If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? More importantly, if a citizen is prosecuted in a British courtroom, the press is barred from the record, and the jury is removed from the box, does justice still exist?
Under the stewardship of David Lammy, the Ministry of Justice has moved from mere incompetence to active suppression. By ordering the total deletion of the Courtsdesk archive, the government is not protecting “data privacy”; they are sanitising the record of a failing state.
The Architecture of Secrecy
The statistics unearthed by Courtsdesk are an indictment of a system in collapse. When journalists are given no advance notice of 1.6 million criminal hearings, justice is no longer “done in the open.” It is conducted in the shadows of a crumbling bureaucracy.
Courtsdesk provided a lens through which the public could see the machinery of the law: listings accurate on a pitiful 4.2 per cent of days and half a million weekend cases heard in total silence. By issuing a cessation notice, the Ministry has effectively smashed that lens.
The Grooming Gang Connection: Erasing the Evidence
The most chilling implication of this purge concerns the “historical” record. We are currently in the midst of a statutory inquiry into grooming gangs, a scandal defined by decades of authorities ignoring data and silencing victims.
Recent audits, such as the one led by Baroness Casey, found that two-thirds of recorded perpetrators had no ethnicity data captured. This “data gap” was not an accident; it was a policy of obfuscation. This looks very much like by destroying the Courtsdesk archive, which tracked 1.5 million hearings, the MoJ is ensuring that independent researchers can never go back and cross-reference these “lost” records against the official narrative. They are deleting the receipts of their own negligence.
No Jury, No Record
But the deletion of data is only half the strategy. While the MoJ burns the archives, David Lammy is simultaneously moving to dismantle the 800-year-old right to trial by jury. Under the guise of “efficiency” and tackling backlogs, we are seeing a radical shift toward judge-only trials for a vast swathe of “either-way” offences.
The logic is chillingly Orwellian: no jury, no record. When you remove the jury, you remove the last democratic check on state power. You replace a panel of peers with a single state-appointed official. When you combine this with the destruction of the Courtsdesk archive, you create a vacuum where the state prosecutes, the state judges, and the state deletes the evidence of its own procedural failures.
The ‘Data Protection’ Fig Leaf
The MoJ justifies the Courtsdesk purge by citing “unauthorised sharing” and data protection concerns. It is a classic bureaucratic manoeuvre: find a technical foot-fault and use it to justify capital punishment for transparency.
The CEO of Courts Desk, Enda Leahy, noted they reached out sixteen times for a dialogue. They were met with the ultimate silence: an order to delete everything. If this were truly about security, a solution would have been found. This is a scorched-earth policy against scrutiny. You would be within your rights to ask what the hell they are hiding.
The Verdict
Open justice is not a luxury; it is the only thing that prevents the legal system from becoming an instrument of arbitrary power. In a democracy, the courts do not belong to the Ministry; they belong to the public.
By forcing the deletion of this archive and curtailing the right to a jury, David Lammy is overseeing the construction of a legal system that is both blind and invisible. We must demand to know why a Labour government, supposedly committed to the rule of law, is so terrified of a spreadsheet and twelve ordinary citizens.
Justice dies in the dark, and the Ministry of Justice just turned off the lights.
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