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Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill

I was hoping to have an answer, but unhappily I did not; or rather, it was an attempt at an answer but, as the Solicitor-General knows, it was entirely deficient. I shall take it piece by piece. PII happens in almost every serious fraud case that is tried—certainly in my experience—so that is the end of that argument. The second argument is that a single judge can hear PII applications, but the European Court has already said that the only reason it endorses PII applications made to a single judge is because he is not the judge of fact. The minute he is a judge of fact, it will, ipso facto, offend before the European Court. For a secondary judge to sit alongside another judge dealing with PII applications would be reinventing the wheel, with one judge sitting as jury and the other as a judge. Furthermore, it is necessary that PII cases are kept permanently under review by the judge trying the case. Finally, I do not want to give the Solicitor-General a long lecture on the inquisitorial system, the Napoleonic and other codes and how they differ from an adversarial system, because we would be here for a considerable time. However, the checks and safeguards in an inquisitorial system are wholly absent from our adversarial system, which relies on a jury to provide them.