Confidence in the British judicial system is ebbing away, a pollster finding a majority saying they have little or no confidence in the courts and judiciary for the first time.
Those saying they have “no confidence at all” in the courts and judicial system in Britain has nearly doubled in two years, rising from nine per cent in Summer 2022 to 17 per cent today. Taken together with those who say they feel “not very much confidence” at 36 per cent — up from 32 per cent two years ago — the total negative response to pollster YouGov stood at 53 per cent.
The results are an inversion of the longstanding situation in which the law, courts, and judges have generally been respected as just in the United Kingdom. As recently as Summer 2022, a majority were in the net positive camp, while 41 per cent overall said they had little or no confidence.
Much of this movement has come from those who self-reported having “a fair amount of confidence” in the justice system, that having fallen from 44 to 36 per cent in that time. Those who said they had a “lot” of confidence was never high, being 6 per cent in 2022 and only 10 per cent in 2019 when the survey was first taken, but collapsed to just four per cent today.
There is a clear political split in perceptions of the judiciary, with those who voted to remain in the European Union in 2016 considerably more likely to trust the courts than those who voted to leave. Brexit voters were overall 66 per cent in the negative camp — well ahead of the public average — while 53 per cent of Remainers still say they trust the judiciary.
A loss of faith in the law as just raises a major question of legitimacy for the government, which has struggled to deal with persistent accusations of two-tier policing and courts in recent years.
King’s College London academic David Betz, who has written on institutional blindness to the United Kingdom and other Western nations portraying warning signs for potential civil unrest, wrote of this phenomenon this week:
The essence of the matter, says Orwell, is this: ‘Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.’
That’s exactly why we are headed to civil war—very precisely: because this isn’t a valid premise anymore. That is exactly the matter at hand, the perception of legitimacy, that our state had trodden across and squandered because they do seem corrupted.
With that gone we come to a different aspect of cultural character, the same as every other, which is a desire to continue to exist.
YouGov’s finding that faith in one of the key institutions of the British state has dipped into negative territory for the first time appears to match with other recent findings by the same pollster pointing at public disquiet with the state. The latest government approval ratings this week saw 66 per cent unhappy, while on the subject of the party of government itself just 18 per cent said they feel Labour has a “clear sense of purpose“.
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