Labour MP who was groomed asks colleagues to back judge-only trials

A Labour MP who became pregnant after being groomed and raped as a teenager has called on colleagues to back plans for judge-only trials or “allow the power balance to remain in favour of criminals as opposed to the victims”.Natalie Fleet, the MP for Bolsover, said she would not encourage survivors to seek justice through the courts because “the hell of being raped is made worse by the hell of going through delays in the system”.Drug dealers by contrast were electing for lengthy jury trials so they could “game the system”, she said. She has also hit out at “the barrister class and lawyer lobby” among MPs for not sticking up for the victims of crime.She is backing David Lammy’s proposals for a new criminal court where judges will hear cases on their own, with magistrates-only hearings for offences that carry a maximum sentence of two years or less and judge-only trials for complex fraud cases.The plans have already faced significant backlash from the legal profession as well as dozens of Labour MPs and peers from across the upper chamber.Fleet, who grew up on a council estate in Sutton-in-Ashfield in Nottinghamshire and became pregnant when she was 15 after being groomed by an older man, called on colleagues to back changes so that courts could be used to clear the backlog of rape cases.She said: “In the community and the council estate that I come from, I know a lot of women who have been raped and I know drug dealers.“And I say this as somebody who has been raped, I would not report being raped under this current system because the hell of being raped is only made worse by the hell of going through this system.”By contrast, she said, a drug dealer facing “either-way” offences chose trial by jury because they knew it would delay imprisonment while they continued to sell drugs.Fleet said: “They chose a jury with the intention that they knew it would take longer. In the time they’ve been waiting for trial, they’ve had two children … They’re going to be in prison for a shorter time than they have been waiting for trial. This is a brilliant way to game the system.”Fleet called for Labour MPs to back the changes to the justice system to restrict either-way offences and allow more time for serious sexual assault cases to be heard.She also questioned the tactics of the Labour MP Karl Turner, who has threatened to resign and trigger a byelection unless Keir Starmer scraps the plans.Fleet said: “I’m not angry on behalf of the barrister class and the lawyer lobby. I am angry on behalf of the victims. You can shout and you can scream and you can brief and you can threaten a byelection. Or you can support the government on behalf of victims.”Lammy is pushing ahead with the changes to the justice system, but officials remain concerned they may struggle to get the package through the upper chamber without having to compromise, adding to a series of high-profile government U-turns.The Tory and Liberal Democrat frontbenches will oppose the changes, while “significant disquiet” continued among Labour backbenchers, a party source said.The former shadow attorney general Shami Chakrabarti said: “The government will have its work cut out to persuade the Lords of its wisdom in exceeding Sir Brian Leveson’s proposal without even a sunset clause to allow temporary provision.”Helena Kennedy, the Labour peer and president of the campaign group Justice, said: “At time of low trust and limited judicial diversity, weakening jury trials could strip the justice system of legitimacy.”A report released on Thursday by the Institute for Government (IFG) said Lammy’s plans to introduce judge-only criminal trials in England and Wales would save less than 2% of time in crown courts.It said while the number of jury trials would fall by about 50%, there would probably be only a 7-10% reduction in total time taken in the courtroom as a result of the entire package of changes, with judge-only trials contributing to only a fraction of that time.