Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill

My hon. Friend has got the point—very late. [Laughter.] What depresses me and many others more than anything else in the Bill is the presupposition that jury service is an unaccountable burden on our fellow citizens. Jury service is not a burden; it is a privilege. It is a privilege which derives from the freedoms with which we were all born. We did not earn the privilege; it has been passed to us from generation to generation over 800 years. Like all privileges, it is not necessarily a pleasure. Often it is not, but as the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) said earlier, jury service can be and often is a pleasure, particularly on long trials. He mentioned that long associations are made between jurors and that occasionally they marry. I recollect being invited to just such a wedding after my client, no doubt as a result of the representation that he received, was convicted by those jurors. We live in an age when our fellow citizens are accused of hedonism, apathy and an indifference to social responsibilities and the way in which they live. Nobody who has sat through a long fraud case or a long trial and watched how jurors—our fellow countrymen—deal with these cases can agree. People come as jurors to trials believing that they will never understand them. After weeks, the fascination with the trial grows. The jurors learn; they bring concentration to the trial. All that gives the lie to the false psychology that tells us that our fellow countrymen have an attention span of three minutes.