A Labour minister has justified proposals to eliminate juries in some situations by arguing that judges who have received diversity training will perform “well.”

Following claims by Labour MPs that judges could be prejudiced, Baroness Levitt said she had ‘confidence in a professional judiciary’.

The Lord’s justice minister told peers that the ‘judiciary is becoming more diverse’ in response to concerns about the lack of diversity among judges.

‘It is not where we want it to be, but it is getting there,’ she said.

‘What it does have is extensive training in matters to do with issues of diversity, fairness and disproportionate impacts on particular sectors of the population.’

Her words came amid a huge outcry over measures suggested by Justice Secretary David Lammy to remove jury trials for some offences.

On Tuesday, Labour figures warned that the lack of diversity among judges could lead to those from minority or poorer backgrounds being discriminated against.

Former Labour grandee Dianne Abbott said the ‘entire House’ was concerned that members of the public ‘will undoubtedly suffer miscarriages of justice if the right to trial is curtailed’.

Labour MP Clive Efford told the Commons that he feared that restricting trial by jury ‘would put a certain class of people in judgment over the rest of us.’

His fellow Labour MP Stella Creasy added: ‘It is difficult to see how this measure – with all the challenges it may bring for justice and fairness, particularly for some of our minority communities – will address that backlog.’

Speaking in the Lords on Tuesday night, Baroness Levitt, a barrister who previously worked under Sir Keir Starmer, defended the plans.

She told peers: ‘I have been a criminal barrister for many decades.

‘When I practised as a criminal barrister, I too felt that any attempt to touch what happens with jury trials was fundamentally wrong.

‘However, I then became a judge in the Crown Court and saw what was actually happening.

‘Every judge in the crown court up and down this country will have experienced sitting with other judges at lunchtime and saying “I cannot believe that this case I am trying here and now is actually in the Crown Court. It shouldn’t be here.”

‘We are not sacrificing jury trials – of course, we are not.

‘It has never been that every criminal case was tried by a jury – 90 per cent are currently tried in the magistrates’ courts. The question is, where do we draw the line?’

She was responding to former Labour minister Lord Boateng, who said that juries were the best safeguard against an ‘overmighty and oppressive state’.

He told peers: ‘At the end of the day, are not random and conscientious people taken off the street the best safeguards of our civil liberties against an overmighty and oppressive state?

‘If any one of us here were to be charged with a criminal offence, would we not rather put our trust and confidence in a jury rather than in a state appointee? Are not juries the best way of linking ordinary people to our criminal justice system?’

Under the proposed amendments, jury trials will be discontinued for offences that carry a likely penalty of less than three years.

The most severe crimes, such as murder and rape, will continue to be dealt with by juries, along with lesser ‘either-way’ offences that carry more extended jail times.

Baroness Levitt was chief legal adviser to Sir Keir while he was director of public prosecutions, and she supervised the Crown Prosecution Service’s examination of its handling of the Jimmy Savile case.

Earlier this year, the PM put her up for a peerage.

There it is! The real truth behind Lammy’s plan. Judges with their ‘diversity training.’ Does this mean they will go easy on migrants, and is it a protection scam? What they don’t have is any common sense training.

How the hell is diversity training going to help? At the moment, they are letting more criminals out of prison than they are putting in. It’s a complete farce.

It’s pretty evident from where I’m sitting that judges can’t be entrusted with such important decisions – this is the reason we have juries, and even that’s not foolproof.

If judges have undergone diversity training, does it also suggest that they have been brainwashed? But then they would require a brain to start with.

There is nothing diverse about criminality. Either a person has committed a crime, or they haven’t.

When convicting somebody of a crime, the proof needs to be irrefutable (beyond doubt – the act of crime – something that has been seen with one’s own eyes – caught in the act of the crime – not just a reason to believe), because at the end of the day, justice is blind.