about seven years to ⁓ do this job. ⁓ So yeah, you know, it’s not the best paid job. You’ve not got gazillions of applicants wanting to take on the role of being a CPS duty solicitor. can imagine some days it’s pretty soul destroying if you think of, you know, you’re not exactly dealing with the intelligentsia all the time of society, are we?

your clients are probably not people that you might want to hang around with all day, especially, you know, people.

GT (18:34)
What would you do to increase the uptake

of duty solicitors then? What would you do? So you’ve just highlighted a point. What I’m trying to do, I’m not role playing here, but what I’m saying is we’ve got really, really simple problems that we need to fix. Inefficiencies, the courtrooms are over stacked. There’s a backlog. So you’ve just highlighted something there. Let’s pretend we’re politicians. So what would you do to double the amount of duty solicitors in the courtrooms in the next five years? What would you do?

How would you do it? Why don’t we just pay them more money then? Why do we do that? Why do we throw money into that? No, I’m just, I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m just saying. But it’s frustrating because it seems simple.

Justine Thomas (19:04)
Pay them more money. Pay more money. There you go. I would pay them more money. Yeah, I would pay them more money.

I would pay them more money. I would offer overtime. I would encourage them to hold surgeries for people who were going to be coming into court and for them to work at different times. you know, they are supposed to. It depends. You you’ve got people for whom the cases are ongoing.

they’re supposed to have engaged with the solicitor, the duty solicitor outside of the courtroom and then you’ll get to court and they’ll say, I didn’t hear from the solicitor or I didn’t know who my solicitor was. I am talking in the lower level courts here. So, you know, one would hope this wouldn’t be the case in a big fraud trial, but I’m talking about people who’ve come in who were facing custody. So I don’t know.

GT (19:55)
Do we find people? Do

we find people for not being prepared for when they come to court? Do we find them?

Justine Thomas (20:04)
No.

GT (20:04)
Right. So, so if I drive home tonight and one of my wheels goes into a bus lane at the wrong time, I’m going to get an 80 quid fine. So if I can be fined for putting one wheel, one of my tires into a bus lane while I’m driving home or stopping in a box junction, if I can be fined 80 pound or 160 pound for that, why can’t we fine people for wasting the court’s time? Therefore generating more income to pay duty solicitors more in the same way that I would fine people for ringing ambulances when

It’s not an emergency or missing doctor’s appointments or a whole host of other things. Why don’t we raise money in that way to pay duty solicitors more? And then by doing that, there’ll be an increased uptake and efficiency will go up.

Justine Thomas (20:54)
So who are you talking about fining? The duty solicitors or the accused?

GT (20:57)
Well, don’t know. everybody.

We live in a fine culture, don’t we? I’m not saying fine as in like a fine wine. We live in a fining, a fining, ⁓ financially punishing culture where we just fine everyone. You you drop a sweet wrapper. You should never let it, by the way. But you know, you drop a sweet wrapper. They’ll try and you 60 quid. So what I’m saying is if there are inefficiencies due to people not being prepared.

for what would be an extremely serious occasion. Obviously, if you have to go to court, then there would have been numerous letters sent to you. You’ll know why you’re there. You’ve probably had a lot of guidance on what you should or shouldn’t have done. ⁓ On both parties, the duty solicitor and the person who’s actually in court. If you’re not prepared and you waste the courtroom’s time, you should get a fine.

Justine Thomas (21:50)
I can only give you the benefit of my experience in Magistrates Court. I can tell you what I think about Crown Courts, bringing all my… bringing… that’s quite extensive. Bringing all my different experiences to bear. I can pass an opinion on what I think should happen at the Crown Court system. So in terms of fining people in the Magistrates Court for not being prepared, most of the people…

GT (21:54)
which is extensive.

Justine Thomas (22:13)
who are passing through the court system who are not prepared are likely to be on low incomes or to be on benefits. So you can fine those people. Now, in position of a fine, you could implement a new law that means you could do a spot fine, basically, rather than making it a criminal offence, that you could have some fining type sanction that you introduce into legislation one way or another. So do you understand what happens when people

commit offenses over and over again and keep getting fined and they are on benefits. Do you have any knowledge of what that actually looks like?

GT (22:51)
I can understand that, but we can’t, we can’t.

Justine Thomas (22:54)
No, no, no. Do you understand what that looks like? Because I might tell you something that might shock you in a moment.

GT (23:00)
Well, go on then. I’m not going to walk into your trap. You just tell me.

Justine Thomas (23:04)
So if you’re on benefits, most courts will not impose any costs. So let’s say you get nicked for shoplifting and you’re employed. I get nicked for shoplifting and I’m not employed. Exactly the same offense. We both steal the same bottle of wine or borrow chocolate, whatever. And ⁓ you’ll get your fine, band-aid fine, based on your income. So let’s say…

your income is a thousand pounds a week. Okay. So it will go on the relevant weekly income that you tell the court you have. So you’ve got a thousand pounds a week. So you’ll have your band day fine, which will be a proportion of that.

So that’s 50 % of your relevant weekly income. Okay, so you’ll have filled out a form. So I’ll sit there as a magistrate. You probably won’t come to court for this offence, but I’ll sit there as a magistrate and say, well, the CPS is usually asked for 85.

pounds costs for bringing the case to court. I know that your ⁓ relevant weekly income is a thousand pounds. I’m going to impose a band-aid fine, so I’m going to charge you five hundred pounds. There’s a victim surcharge which is forty percent of that, so that’s another two hundred pounds, that’s seven hundred pounds. And then you are going to pay a court cost fee of eighty five pounds. So it’s going to cost you seven hundred and eighty five pounds to nick that bottle of wine.

If you come before the court and you’re on universal credit, and by the way, I cannot live in any memory of any sitting, ever recall anybody coming to court with any evidence of what they earn. People do not go to court with evidence of what they earn. still, to this day, it still shocks me.

The concept as it was always explained to me, well, people are there and it’s their evidence that what they’re telling you, that’s what they earn, that’s their evidence basically of what they earn. They say so, if you like. So if you come to court and you say, I’m on universal credit. So the most weekly income that I can assume that you have is £120 a week.

So court costs will say, well, we’ll either let you off with those or we’ll halve them. Okay. So let’s say we let you off. So your fine is 60 quid.

and the victim’s surcharge on that, 4.6 is 24, 84 quid. So we’ll find you 84 quid. We’ll then have a look and see if you’ve got a fines account. Oh, you’ve got fines accounts at 2,000 pounds. Oh, you’ve got a fines account. It’s at 7,000 pounds. You’ve got a fines account. It’s at 9,000 pounds. What we then might be asked to do is do what’s called a remittance. And the remittance is that we’re being asked to look at your fines account and to consider whether…

GT (25:55)
What’s a fan’s account?

Justine Thomas (25:57)
A fines account is when you’ve committed loads of offences, you’re not paying them all back, you’re just paying them back on tick, on the never never, okay? So you could be in court for a shot on tick, on the never never. So it’s called a fines account. So you come back into court every week for a different offence, every single week, you’ll just keep building up a fines account, building up a fines account. And eventually the bench will be asked to remit your fines account. Remit means they will wipe it all out.

GT (25:59)
and it adds up. OK, OK. OK, yeah. OK. Is that the legal term on tick?

Ahem.

Justine Thomas (26:26)
because it’s got so high that there’s no reasonable chance that you will ever pay it. So to help you out, we’ll write it all off and you’ll never pay a penny of it. So you can go out and commit multiple offenses, multiple offenses, keep racking up your fines account and at some point the court will write the entire fines account off and you won’t have any fines.

GT (26:47)
Well, I’ve got the solution then. We ban the court from writing off the fine. There, that’s that problem sorted. That’s that problem sorted. It’s not a difficult question. No, there’s a saying, your actions have consequences. I just get really sick of all this intelligentsia way of going about it. I actually believe we should start simpler. So if I murder someone,

Justine Thomas (26:52)
I don’t think it’s a difficult question. Well, it’s a difficult. ⁓

I’m not surprised.

GT (27:13)
I am going to sacrifice an absolutely monumental portion of my life. And that is called a consequence. The Crown Court is not going to look at me and say, let’s look at his years account. ⁓ Flipping egg. I mean, in America, they’ll sentence you to 300 years. You know, they’re not going to look at my years, stroke, fines account and go,

Well, with all these crimes added up here, he’s looking at about, you know, 94 years in prison and is already 60. So what we’ll do, it’s not fair. We’ll wipe it. It’s the same thing. You are going out and you’re committing crime. The reason that your fines account is growing exponentially is because you’re a scumbag. You’re a criminal. So why are you sat there feeling so, my God. Well, we can’t keep fining this criminal who is blatantly

He’s blatantly breaking the law. mean, this guy’s blatantly breaking the law.

Justine Thomas (28:05)
But that’s what happens. That’s what happens. That’s happening.

GT (28:10)
He does not care about the amount of fines that he’s running up and he’s got no concept of how this is going to affect his life. So let’s just get rid of it all. It’s pathetic. If you choose. Well, this is the thing. So so I would compare it. I would compare it. Yeah, I would compare it to that. It’s the same. You do one extreme action.

Justine Thomas (28:20)
That’s happening every single day up and down the land. That’s happening every day. I told you you’d be shocked. I told you you’d be shocked.

GT (28:32)
Surely one extreme action like, ⁓ so for example, like a bank robbery, A bank robbery, a serious assault, a murder, a serious fraud, whatever, right? You’ll have one serious action that will result in a massive consequence, yeah? How is that any different then to 500 micro actions that result in the same consequence?

because in theory you could you could weigh them both up together and say one is could potentially if you look at all of the victims, all the guy that the houses that this guy wrote. Well, yeah, I’m not saying it’s as simple as that. But what I’m saying is writing it off is it’s ridiculous. You’re not punishing the perpetrator. And guess what? Sometimes you may be paying for your decisions, bad decisions that you’ve made for whatever reason. There are some people.

Justine Thomas (29:07)
Well, if you had a scorecard and you just got to a number on the scorecard, yeah, I suppose so.

Well that’s, I’m just.

GT (29:25)
that have to pay for those decisions for the rest of their lives. I knew someone who jumped off a wall once and it was a 20 foot drop. And for some reason he decided to jump off the wall. Well, guess what? He was paying for that decision for the rest of his life. He’d come right off that check. you it seems that it just seems ridiculous. I think a lot of people would agree with me.

Justine Thomas (29:44)
Well,

I think the counter argument is, and you know, having sat there and seen this happen, and I just think it’s absolutely crazy, it took me a long time to get my head around it, but the counter argument to what you’re saying is, if you’ve got somebody who’s committed multiple offensives, you’ve got this huge fines account, if you’re trying to then steer people away from a life of crime, if they then suddenly decide to try and turn their life around and they’ve got 12 grand in fines, if that person is really…

turning their life around, they’re making something of themselves, maybe they’ve got family now or whatever, who knows. As a society, well, it does, it does, it does, I’m afraid it does.

GT (30:18)
But it doesn’t erase your past. doesn’t erase what you’ve done. You’ve still got to be accounted. Well, that’s what I’m saying. It doesn’t in the legal

sense, it probably does. But at the same time, you did what you did. So fair play. Round of applause. You’ve turned your life around, but that doesn’t. It’s like when someone murders someone in prison and they go, actually, I’m a born again Christian now and I’ve turned my way and murder is bad. I’ve turned my way. You’re still not coming out, mate. I’m sorry. You’re not coming out. So I get it.

Justine Thomas (30:39)
Yeah.

Yes. Yeah, good analogy.

And I’m not saying that I agree or disagree with this. It really shocked me when I first knew that this happened. I don’t think most people are aware of this.

GT (30:53)
But this is us in it in this country. This is just

us. This is what we’re like. A lot most of other countries around the world would just have to would take my hard line opinion. And I think there’s probably a middle ground somewhere. ⁓ But again, if you commit X. I’ve got the answer.

Justine Thomas (31:07)
But it should be prescribed in

a better ⁓ way.

GT (31:12)
Once your fine account gets up to 50 times your income, we’ll just send you to prison. Five years. Done. No more crime.

Justine Thomas (31:22)
Okay, so on prison then.

So another thing to do with sentencing then is that if you plead guilty at the earliest opportunity, so Holly Willoughby has been in the paper today, hasn’t she, for driving without due care and attention. She didn’t appear in court, but there was a hearing at the magistrate’s court because she had a momentary lapse of concentration. She pled guilty immediately at the scene. She knocked a guy off his bike and I think she broke his neck, didn’t she, and maybe broke his toe. I think the toe was the least of his worries.

⁓ So, yeah, somebody like her.

GT (31:54)
I wouldn’t have said it in that order.

Maybe you should have said the toe first. The toe didn’t really have the impact after we knew he’d broke his neck. But anyway, continue, sorry. Sorry.

Justine Thomas (31:59)
you

That’s the order I read it in in the article,

⁓ So yeah, so for somebody like her, anybody who pleads guilty, she’s gone to court earliest opportunity, so she will get an automatic third off her guilty plea. And the third off the guilty plea is pretty much throughout the justice system, that’s what you get. So it could be anything, murder, manslaughter, down to shoplifting, down to, you know, urinating to public place, whatever.

So ⁓ you get your third off. Now, Levenson’s proposals are actually to try and get more people out of the system and get them through quicker, that we just increase that to 40. Okay. But think about this. when Labour came into power and they had that brilliant idea, I know we’ll free up more space for criminals. We’ll just let out loads of really violent, awful criminals early. So…

I believe they’d let out some people who had only served 30 % of the sentence. So if you take that view, so let’s say you’re going to get sentenced to 10 years in prison for something. You plead guilty, 10 years is probably a bad example actually. Let’s take five years. So you get your credit for your early guilty plea. your actual sentence, you’ll have a third off.

That’s not the same as it being suspended for a certain amount of time or leaving prison early, but your actual sentence is officially a third off. So a third off five years would be 1.5. So you’re sentenced to three and a half years. That is your sentence. If you’re sentenced to three and a half years, so you start out at five years, you pled guilty at the earliest opportunity. So ⁓ at the moment you get 30 % off.

but now they’re going to give you 40 % off, so you’ll get two years off, so that’s three years, but based on what Labour did before, if we have a crisis again, so what would let you out after 30 % of your sentence, so you’ll come out of prison after one year. So you’ve now got somebody who could have had a five-year sentence, who’s now been released after one year. Tell me how that makes sense. How is anybody going to be happy with that? How can that be right when essentially,

GT (34:26)
I can’t,

Justine Thomas (34:27)
It’s the 20th, 20th, isn’t it, of what you would have served. How do victims feel

GT (34:27)
I can’t be happy. I can’t.

Justine Thomas (34:33)
served by that? How does society, how does the community, how does society feel served by that? Because ultimately, if you’ve got something that you could have been sentenced for five years for, how on earth are you going to be rehabilitated in a year is beyond me, if it’s that serious. But moreover, in terms of punishing people, how is that any sort of punishment when it should have been five years?

GT (34:58)
yeah, the sentence should be the sentence. And I think most people, again, it’s just I hate oversimplifying things, but the sentence should be the sentence. If you get five years, you should serve five years. Understand good behavior and that maybe they should just do it to the ⁓ governor’s, the prison governor’s discretion. Or if someone genuinely has, you know, turned the life around or really shows remorse or was an absolutely outstanding prisoner.

But it’s not special circumstances anymore, is it? It’s just across the board, just kind of keep your nose. They’re gonna let you out early no matter what. You’ve gotta do a lot of bad stuff to actually serve your full sentence, you know, and they’ll chuck you out and they’ll put you on license. And it’s like, okay, babe, good boy, are you gonna go back to prison? But…

Justine Thomas (35:38)
Hmm.

I don’t have an issue

per se, I don’t have any issue at all with the concept of letting people out early for good behavior, to coin the phrase. I don’t think there should be any automatic right to come out early. think the sentence, yeah, the sentence should be the sentence. And if you can demonstrate certain things like rehabilitative type, you know, that you’ve been rehabilitated, good behavior, all of that stuff. Yeah, absolutely fine. Allow people.

GT (35:55)
5 % earlier, 5 % earlier maybe.

Justine Thomas (36:12)
give people something to aim for rather than people saying, well, I might as well just behave however I want when I’m here because there’s no real motivation for me to behave any differently because people are often motivated to change by reward. And if the reward is you can get out sooner, well, then that’s got to be a good thing, hasn’t it? But I think, you know, we were talking about this whole right to trial debacle.

which is not from Magna Carta by the way. So everybody keeps saying it’s from Magna Carta, it is not from Magna Carta. And we’ll do a special video all of my own on that because that is one of the most common misconceptions, it really, really is not. But ultimately, you you were talking about one of the most fundamental rites at the top of the hour, but…

GT (36:43)
Noooo

you do a special video. Whoa.

Justine Thomas (37:02)
You know, surely, innocent until proven guilty is the cornerstone, actually, of the criminal justice system. That’s the thing that’s most important. And I struggle to understand how having trials where there is just one person who is sitting in judgment, I am personally deeply concerned that that does not protect the maxim properly of innocent until

proven guilty because judges, as you said before, are too open to their own biases. And actually, they deal with this day in, day out. And then they’re often too close to it, if that makes sense, in terms of procedure, et cetera. And ultimately, you’ve got people within a community. can often see things for what they are because they’re in that community, if that makes sense.

GT (37:54)
So to summarise, we should keep jury trials, we should get more efficient within the whole legal system and maybe adjourn this subject to a later ⁓ date and discuss whether Rachel Reeves has been guilty ⁓ of misleading the House.

Justine Thomas (38:17)
Well, we’ll have to

come back to that. We’ll have to come back to that. But I will leave you with one thought. So in 2011, when there was talk about the UK having a Bill of Rights, the Roundtree Foundation went out and did a survey. And the top two things that people who were surveyed came back with as being fundamental were the right to free healthcare and the right to a jury trial. They were the top two things.

GT (38:46)
Well, Justine just segwayed my segway. Love it. Now back to the back to guilt. Rachel Reeves, is she guilty of misleading the public? Go.

Justine Thomas (39:01)
She’s,

yes, ridiculous question. I thought we could have another episode for this. Absolutely, no, no, yes, yes is the short answer to the question, yes. She’s misleading herself. She’s misleading herself.

GT (39:08)
well, can I summarize my understanding and then you put me you put.

So from, I think she is.

So from my understanding, it turns out now she’s been kind of softening us all up for these major tax hikes. She’s been telling us for the last, well, is it six weeks now, you know, doing little press conferences after, yeah, after Nigel Farage did his little press conference, she did her press conference that said, we’re all gonna have to get in this together, we’re all gonna have to make hard decisions.

Justine Thomas (39:35)
Pitch rolling. She’s been pitch rolling.

GT (39:46)
She’s been talking about this black hole. She’s raised taxes by, I think, something like £26 billion. And it turns out that the OBR were telling her in September, well, it’s not that bad, love. It’s actually not that bad. Your black hole isn’t as black as you thought it was or as deep as you thought it was. So I think from my understanding, what it looks like to me is…

Justine Thomas (40:08)
Yeah.

GT (40:16)
She’s used this budget to basically raise taxes in order to not only U-turn, but give even more welfare away to calm down her backbenchers and basically protect her and the prime minister’s job. I can’t see it any other way, if I’m honest, because, well, I just don’t know any other way of describing it.

Justine Thomas (40:44)
Yeah, I think you’ve nailed it. I think it’s exactly that. I mean, she was opposed to the two child benefit cap in the same way that David Lammy was a vehement supporter of jury trials a few years ago. I’ve been on X saving all the screenshots. But yeah, you know, she opposed the two child benefit cap and you know, she’s a sort of compared to the rest of the people in her party or many in the party, she’s quite right wing.

GT (41:03)
Cake.

Justine Thomas (41:09)
So I think it was not of her doing to get rid of the two child benefit cap, which just in case anybody’s still listening, it is not child benefits, that is something different. So the two child benefit cap is a cap for universal credit claimants on the number of children that can be included in their claim. And it was two and it will be as many as you like from April 2026.

GT (41:33)
And is it does it not equate

to about £3,500 a child now? So if you’re if you have if you’re currently sitting at home unemployed with six children, you’re essentially going to get a 14 £15,000 pay rise a year from when does it come in? Is it April?

Justine Thomas (41:38)
Exactly, per year, yes.

Yeah, exactly that. So.

GT (41:54)
And so you literally, I mean,

and that is the equivalent to some people’s monthly wage, which I just find incredible. just, I just, and I also, well, again, we talked about the school lunches and yeah, that’s on top of the breakfast clubs. Don’t get me started on breakfast clubs. but the thing is the amounts of money that she’s playing with and the repercussions from the lies she’s

Justine Thomas (42:02)
Yeah. Yeah.

GT (42:20)
telling just to save her job. So this is one person. This is well, this is two people. She is affecting the lives of tens of millions of people in order just to secure the jobs of two people. I mean, if you put that in perspective, how

Justine Thomas (42:36)
aren’t RAGIOUS!

GT (42:38)
if you look at how much 26 billion pound is, she’s literally manipulating the levers of power to suit her own. Well, that’s what it appears to be to me, because I think that the OBR was saying that the her wiggle room was about four billion. If anything, she needed to raise four billion. But what she did is that

Justine Thomas (42:49)
Keep her job. Yeah, exactly that.

GT (43:00)
she put up taxes in order to give away more money. If she hadn’t have changed the current standing, as in she’d kept the two child benefit cap. mean, they never said this in their manifesto, did they? They never said they were going to do, but she didn’t say anything until Nigel Farage said it. I think it was actually because I was quite shocked when Nigel Farage said it, if I’m honest. But didn’t Nigel Farage mention it? And then all of sudden Rachel Reaves is now decides she’s going to spend nine billion pound on it. The money comes out.

Justine Thomas (43:26)
Well, they’re just hanging on reforms coattails, aren’t

they? Yeah, exactly. But it’s not, know, the money and it’s whose money is it at the end of the day? I do things ⁓ when, you know, that are outside of this and I do my own, I’ve got my own little socials and things. And I did a video three or four days ago where I showed that if you were a single parent and you’re on Universal Credit and if you could also

GT (43:31)
The money guns out again!

Justine Thomas (43:54)
get a little tickle for your children and get them, you know, if they’ve got low level anxiety or maybe some ADHD that you have diagnosed yourself and you can get them on some low level disability benefits as part of your universal credit claim, that actually the amount that a person would need who was going out to work to raise the same amount of money that you will get from universal credit

was £99,800 a year, because your net income next April with those four children will be £5,170 a month. And that’s before, as I said previously, before you’ve had your warm homes discount, before you’ve had your free school meals, gone to the food bank, had your breakfast club, had your free school uniforms, all of those things. And ultimately the benefit system

is just being used as a cash cow now in relation to disability benefits and it’s being abused with disability benefits. It really, really is. And people who say it isn’t, you know, I’ve had quite a few comments on my socials, people saying, oh, you know, it’s outrageous you’ve said that about disabled people. I said, well, no, actually I didn’t say that about genuine disabled people. And that’s also in the video because I do carry out that. But ultimately, if you are genuinely disabled, you know, we’ve got some genuinely

GT (44:56)
It is, it’s been abused. It’s just been abused.

Justine Thomas (45:20)
very disabled people in our family. know, we’ve got that particular person I’m thinking about, he will never live an independent life. He’s got to have 24 hour care. You know, he is disabled in every single sense of the word. Who would begrudge him, anything? Give him twice as much money, quite frankly, as what he’s Yeah.

GT (45:40)
You could give him 10 times. If you stopped

all these false claims, you could give him 10 times as much.

Justine Thomas (45:45)
Well, you could put the money into the justice system, couldn’t you? But ultimately…

GT (45:47)
I wish I’d

have looked up how many people were receiving any kind of financial aid in the 1980s for stress or mental… ⁓ Well, no, but maybe the worst in society. So if you were schizophrenic, maybe, or if you had like severe PTSD or something like that. But how many people through mental illness were actually getting support from the state? I wish I’d have looked at the figures or if there are figures.

Justine Thomas (45:59)
None. Don’t bother looking, it’s none.

Yes. Yeah.

It’s just gone like that. mean,

it’s just, it’s the whole thing is ballooned. Yeah, I think it’s 500 a day are adding, adding, adding onto this. And the interesting thing is they keep talking about lifting children out of poverty. If you actually go, which I like to do and go and look at the government’s own papers and policy documents on all of these things.

GT (46:17)
Well, isn’t it something like a thousand claimants a day? A thousand claimants a day now for the people.

Justine Thomas (46:38)
so the government doesn’t call it child poverty. It uses a thing called relative low income after housing costs. But in the same paragraph, they also say that this measure will lift 150,000 adults out of poverty to use the short term. So who’s the money actually for then? So is it for the adults? mean, it’s…

GT (47:00)
And how do they ensure, I

mean, I’ve never had children, but how do they ensure that money goes to the children? I’d feel better about giving, no, well, that’s what saying. I’d feel better if I knew that a lot of that money was going towards their food or their, like you say, their school uniforms in the form of vouchers or something like that. how do you know that someone who’s now got a pay rise of 14 and a half grand a year, the first thing that they’re

Justine Thomas (47:06)
We can’t.

GT (47:27)
that they’re going to do tomorrow is book a holiday to Benidorm or something with the money that they’ve got. How do you know that money is going to go on the child?

Justine Thomas (47:32)
probably do. There’s people on benefits who,

people on benefits go on foreign holidays and ultimately if the benefits have stopped gap and they’ve ended up, booked a holiday anyway they go, but you shouldn’t really be able to afford to book a foreign holiday if you live on benefits. If you are able to do that, the benefit system is completely and utterly failing. But just to come back to the, I know, I know.

GT (47:51)
No, I agree.

I’m not saying that’s fair. I’m not saying that’s fair.

It’s not. But that’s the thing. It’s not fair that you can’t do it. But at the end of the day, that’s reality. And that’s part of the thing. None of us seem to live in reality anymore. It’s a case of we’re all just living this lie. But the lie is going to catch up. The lie is going to catch up with her. And it’s going to catch up with this country when it goes, you when it runs out of money.

Justine Thomas (48:05)
Yeah, so

Well you… Well the…

Well, yes. you know, your original question to me was, has Rachel Reeves, is Rachel Reeves misleading us? Has she misled people? Yeah, absolutely. She’s misled people. I mean, she can try and dance around it, but she didn’t know that that paperwork from the OBR was going to be released by Richard Hughes on Friday. She didn’t know. She thought she had this little private space that she could have a conversations with him. And my

GT (48:26)
misled people and I think she has.

for her own gains, which makes it even worse.

Justine Thomas (48:47)
best guess that there is still some hope that there are some people who’ve got some conscience and some honor in these organizations is that based on the things she was saying that somebody just thought maybe it was him thought, do you know what? Enough’s enough here. We cannot have people going out just saying these lies to the public because they’re just complete and utter lies. And it has all been done to keep her in power and Keir Starmer.

And it’s just all been done to placate the backbenchers who want to lift the two child benefit cap. And it’s absolutely insane how people who are on benefits can have more money and enjoy a better lifestyle than people who are getting up at six o’clock and going out and working is completely and utterly beyond me. And it’s wrong.

GT (49:36)
It is. And it feels like we’re moving into a society where you’ve got one section of society is basically working and producing wealth to look after and nurture the other side of society. like I say, I don’t mind my taxes going on, helping people who deserve it, but being on benefits is becoming a career choice for a lot of people. And it is a lifestyle. And I think…

Justine Thomas (50:03)
It’s a lifestyle choice. It’s just a lifestyle choice.

GT (50:06)
I and there’s a whole

Justine Thomas (50:06)
surely.

GT (50:07)
section of society now, their key role. I mean, I want my taxes to go to things that are going to benefit the country, make this country better, you know, investing in our military, the NHS, in schools, education, the police, making this country a better place to live. But it seems more and more and more now that our hard earned tax money is basically going in a pot.

then just be distributed to a lot of people that just don’t want to work and have been and are also being engineered not to be able to work. this generation of anxiety and, you know, these…

Justine Thomas (50:36)
Just, yeah.

Yeah, don’t worry about

your anxiety. That’s fine, you know. Don’t worry. You stay at home. We’ll pay you. You’ll be fine.

GT (50:46)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, don’t worry. you know,

not not making not making our children. I mean, you’ve got a whole generation of children that are just being taught on how not to be resilient at all. we’re just teaching a whole generation of children how not to be resilient. But then once they get taught

that they don’t have to be resilient in any way. We just look after, we’ll just look after you. The state will look after you. And these guys over there that work hard and get up at six in the morning every morning, they’ll just pay for you. And that’s kind of where we’re moving, isn’t it?

Justine Thomas (51:20)
Yeah, and

these people just think it’s normal. And ultimately, you’re right, we’ve just got this ballooning welfare state. We’ve got a ballooning public sector. It’s just never, ever ending. you know, I’ll leave you with a thought about the public sector. So the doctors are there. I mean, the brass neck, did they have a 29 % pay rise or something similar?

GT (51:43)
Yes.

Justine Thomas (51:44)
And I did hear Wes Streeton this morning going, flipping out to be fair, telling them not to go on strike. I thought it was quite engaging, should we say. But ultimately, take the NHS, you’ve got doctors now, they’ve had nearly a 30 % pay rise. They’re going out striking for more money again. Apparently they’re all going to Australia. Well, do you know what? Go to Australia then, quite frankly. Because we’ll have to get other doctors to come over here then, won’t we? But ultimately, the…

you know, the issue with whatever the doctors are going to, but the time a doctor retires, my understanding is that their pension will be about £125,000 a year. So, you know, it’s all right me flipping flippantly saying, go to Australia then, because they’re not going to go to Australia, are they? You know, they’ve got great pensions once they get a certain number. No.

GT (52:34)
And I don’t think you can transfer it abroad. I’m pretty sure you

can’t, but that’s the thing with doctors.

Justine Thomas (52:38)
Once you’ve won the

point I wanted to make once you’re a certain year in certain couple of years in, you you’re earning really pretty, pretty good money. You will always earn good money. Your income will go up and up and tell me why since 2019, the productivity of the NHS is reduced by 18%. I could have got that back to front. It could be 19 % since 2018, but it’s 18 and 19. So what that actually means is now it’s costing us 30 billion pounds.

a year more for our NHS in real terms because the productivity has dropped. we’re throwing more money at this stuff all the time, but it’s not more productive because the only section of society that actually produces anything and produces any money is the private sector. And even when you’re taxing people who work in the public sector, all you’re doing is just washing round private sector money again.

That’s all. You’re just giving it to somebody just to take it back.

GT (53:32)
Mm.

Well, I think that they’re striking between the 20th, the 17th and the 22nd, aren’t But again, I looked at some. You’re not the only person who likes to look at government papers and stuff, Justine. I can look at things too. So I looked at the the population of the country since the year 2000. So hear me out here. So the population of England since 2000 has grown by 19 percent.

And frontline clinical staffing in the NHS has grown by 54%. So in the year 2000, in the year 2000, there was one frontline member of staff for every 107 people in the UK. There’s now one frontline for every 83 people in the UK. So there are more frontline employees of the NHS per person in the UK.

Justine Thomas (54:14)
around.

GT (54:35)
than there has been for the last 25, 30, 40 years. No, well, this is the thing. This is the thing. So, again, if they don’t feel they’re getting paid enough, well, the key is in the name budget. So I’m pretty sure that the NHS controls its own budget. Pay your doctors more. And just like the discussion we had about the jury trials, stop being so inefficient. You’ve got more staff than you’ve ever had.

Justine Thomas (54:39)
So what are they all doing?

Yeah.

GT (55:04)
You’ve got more staff than you’ve ever had, but you’re the most inefficient. I think the way that Labour are saying waiting lists coming down, but I don’t believe that they are. So we’re the most inefficient that we’ve ever been. We’ve got the most stuff that we’ve ever had. There is something.

Justine Thomas (55:04)
Mmm.

Costing

is the most it’s ever cost us.

GT (55:21)
And there’s a common theme that’s run through this whole podcast, actually,

in each one of these topics that we’ve discussed tonight, the root cause you could point to is just the flagrant, just ridiculous waste of public funds. And obviously how these budgets are set, how these funds are spent. I’m pretty sure there’s enough money

in the NHS coffers to pay the doctors a little bit more, even though their pensions are gold plated as well. think if you look at the difference between an Australian pension and a British pension from the NHS, the British pension gives you a lot more value. And I think when you you tot it all together, I think Australia is a little bit, you know, they’ve got a private sector, haven’t they? But

when you look at it round and about, they all earn a good stack, but just in different times of their lives and in different ways. But again, if you wanted to pay the doctors more money, the frontline staff, pay them, get rid of all these DEI guys, which I think they’re about ⁓ how many DEI people are there in the NHS, about 2000. And they’re all on they’re all on about 10000 pounds. Get rid of the waste in every scenario tonight. The budget. You just wasted money, Rachel. The court system.

Justine Thomas (56:32)
No, I don’t know. I mean, it’s just ridiculous. Yeah, it’s…

GT (56:43)
Just make it more efficient and stop wasting money. And with the Doctor Strike, you know, you’ve got more money than you’ve ever had. You’ve got more money than you’ve ever had. Please just spend it wisely. I’m not sure it’s that difficult.

Justine Thomas (56:57)
Well, what a fabulous way to end the show on Gaz. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

I’ve just got one question to ask you before we go. Apparently, Donald Trump thinks there will be a general election in the UK in 2027 and that Nigel Farage will be the next prime minister of the UK. Do you agree? Yes or no?

GT (57:22)
Yes.

Justine Thomas (57:25)
Well, we’ve got some more episodes to come before then. So hopefully, let’s see how it goes. We’ll report back. Okay, well, look, thanks very much, everybody, for listening. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you did enjoy it, please give us a little like, drop us a comment. Do you agree with the things we’ve said? Do you disagree? And please don’t forget to subscribe if you like it so you can be directed to come back for more chit chat. ⁓ It’s been great. My name is Justine Thomas.

GT (57:54)
My name’s Gareth Thomas.

Justine Thomas (57:56)
Goodbye.