Three juries and one judge: a field report

The simulation of legal authority is becoming a mainstream issue in court

A rough start to a telling day

This morning, I had a minor meltdown. Heavy traffic and an impossible parking situation meant I was late to court — not as a litigant, but as an observer. A friend of mine was defending her home from a council-initiated charge, invoking trust law in a partially personal but profoundly public matter. While some slipped in late or left early, I counted around 36 people in the gallery — enough to fill three juries. The ushers looked visibly stunned; they had never seen anything like it.

A judge doing his best within a broken system

District Judge Terrence Phillips presided. I name him because he earned it — for his generosity toward open justice and an unusual grace under fire. With spectators standing against the walls and the courtroom exceeding safe occupancy, he nevertheless welcomed us all. He seemed honest, humane, and palpably uncomfortable at being placed in an impossible position. He accommodated both the defendant and her McKenzie Friend with decency — that British legal oddity: an informal assistant to a litigant in person, unfamiliar to American jurisprudence.

Contrast that with the council’s barrister — young, dishevelled, and literally picking his nose and eating it before the public. Unaware he is cannon fodder in a system built on procedural deceit, he dutifully played his part in a farce of public accountability. For the councils no longer act as civic caretakers; they behave as extractive syndicates, turning the human right to shelter into a taxable event. This is no longer property tax. It is existence tax — a financial enslavement indistinguishable from tribute.

The rotten core: liability orders without law

What makes this hearing significant is the legal mechanism at play. Council tax liability orders are processed en masse by magistrates’ courts — without meaningful judicial review or lawful process. There is “no sum adjudged to be due” under statute. These orders aren’t debts in the usual legal sense. They are accounting fabrications, backed by administrative summonses from councils pretending to be courts — something explicitly forbidden under current legislation.

Yet people lose their homes, their liberty, their sanity as a result.

Judge Phillips could not peer behind the so-called order. Bound by a system that treats such orders as sacrosanct, he cannot reassess what the issuing magistrates’ court has “decided.” But this raises an existential question: what happens when courts are reduced to simulacra — when the process is devoid of adversarial testing, judicial discretion, or statutory conformity? What we are witnessing is state-sponsored simulation: private debt enforcement masquerading as public law, under colour of justice.

These aren't courts. They're tribunals in disguise. And the English Constitution — whatever remnants remain — has no room for Star Chambers.

Fraud by system design

The fraud is systemic, not incidental. Summonses are issued that claim judicial authority when there is none. Councils assert orders exist when the very courts they cite deny ever issuing them. The line between claimant and judge collapses. Due process dies. And because the law is being applied through administrative mimicry, downstream actions — such as charges against property — have no valid legal origin.

No proper court seal. No named issuing officer. No consent. No contract. No due process.

Judge Phillips tried. He truly did. He reached for the Civil Procedure Rules and rightly demanded orders be signed, sealed, and dated. He confessed the limitations of his role — constrained by a procedural machine that knows no accountability. But his discomfort was evident. He conflated discretionary evidential standards with absolute jurisdictional defects, possibly because there was no precedent for what was in front of him: the administrative shell of a legal order, issued by an automated bureaucracy.

When he mentioned ink signatures and fingerprints, and quickly veered away, warning of “freeman on the land” arguments, I heard something deeper: a man aware he is on the edge of a dangerous truth. That the old legal rituals — signatures, seals, oaths — were never archaic. They were safeguards.

Personal cost of bearing witness

I was sick the day before, in bed, worn down by nearly a year of living amidst judicial lies, surveillance, perjury, and abduction — the scars of both personal betrayal and state abuse. This was my third court visit in a week. Each one adds weight. I carry it because I must.

And what did we see? The council dragged a grandmother into court. Harassed her. Threatened her home. Then dropped the case — with zero consequence for their malicious conduct.

This is what happens when the separation of powers collapses and no one in authority wants to be held responsible. Councils act without lawful documentation. Courts process bulk claims with no checks. Public scrutiny is the last mechanism of justice remaining.

Justice must be seen to be done

Before I left (I was in a two-hour parking bay and had to go), the judge acknowledged what the public already senses: if an order exists, it must be provable. It must be issued by a competent authority. It must bear the marks of law.

But here, none of that applies. Councils operate through automation and presumption. Courts pretend not to see. And the public, finally, is arriving in numbers — and in anger.

Let this hearing be a warning. The issue of council tax liability orders is not going away. If anything, it is heating up. The rule of law — not its bureaucratic imitation — demands full transparency. Without it, the legitimacy of the system dissolves.

And justice, once merely blind, may soon be seen as deaf and mute too.