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Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill

I want to intervene on my hon. and learned Friend on the point about the balance and the representativeness of juries, which is already causing much false indignation and misrepresentation on the Opposition Benches. I covered the Blue Arrow case; it was my first journalistic assignment. It was strange, because I was in the scribblers’ dock when one of my former colleagues, an investment banker called Nick Wells, appeared in the dock because he had worked for County NatWest. I remember clearly that a way in which professional jurors got off doing jury service in great numbers was either to declare to the judge that they were account holders at the NatWest bank or to go and open such an account. A large number of white-collar jurors disappeared from that court through jury selection, and there was a serious question about the representativeness of the jury.