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Four English murders (three of them in London) “Other news today” in today’s Telegraph makes cheerful reading.
Here are the first four stories:
Convicted man who cooked victim’s brains admits killings
Teenager killed boy for his baseball cap
Elderly woman stabbed to death by thieves
Waiter accused of axe murder
And that last one was not just a murder, it was a decapitation. A few feet away from where her boyfriend works, apparently.
George Orwell wrote a famous essay called Decline of the English Murder. It would appear that England, has, murderwise, bounced back since Orwell’s time.
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As Louis Armstrong said, “What a wonderful world”.
Thank you, Mr Blair, Mr Major, Mrs Thatcher, Mr Callaghan, Mr Wilson, Mr Heath, Sir Douglas-Home, Mr Macmillan, Sir A. Eden, Mr Churchill, and perhaps most of all to Mr Atlee for sowing the seeds of the rot we call socialism.
Thank you all, for a job so poorly done, that Great Britain could not be in a worse mess, even if during your collective tenure, we had no leaders at all.
Having Leaders of your calibre, has resulted in the squandering of so much that was civilised and worthwhile, that we are now reduced to the level of just another ‘Africanised’ state, where bribery, corruption, murder and the worst forms of criminality are considered the norm. It really has to be some special form of stupidity that sees such waste as a virtue…
There is no-way that Great Britain can be considered a civilised country, while acts such as those mentioned in the post are considered ‘the norm’, and where criminals are no longer called on to atone for their crimes.
Thank you all for giving life in GB ‘that added something’, even if it is a certain edginess and fearfulness, it certainly makes our old age more interesting…and then there is that multicultural thing, but I will resist regaling you with the details.
Thank you all for creating one of the Greatest Cock-ups of the modern era, a perfect monument to Over-reaching ego and stupidity…
When I was visiting family and friends in Ohio this weekend, my father said, “So-and-so wants to talk to you about emigrating to England. They want to move there for the low crime rate.” I haven’t laughed so hard in a long time. And this was before yesterday’s beheading in our neighbourhood, which comes only a few months after one of Perry’s neighbours in upmarket Chelsea – where I work – was stabbed to death. My father suggested a self defence class to me, but I don’t think a knee to the groin is much of a defence against a guy with an axe.
Well, I’ve only read the decapitation story, but it’s obvious what Britain needs now. Yes folks, it’s time for Ax Control! Only when these dangerous weapons are off the street and no longer available (he probably didn’t even have a permit!) will Her Majesty’s subjects be safe in their own homes and cafes!
You read it here first!
(Maybe we should pre-emptively begin a Sticks and Stones Control campaign too?)
And thank *you*, Ernest Young for an astute post.
Britain, with its town centre drunken yobbery at one end and the endless stream of murders at the top end, so to speak – if only topping them were the legal penalty – is not civilised. It may be the most coarsened, brutal country in Yurrop.
Today, a little 83 year old lady was murdered in her home while her husband was out on an errand (hmmmm, do you suppose the burglars had been watching the house? – I mean, *two* 85-yr olds may have been a bit of a struggle for a couple of pumped up greedy young louts) because she tried to defend her home against the burglars. How fragile, how frail is someone in her ninth decade on this earth, yet still living independently? What brute nature does it take to murder her?
Someone else was decapitated in Swiss Cottage. A car in a good neighbourhood of London was randomly vandalised and wouldn’t even have been commented upon had the owner not been the wife of the Leader of the Opposition. A couple of years previously, she had had her engagement ring yanked off her finger on a public street. Someone else (was it a waiter? I can’t keep up with the daily news any more) fried someone else’s brains and ate them.
A girl who had downed 12 double vodkas claimed she was raped by two policemen she invited into her flat. Heigh-ho! So what’s new?
Two days ago the chief of police in Nottingham said the police were doing clerical work more suited to, um, clerks and he begged for help solving 30 back murders. His Labour MP has castigated him – my eyes skimmed over whatever it was he blethered in righteous socialist boilerplate. Doubtless the people of Nottingham drank in every self-serving word and won’t be voting for him.
The other day, a 13 year old boy who raped his teacher was put away for life, which meant at least, as the judge said, two years if not less. Perry’s neighbour was murdered. We don’t know the details of any of those 30 murders in Nottingham that are causing the police chief such despair. When I was small, a murder anywhere in Britain was talked about incessantly and there were constant updates. People were actually shocked.
All this in a tiny cluster of islands in the North Sea that for hundreds of years previously had spawned heroes.
Thank you, socialism. Thank you, “multiculturalism”, on which process no Briton was consulted, yet gives a free pass to some criminals on the grounds of a “culture” which the indigenous British electorate never invited in and is antithetical to *our* culture. And in whose service we have Kaiser Trevor Phillips, who has always failed to get elected and thus qualifies an *un*elected job!
Thank you for the coarsening effect of “abortion is a matter for a woman’s – or 12-yr-old girl’s – conscience” no matter how late in the day. (These apologists are the same people who whine that we need more “asylum seekers” to make up the Ponzi pension funds.) I’m not someone who holds all abortion to be morally wrong, but I think after a certain stage of development, it does begin to look like the murder of a fellow human being.
Thank you to each and every Gramscian for destroying a civilisation the world admired and copied for 200 years with your truly evil, coarse, manipulative, faux “caring”.
Amen to every word Verity. I am looking forward to telling any candidate who knocks on my door this election that I will not consider voting for any of them since I hold the whole political class responsible for the betrayal of this country, its people and heritage over the last 35 years. What a sad and disastrous phase of our history this has been. And no-one hung for it – yet. May I live to see the day.
Verity
Modern Britain summed up in one more recent episode. It’s the case of the terrified 16 year old thrown from a bridge into a river by two 16 year old monsters. He had told them he cannot swim and has a fear of water yet they marched him to the bridge, prised his fingers from the railings and threw him in where he drowned. Last week a Judge gave them sentences of 18 months and 8 months! Such is the price of life in Britain today that you can kill and be at liberty within months. Have no doubt that in North London the Gramscians will be rejoicing at such an enlightened Judge and his civilised sentence.
I was against capital punishment until the late 1990s. I discovered then that from when capital punishment was abolished to that time 78 people had been murdered by someone previously convicted of murder then released to kill again. That figure must be around 100 now. Some 100 people dead, 100 families destroyed by someone previously convicted of murder yet released from prison.
The other day I googled for “British Murder Statistics” and here is what I came up with. The source (google yourself – I’ve forgotten it) indicated that they weren’t all that easy to obtain. Certainly they don’t seem to feature much in discussions about crime:
From March to March:
1999 – 2000 . . . . . . . . 760
2000 – 2001 . . . . . . . . 792
2001 – 2002 . . . . . . . . 891
2002 – 2003 . . . . . . . . 876 *
2003 – 2004 . . . . . . . . 853
* plus 172 murders by Shipman uncovered over the years.
In the fifties and early sixties, the murder rate, as I remember it, rarely reached 200 and there were about a dozen executions each year. All rational (as distinct from emotional) arguments seemed to lead to the conclusion that the death penalty could be abolished without an increase in the murder rate and I was one who campaigned against it.
Could this have been a mistake? Diehard opponents will undoubtedly deny this, but perhaps the time has come for a deep analysis and debate. After all, it must be emphasized that if capital punishment is a deterrent, then innocent lives are being sacrificed to keep the guilty alive. On a purely raw statistical basis, looking at the figures above, 600 – 700 people are being murdered who otherwise would have stayed alive.
One hypothesis I suggest is that the “rational” criminal element was kept aware of the risk of execution when that happened to others who murdered for personal reasons. They also became aware that “life imprisonment ” resembled nothing of the sort, tilting the balance of risk even more towards murdering their victims.
It is now impossible to execute anyone in the European Union, although I believe that surveys show that the public (as opposed to politicians) are still, by varying majorities, in favour of capital punishment.
But Brian, Orwell was lamenting not the fall in numbers of murders (during WW2 they rose in the blackout, black market and general lawlessness of the times) but the decline in quality.
He liked reading about middle class lace-curtain murders with plenty of background sociological interest, and contrasted those rare fait divers (typically written up at length in the News of the World, just the thing to peruse sleepily after roast beef and Yorkshire) with the nasty, brutish and short homicides of wartime gangsterism. No friend of Yanks, crusty old Orwell, about 40 at the time, blamed our young for imitating what they saw in Hollywood movies.
PD James, the detective story writer, got into hot water a few years back by saying that most murders were no good for novelists because they were crude outcroppings of violent prole mores. The juicy cases, fit for posh Inspector Adam Dalgleish to solve, were haut bourgeois, in circumstances where you didn’t expect that sort of behaviour and the killer was clever enough to cover his tracks.
Findlay: Comparative murder conviction rates are a bit Heisenbergian over long periods of time. Juries are far readier to convict now there’s no death penalty and the average murderer gets out within 15 years. In the old days a lot of murderers dodged the drop by copping a plea on ‘manslaughter’ or ‘while the balance of his mind was disturbed’.
Fretting about so rare a crime is a distraction. It’s low-level violence and robbery we should worry about. However, the rapid drop in the 15-30 male element of the population over the next few decades will make Britain more peaceful without political meddling.
The reportage of the Met’s reaction to the beheading was absolute class. They Met released a statement about a “suspected serious incident.” This was as a witness was calling into Sky describing the head sitting in the gutter.
A quick look at FBI stats for the US in the period 1983-2002 shows a murder and “non-negligent manslaughter” rate averaging 7.82 per 100,000 population, and in the period 1999-2002 5.62 per 100,000.
In comparison, the British figures (assuming a population of 59 million) for the same 1999-2002 period show an average of 1.41 per 100,000.
It would appear from the fairly limited information available that the American national murder rate is falling but the rate of decrease seems to be levelling off, whereas the British rate is increasing. How the rate of increase in Britain compares to the rate of decrease in the US is another matter, but there doesn’t seem to be sufficient British information to look at this, or to look at a longer term trend as with the US data.
It remains the case, though, that the per capita murder rate in the US is roughly three times that in the UK. Perhaps Jackie D’s friend is more informed than suggested above?
EG
UK crime stats available in considerable detail here, including murder.
EG
Jackie D: “My father suggested a self defence class to me, but I don’t think a knee to the groin is much of a defence against a guy with an axe.”
Indeed not. This is the problem with any form of self-defence class – f it comes to combat, you will still be at a serious disadvantage against an opponent who is larger, stronger or more heavily armed, no matter how good you are.
I’d feel much better if I could teach my small (5′) female students to use a handgun rather than their fists.
The other factor to consider is the advance in medical techniques which mean that injuries that would have proved fatal in, say, the 1950’s are rarely fatal now.
Hence a lot of violent assaults/stabbings etc which would have resulted in a murder in 1955 now result in actual or grievous bodily harm. I suggest that the overall picture points to an increase in violence over the last few decades.
Euan,
As usual your use of the available statistics demonstrates that a: A little knowledge can be dangerous, and b: That there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
To compare stats, you have to compare ‘like with like’.
Murder in the US would seem to be more ‘specialised’, i.e more personal, gang related, or of the serial type. In the UK it seems to be largely gratuitous by nature, which makes everyone a possible victim, and vastly increases the fear factor.
I wonder how the ‘clear-up’ rates compare….
Ah, I understand. The statistics don’t support your preconceptions, therefore they must be wrong, hmm?
What is not like for like between FBI national statistics and the Home Office national statistics?
Britain doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with gang culture, certainly not to anything like the extent the US does – should we then discount those numbers from the US totals? Britain has a much smaller drug problem than the US, so should we then discount drug related murders from the US? In fact, should we not discount various types of murder until the US per capita rate falls below the UK one such that your preconceptions are justified?
Are there then not, lies, damned lies, and ernest’s dodgy self-serving numbers?
America is overall a more violent place than Britain, and on the average you are some three to four times more likely to be murdered in the US than in the UK. For sure, if you live in a tiny village in Vermont you’re less likely to be murdered than if you lived next door to a black ghetto in Los Angeles. Then again, you’re less likely to be murdered in rural Scotland than in south London.
What does this prove? Nothing, other than that in both countries you can find peaceful places where murder is incredibly rare AND you can find other places where it is almost a daily event. A large scale comparison is meaningul, and pleas to remove certain categories of murder to make it “like for like” won’t work.
EG
Euan Gray – Surely you don’t believe government crime statistics – especially in the face of daily evidence that the police and the government are cooking the books?
Effra, as murder is so rare and such a distraction in Britain, I hope that you and yours are not among future distractions. Today’s Britain is brutal, lawless and vulgar. I think the feeling abroad in Britain is probably very similar to that of post-Revolution France. Everyone, from the highest to the lowest, is “mate” (Citoyen.) Public schoolboys talk chummy Estuary and call waiters “mate”. No heads above the parapet in this bitter, envious, spiteful society. The sans sabots are in charge and are courted by the socialists/Gramscians with hissing, emollient insincerity.
Andrew ID – Every time the Met opens its mouth, it says something priceless.
I think when you live through the tiny degradations of society, day after day, you don’t really notice the mayhem and shrivelled spirit after a while. Just as you don’t notice the tubes are foul, stinking, overcrowded skips on wheels, and that the trains don’t make any pretence of providing a service, that schools make no pretence of teaching the young in their care and the police behave with remote, curled-lip dismissiveness to their paymasters, the public.
In that case, no meaningful discussion could take place on the subject since all we could use were the subjective feelings and opinions of people.
If the government crime statistics backed up one of your theories, would you still say they were unreliable?
EG
Euan,
As usual, a combative reply when one of your favourite pomposities is, even mildly criticised.
You, like so many others, assume that the US and the UK are ‘birds of a feather’, they most definitely are not…they are two wildly different cultures, and any direct comparisons are an excercise in futility at best.
The point that I was making, deduced from personal experience…is that the violence in the UK is very gratuitous by nature, unlike in the US where there does seem to be a more personal link between killer and killee.
Of course I query stats, whether by the Home Office or the FBI, do you take them as gospel? – do you know just how they were compiled?, are you au fait with the definitions used? of course you are not. You use them selectively, just the same as everyone else, so don’t get all pompous on me, for expressing my doubt as to their veracity…
Yes, of course I am voicing my own opinion, and my general perceptions, deduced from my personal experience, and I make no pretense that they are anything other than that. Unlike your goodself, I have little faith in bureaucrat generated stats.
Scotland – safe? wasn’t there a multiple killing there not so long ago? – (now look that up on Google).
Bravo, ernest young.
This Gramscian government is well-practised in telling people that black is white and feigning surprise when citizens insist on believing their own eyes in preference to cooked books. Every single day brings a new murder or two – not the personal murders ernest young refers to, but vicious, feral, gratuitous murders perpetrated by an underclass that is so confident of its “rights” that it doesn’t fear incarceration. And quite rightly so. The government constantly bewails the fact that Britain has the highest rate of prisoners in Europe, as though this were a result of draconian law enforcement rather than of a debased society in which human life and property aren’t really worth much. We have the most prisoners because we have the most criminals. Du-uh.
I agree with ernest young that violence in the US is more likely to be personal, although there are also instances of completely impersonal killings, as when someone holds up a 7-11 and shoots the hired help for a sixpack. But other than gang-related murders, about which I harbour a deep indifference, and that weird American phenomenon, serial killers who pick hitchhikers up on the highway and dump them in deserts or other parts of the vast wilderness that is the N American continent, murder in the US is rare. Especially in states where citizens are expected to be armed and where law enforcement is strongly on the side of the innocent.
No, I do not. I have often enough commented that the two places are quite different in a great many respects & been roundly slagged off for it too.
No, I don’t. Do you by default assume they are lies?
Are you? If not, what justification do you have for not considering them worthy of analysis? Much explanatory information is available on the cited webpages, some of which does explain (esp. in the British case) how the information is collected and recorded, which you would see if you read the pages. So it isn’t too hard to become acquainted with the methods and definitions, now is it? As for the definitions specifically, I would have thought a reasonable starting assumption would be that the number of crimes recorded as “murder” would be those meeting the legal definition of murder.
And of course they are public information, freely available to anyone interested. Anyone can download and analyse to their heart’s content. If such analysis refutes my position, fine, I learn something. If not, equally fine.
Fair enough, but it is I think unwise to do this without at least considering the available data. It may be inaccurate, it may not, but it is the only real summary of the numbers available. It should be used, perhaps with some caution, but not ignored. The information presented is, if you care to read it, rather less flattering than the government pretends the real situation to be, so perhaps it is not massaged?
Then again, perception, feeling and personal experience seem to the the fashionably liberal way of assessing situations these days – facts seem to be a bit of an inconvenience sometimes. Hence the British Crime Survey, used by the government to trumpet success since it is somehow more “accurate” than the recorded total of actual offences. Terribly New Labour, you know 😉
EG
Euan,
When there are no reliable stats, then all you have are subjective feelings and experience to go by, and yes, you can have ‘meaningful’ discussion on any topic you care to name.
It’s called a ‘discussion amongst peers’, where mutual respect is the order of the day, and common-sense prevails.
If, by a slim chance the stats backed up any conclusion of mine, I would be sure to double-check them, as that would likely be an indicator that I was wrong, (who – me!).
But ernest, you’re assuming immediately that the available statistics are junk and therefore to be discounted. Essentially, what you’re saying is that whatever you think is the case is, in fact, the case, even if the available evidence contradicts you. Dogmatic or what?
Is this not somewhat arrogant and unjustified?
Call it a discussion amongst peers if you like, but any debate that involves only subjective opinion and takes no account of the available statistical data is of dubious utility. Then again, I understand this casual discounting of empirical data is a feature of certain strands of Austrian economics, and therefore might be expected to be not uncommon amongst those of a libertarian tendency.
EG
Euan – This government is notorious for cooking the books. It has reduced hospital waiting lists by adding on totally new waiting lists to be on while you’re waiting to be put on the waiting list.
Treatment of accidents at A&E departments have fallen down to “targets” by the simple – and frightening – new rule of not taking accident cases out of the ambulances until there is someone available to treat them.
Every British teenager, no matter how congenitally stupid, leaves school with at least 10 GSCs, or whatever they’re called this month, to his/her credit, most of them with distinctions. This has been accomplished by another magic application of “targets” – to get an A in Maths, you need only answer 42% of the questions correctly. The requirements for getting a B aren’t quite so rigorous. And you get a C for knowing which way up to hold the pen so it will produce marks when you put it to paper.
Are you seriously suggesting these “targets” aren’t applied to reductions in crime? Some murders can be reclassified as ‘violent incidents’, for example. Murder statistics will be whatever Tony Blair has told the police their “target” is.
Verity,
Firstly, have you actually looked at the spreadsheet at the accomapnying notes? From your comments, it sounds unlikely.
Secondly, the UK government uses the British Crime Survey as its propaganda ^W fact source for crime pronouncements. They do this because, inter alia, the statistics on crime recorded (as opposed to perceptions felt) are not so cheery. The linked spreadsheet is the actual recorded crime, i.e NOT the statistics the government trumpets.
Thirdly, BCS data is also available online if you’d like to comapre.
Fourthly, we have to start somewhere. This data may not be perfect, but it (and the BCS) is all that’s available. It is not necessary to accept it as Gospel, but it should inform debate. Relying solely on subjective feeling to discuss objective fact is unwise, especially when there is at least some empirical data available (even if we must treat it with caution).
Fifthly, government statistics seem to be quite acceptable when they back up the anti-statist position, for example in John Lott’s “analysis” of gun data discussed in the thread above), but wholly unreliable and useless when they don’t. This is called hypocrisy.
Finally, if we assume the real British murder rate is actually double that shown, it is still only half that in America. If we assume that, in addition, the true US murder rate (deducting the “irrelevant” numbers) is half that reported, we get about the same rate. So to assume something like the British government wilfully under-reporting the rate by 50% AND the FBI wilfully reporting double the true rate, even at that we still only get Britain having the same rate as America. How likely is it that two sets of independent data from two different countries are intentionally misreported to such an egregrious extent? How paranoid does one need to be to swallow this?
Is it not perhaps more likely that the statistics, whilst inevitably incomplete, are somewhat analogous to the truth?
EG
Euan,
Yes, I am arrogant, and yes my distrust of bureaucrats, and politicians, is justified – by experience, and is not based on some whim or fancy, or even a particular political philosphy.
I am just an ordinary fella, who has had enough of being misled and lied to by the Establishment, and yes, I do have a problem in placing my faith in the word of some, usually, ill-educated nonentity, or accepting the edicts or statistics of some bureaucratic government department, interested only in pushing a political agenda. You might even say that I was disallusioned…
If I had the time, I would tell you what I really think of them!……
Truth is, I have long lost any faith or belief in the integrity of any form of UK or EU government, whether local or national, or continental.
The age of my innocence is past, but I feel that I am not alone in my distrust of ‘supposed authority’. That this scepticism is so widespread should be of concern to ‘them’, but it isn’t.
However, I do like to see the naivety of worthies like yourself… prepared to see the best in the likes of Blair, Prescott, Blunkett et al. Although how you can see much among all that bs, is quite amazing.
Keep up the good work – your country needs you!
Ernest,
I sympathise with the way you feel, but…
Your distrust may be justified, but the consistent refusal to consider empirical data is not. No set of real world data is complete or absolutely accurate. But that’s not the same as saying all real world data, especially that produced by a government department, is useless. That is not fashionable ennui with the mendacity of government, it is just wilful blindness.
Actually, it is. All political parties in the UK are concerned at the level of apathy and lack of interest from and engagement with the electorate, particularly the younger ones.
I’m a conservative. I dislike the current government, but have no illusions that an realistic alternative would be much better. Then again and as I have observed several times before, one cannot have perfection and must deal with the real world.
EG
Euan,
Being a simple man, the old saying; “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me..” has some small significance in the way I feel re ‘them’.
If only it was just the twice!….
In truth, the punishments being meted out is all the evidence you need. How many criminals and would-be criminals are deterred by such lackluster sentences? Cane them. Whip them. Hang them. The only language idiots understand is that of pain and suffering.
I think for the statistics, one must make a careful per capita study of the US state by state instead of taking the whole chunk, since different states can have significantly different laws. And then compare each state to the UK on a murder per capita basis.
As for the veracity of government or official statistics, one has to start somewhere.
TWG
People have been doing weird crap since the begining of time. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or who the leaders of that country are….people will do weird crap.
Weird murders and such certainly aren’t rare nor are they the fault of Blair, Major, Thatcher, Reagan etc etc…
We simply hear about them more in this information age and our voyeuristic nature motivates the media to report as much as they can on the weird stuff people do.
This constant comparison of crime and evilness between Britain and America is absurd…what’s the point?
Surely the key issue is the trend. The trend in the UK is brutally clear – rising murder per head of population, while in the United States, it has been the other way for the past 15 years or so. The causes of this are many and various but to ignore the trend is to ignore a possible set of solutions.
I would favour bringing back capital punishment for first degree murder although my main reservation is that juries, given today’s moral climate, would never convict. In the absence of that, we need longer prison sentences, “zero-tolerance” policing, abolition of state welfare for the able bodied and, controversially perhaps, ending bans on drugs excpt perhaps for crack cocaine.
rgds
Garr… loons. How is 853 murders a year in a population of 60 million a stat worth worrying about?
“Garr… loons. How is 853 murders a year in a population of 60 million a stat worth worrying about?”
If you’re as batty and as underemployed as Verity, any old broken reed can be used to bash Britain.
I’m only surprised she forgot to mention that her pal Tony Blair is behind most homicide in the old country. Vote New Labour and be horribly slaughtered!