This video, from December 2, 2025, features Jacob Rees-Mogg on the UK news channel, GB News’ State of the Nation. In it, he critiques the UK Labour (leftist) government’s freshly announced reforms to scrap jury trials for crimes carrying sentences under three years (as well as complex fraud cases), arguing that this erodes a fundamental constitutional safeguard for individual liberty. He emphasizes jury trials as an “ancient right” and a bulwark against state overreach, calling the changes “ludicrous” and driven by bureaucratic convenience rather than justice.
The segment, lasting about 3-4 minutes, ties into ongoing backlash against Justice Secretary David Lammy’s proposals, which aim to cut court backlogs but have drawn fire from conservatives for undermining Magna Carta-era protections. The reforms—revealed just days ago—have sparked debates on everything from free speech acquittal rates to comparisons with European systems.
Socialists can’t operate with liberty and free speech, it’s all about control and this is control with the WEF steroids conducting things.🤬🤬 pic.twitter.com/FOObCrSiI7
— Matt Casey 🏴 🇬🇧 (@MattCas04807118) December 3, 2025
Brief Description of the Speaker, Jacob Rees-Mogg
Sir Jacob William Rees-Mogg (born May 24, 1969) is a British Conservative politician, financier, and broadcaster. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he served as Member of Parliament for North East Somerset from 2010 to 2024, holding key roles including Leader of the House of Commons (2019-2022) and Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (2022). Known for his staunch Euroscepticism, socially traditional views, and aristocratic demeanor—often caricatured as quintessentially “posh”—he lost his parliamentary seat in the 2024 general election. Today, he hosts State of the Nation on GB News and manages a substantial family fortune from investment banking.
The Brits are fighting back
Look at this at from the newly formed https://ruleoflaw.institute
FROM THE DIRECTOR OF THE RULE OF LAW INSTITUTE
Donal Blaney, Founder of the Margaret Thatcher Centre & Director of the Rule of Law Institute
“At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
Your rights were won at Runnymede!
No freeman shall be fined or bound,
Or dispossessed of freehold ground,
Except by lawful judgment found
And passed upon him by his peers.
Forget not, after all these years,
The Charter Signed at Runnymede.”— Rudyard Kipling
Reports that the Labour government intend to abolish our traditional and inherent right to trial by jury, codified in Magna Carta, except in the most serious criminal cases, represent an unacceptable threat to our ancient liberties.
For too long, too many of us have sat idly by while our rights have been eroded.
It now past time for us to wake up as a people, and to act.
In her address to a Joint Session of Congress in 1985, and in words that resound all the more as the United States prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in July 2026, Margaret Thatcher remarked:
“Our two countries have a common heritage as well as a common language. It is no mere figure of speech to say that many of your most enduring traditions—representative government, habeas corpus, trial by jury, a system of constitutional checks and balances—stem from our own small islands. But they are as much your lawful inheritance as ours. You did not borrow these traditions—you took them with you, because they were already your own.”
In his Iron Curtain speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri in 1946, Sir Winston Churchill similarly observed:
“We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man, which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which, through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, the English Common Law, find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.
All this means that the people of any country have the right and should have the power by constitutional action, by free unfettered elections with secret ballot, to choose or change the character or form of government under which they dwell; that freedom of speech and thought should reign; that courts of justice, independent of the executive, unbiased by any party, should administer laws which have received the broad assent of large majorities or are consecrated by time and custom. Here are the title deeds of freedom, which should lie in every cottage home. Here is the message of the British and American peoples to mankind. Let us preach what we practice, let us practice what we preach.”
Margaret Thatcher’s holy trinity consisted of reverence of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. The most important of these is the rule of law. Freedom without the rule of law leads to anarchy. Democracy without the rule of law leads to tyranny.
In the postscript of Statecraft, Margaret Thatcher wrote:
“The demand that power be limited and accountable, the determination that force shall not override justice, the conviction that individual human beings have an absolute moral worth which government must respect – such things are uniquely embedded in the political culture of the English-speaking peoples. They are the bedrock of civilised statecraft. They are our enduring legacy to the world.”
And yet in Britain today, as it has been since the 1990s, the rule of law is dying.
The legal system is in disarray. Access to justice is the preserve of only the richest or the very poorest in society. Courts are understaffed, poorly administered and court buildings are decaying. Justice is all too often delayed and thus denied. We live increasingly under a system of judge-made laws, rather than legislation and regulations being scrutinised and passed by democratically accountable lawmakers.
Power is arbitrarily misused by the state, emanations of the state and regulators who are no longer equal before, but sit above, the law. Denied due process, equality of arms and procedural fairness, and without the presumption of innocence, justice suffers. The process becomes the punishment for those who face the ire of the powerful.
Instead of laws and regulations that are known, stable, clear and certain, we now face retrospective legislation, erosion of our traditional liberties, and arbitrary diktat from bureaucrats, administrators and judges engaged in social engineering who push a political agenda that is anathema to the rule of law itself.
The rule of law exists to uphold the dignity and liberty of the individual against the powers of the mighty. Somehow, the country that gave the world Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, constitutional checks and balance, and the common law now finds itself badly adrift. This latest reported threat to the rule of law is a further step too far.
It is for this reason that the Margaret Thatcher Centre – a charitable project founded with the Iron Lady’s active involvement – is launching the Rule of Law Institute in this, the centennial year of Margaret Thatcher’s birth.
Through the Rule of Law Institute, the Margaret Thatcher Centre is uniquely well placed to bring its focus, and the power of the Iron Lady’s reputation and legacy, to educating legislators, judges, court staff, practitioners, academics, students and the public at large to the challenges being faced and the need, with all due speed, to take a corrective path to restore the rule of law to the heart of legislating, government and public policy for the sake of society itself.
Will you stand with us as we work for the restoration of the rule of law and the protection of our ancient liberties, before it is too late?
Margaret Thatcher delivered. Now it’s our turn.
Donal Blaney
FOUNDER OF THE MARGARET THATCHER CENTRE & DIRECTOR OF THE RULE OF LAW INSTITUTE