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It would be quite wrong to suggest that the issue of self-defence (and the law relating thereto) is a libertarian issue. But it is probably true that, for many years, there was next to no debate about it as an issue outside of libertarian circles.
For free market advocates, self-defence (and the natural right thereto) is not just an important issue, it is a cornerstone of individualist philosophy. Yet, while libertarian scholars and writers debated passionately about the issue, it barely registered a blip on the radar of wider public interest.
That is, until a certain Tony Martin shot two intruders who had broken into his remote Norfolk farmhouse, killing one of them. The news that he had been arrested and charged with murder, led to a broken-dam deluge of furious and passionate debate about the right of self-defence and which flooded every medium.
Overnight, it seemed, self-defence had become a hot topic, not least because, as with so many debates, it has tended to generate more heat than light.
I do not intend to simply re-hash the Martin case and the various reasons why his actions either were or were not justified. That has already been done in some length here and elsewhere. What I want is to examine the reasons why practical self-defence has, to all intents and purposes, become illegal in the UK.
The obvious starting point is the law itself. While I believe that broader phenomena have played their part in creating the current situation, it is critical to examine how they worked to shape both law and custom as it stands. → Continue reading: The way we were
The modern Conservative Party goes from feeble to worse. In a week when the Government has never been so vulnerable, the Opposition Leader’s friends are attacking their own party chairman.
Down in Dartford, a grasp of free market economics is beyond the mental reach of local Tories. This report comes from the Bexley News Shopper.
Meanwhile, Conservative Dartford Council leader Councillor Kenneth Leadbeater said he was concerned about the density of developments and how to ensure new communities integrated with existing ones.
But he welcomed the extra money, especially the “wonderful boost” for the town centre.
He said: “We need some sort of anchor store in Dartford and this money gives us a real chance in attracting another major store.” Kent County Council (KCC) Conservative leader Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart said the amount of money heading to Kent as a whole only constituted one per cent of the £10 billion KCC needs to build the 20,000 homes and necessary infrastructure.
But he said: “The North Kent news is really welcome because much of it is for land purchase to build on waste industrial land.”
“This will take the pressure off greenfield sites and fits our commitment to protect Kent’s countryside.” However Kent Wildlife Trust warned about the loss of habitat and insects on brownfield sites along Thames Gateway.
Pass the recyclable sick-bag!
Alex Singleton respects Peter Cuthbertson enough to bother trying to set him straight.
But Cuthbertson has two problems, the first of which being that he seems to think that all authority comes from the state (therefore we need must laws on which hand to hold our forks in when eating fruit salad, and whether to set boiled eggs on the Big or the Little End).
But the second problem is if anything worse. Recently I was in the coffee bar area of the swanky suite of offices where I make a living (at the tax-payer’s expense) whilst two fortysomethings were sorting out teas and coffees for a business meeting taking place on the same floor, but with a different (private sector) company. The woman, was better dressed in her brown-checkered suit than most British female politicians (which is to say that she didn’t look like a dressed-up showjumping horse on steroids or an English sheepdog with dyed hair wearing Nancy Reagan’s padded shoulder suits) without being a glamorous trendy. She was chatting to the man, who was dressed rather like my bank manager did ten years ago. As I was scrambling for teabags, milk etc, the man described how his daughter had invited her boyfriend to meet the parents. The woman then asked if it looked like a serious relationship and did the man approve.
After saying that it could be a promising relationship the man hesitated before adding “He’s quite a promising chap: he’s got a good well-paid job, drives a nice car, has a home in a nice neighbourhood, he looks presentable enough…” The father’s voice trailed off.
The woman interjected: “…but…”
And the man blurted out: “He’s a member of the Tory Party!”
And the woman said: “Oh dear!” with sympathy. The conversation ended: the poor man’s daughter was sleeping with a weirdo.
This story ends on a happy note. Last week I saw the man and he seemed to be in good spirits: it looks like daughter wised up…
There are times when I compare 2003 with the Orwellian world of 1984. In one respect at least, the fictional Airstrip One was far better than present day Britain: kids could have more fun!
Consider this report, that children are being harrassed by intolerant adults into staying locked indoors. Of course we live in an age where most children are treated at best as designer lap dogs or fashion accessories and at worst like punchbags or sex toys. So that actually letting children run around parks, fall in streams, get muddy and avoid obesity and truancy by burning off their excess energy in creative or harmless pursuits are not an option. The streets where I grew up have too many cars parked in them to play football, never mind the traffic.
The contrast with the Orwellian child utopia of Airstrip One is amazing: kids can run around as they wish, there is no shortage of activities for them to enjoy, from attending public executions, to outings in the countryside. But the real fun is in the “spies”. Children are actively encouraged to look through keyholes, snoop into the affairs of adults and they can earn plaudits for exposing corrupt and treasonable behaviour. So when that nasty Mrs B. at the corner of A***** Rd and M****** Rd would should at my friends and I for kicking a football outside her house, we could pick up the phone and denounce her to the Party as an agent of Emmanuel Goldstein!
I wonder if there are any equivalent means for children today to get even with bossy and intolerant adults? They could try this phone number: 0800 11 11 (Airstrip One only).
And it hasn’t been ‘cricket’ for some time according to Philip Chaston:
Preference for the BBC, even from such a low base, demonstrates the length of time that it can take for an institution’s authority to wither away. After all, a dispassionate observer in contemporary Britain would not judge the BBC to be objective or impartial, although the lingering effects of its past present a noteworthy survival and form the foundations of its remaining credibility.
Philip goes on to explain why the problems that beset the BBC beset British public administration as a whole and why the solution to those problems may be emerging.
It’s a strikingly good piece and one to which I can add nothing except a hearty endorsement.
In an extraordinary confession, and despite earlier strong denials, Downing Street has admitted that the Prime Minister’s personal spokesman, Tom Kelly, had spun a story to several newspapers that Dr David Kelly, the UK government’s senior Iraq weapons inspector, was a ‘Walter Mitty’ fantasist. Dr David Kelly’s funeral is due to be held tomorrow.
Sorry Tom, when I first caught this story I totally misheard it. I thought when I heard the words ‘Walter Mitty’ and ‘Downing Street’, together, it could only be one person you were talking about. You know, that blokey bloke, the one with the hair and the smile, the one who fantasises about taking over the world, the one who tells the world of his standing on the terraces at the Gallowgate End, his stowing away to the Caribbean, and a host of other fibs to try to make us like him more. Not to mention the never-ending lies and spin from his corrupt government power-grab machine, which started off with the Bernie Ecclestone saga, worked through to the undisputed NHS achievements, and went gone on to include the threat of weapons of mass destruction, in Iraq, all primed and ready to go off in a measly forty-five minutes. Plus, of course, we won’t even mention the endless slippery associations with other puff serial merchants like Peter Mandelson, Stephen Byers, and the lugubrious Peter Foster.
And I promise to forget the biggest planned lie of all, the one where Alastair Campbell leaves the government, to miraculously clear out the Augean stables of New Labour mendacity, which then presents us with a fresh new Mr Blair, a cleaned-up Mr Blair, and an un-spun Mr Blair, representing all that is Herculean and noble about the way, the light, and the truth of your fabulous and continuing reign of New Labour glory.
Yes, I promise to forget all of the above, because I got it wrong. You weren’t speaking about the Dear Leader at all. What you were attempting to do was to deliberately destroy the name and reputation of a dead man who (probably) killed himself because you, or Tony, or Geoff, or Alastair, or all of you in Downing Street, hung him out to dry and let him twist in the wind, because he may have revealed one of the many Big Lies at the heart of your Big Lie government. Let me remind you of something Adolf Hitler once said:
The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one
You may have got away with the forty-five minutes lie, because it was such a Hitlerian whopper. But now you’ve been rumbled on the little lies, like the Walter Mitty one about Dr Kelly, it really is all over, bar the denials, for all of you there in Downing Street. Because nobody will believe any of the big ones any more. What’s really funny, however, is that the sun-blessed one really is in the Caribbean, for once, though this time one presumes he didn’t need to go as a stowaway. You should’ve listened to Adolf.
In a move which will be the effective creation of a state ID card, Dr Liam Fox, the Conservative health spokesman, has said the next Conservative government will introduce a health entitlement card for all UK citizens.
Thanks, Liam. It’s just what I’ve always wanted.
These cards will either be difficult-to-forge, requiring a trip to a police station to get your iris scanned, or they will be easy to forge, requiring a used tenner in the heroin-dealing under-the-table pub of your choice, to get hold of an effective fake one.
And given that the black market works free of most government interference, except for the bribes necessary to pay off police enforcers, expect even hard-to-forge ID cards to come on the black market for under a tenner within a couple of years.
So in order to garner a few short-term votes, Dr Liam Fox is willing to foist a new hideous layer of expensive bureaucratic control upon us, which will be easily circumvented by everyone except by the guiltless and the honest. Though I’m sure that when it is, an even more expensive and intrusive ID card system will be the solution proposed by the next Conservative government, once again to ‘protect’ the blessed NHS.
Don’t prevaricate, Liam. Just abolish the NHS, and have done with this Jurassic-Age monster.
Though I think I’m rapidly approaching the Carrite position, where just like the pigs in ‘Animal Farm’, the difference between New Labour and the Conservatives is becoming ever more difficult to discern.
Until even recently I held great hope for the Conservative party, but over these continuing issues of ID cards I am losing my belief.
I blame that Murray Rothbard. His books are just too enlightening.
Perhaps I should be more disturbed than I am by the possibility that our Prime Minister appears to have been beset by holy visions:
Tony Blair knows it is one of the most delicate of subjects. When asked about it he squirms and tries to change to a more comfortable line of inquiry. But quietly the Prime Minister is putting religion at the centre of the New Labour project, reflecting his own deeply felt beliefs that answers to most questions can be found in the Bible.
The Observer can reveal that Blair is to allow Christian organisations and other ‘faith groups’ a central role in policy-making in a decisive break with British traditions that religion and government should not mix.
Once again, life imitates art with Mr.Blair appearing to have lived up the Private Eye magazine caricature of him as a trendy, preachy Vicar.
All chortling aside (to be stored up and deployed at a later date) I have no way of proving that this isn’t strictly a matter of conscience. I can’t prove it isn’t, but I simply don’t buy it. The timing is far too suspicious. For me it has got all the hallmarks of a frantic search for a new moral underpinning by a politician whose quasi-evangelical ‘government for everyone’ zeal first had the sheen rubbed off of it and then had the shit kicked out of it. This is not so much an act of piety as an act of desperation.
But perhaps I am being more cynical than I need to be. They say you should never judge a man until you walked a mile in his shoes. Right now, I wouldn’t want to be in Mr.Blair’s shoes. His personal popularity is plummeting and the government he is supposed to be steering just cannot seem to do anything right anymore. Every which way he turns he sees enemies, backstabbers, plotters and sneering journalists asking questions he just cannot answer. Faced with that vista who wouldn’t want to retreat to the comforting certainties of that old-time religion?
I know I am not the first to say so but it does look increasingly likely that Mr.Blair is groping for the door marked ‘exit’.
I am quite sure that I am not alone in having regrets about something I should have done but didn’t. There must be loads of people who once fancied a dabble on some dark-horse penny-share but decided not to take the risk and then watched it go stratospheric. Or perhaps they once thought of a great product -idea but couldn’t be bothered to pursue it only to see that same product in the shops five years and later selling like hot-cakes.
For me, it was the hit-stage play that I envisaged but never wrote. It was about a young couple who met at University in the sixties while they were both throwing themselves headlong into the counter-culture revolution as a means of rejecting the stuffy, conservative values of their staid, suburban parents.
Fast forward three decades and they are now both pillars of the Nulabour establishment. He is a journalist and she is a human rights lawyer. Their Islington home is a shrine to their innumerable cherished causes. Life is a series of earnest campaigns fuelled by a diet of polenta with rockett salad, washed down by ‘fairtrade’ Nicaraguan coffee. They are comfortable, happy cadres of the metropolitan elite blessed with an unshakeable moral certainty.
Until, that is, their teenage daughter returns home from University where she has discovered Ayn Rand and become a fiery devotee of free-market capitalism.
Then the comedy begins.
At the time I was jobbing as a scriptwriter churning out formulaic boilerplate for cable television and being quite handsomely rewarded for doing so. I had the basic characters and the outline plot but I suppose I was too addicted to the money stream to take the time off that actually writing the damn thing would have necessitated. So it never got written.
And now, it’s too late. What would have been groundbreaking comedy has been overtaken by reality: [From UK Times so no link]
Seventeen years after Huey Lewis and The News sang Hip to be Square, young people are joining the Tory party as a way of rebelling against their Labour-voting parents.
The Times interviewed new recruits and found many from a staunch Labour or Liberal Democrat background who relished the fact that being a Tory marked them out from the rest of their family and sometimes from the area they grew up in, too.
Looks like I was ahead of the curve.
One new recruit to the Tories, Caroline Hunt, 18, said: “In a way the role of opposition is to be the rebel, so yes it is a bit rebellious. Our lecturers at college are very left wing and they couldn’t believe how many of us were Tories all of a sudden. Out of a small class, eight of us put our hands up and said we were strong Conservatives”.
The ’68 generation may just be about to learn that what goes around, comes around.
And, by the way, a note to all readers: if you have a good idea, act on it immediately. The world will not wait for you.
The Telegraph reports that Britain is to reopen attempts to change key sections of the proposed European constitution despite warnings by its chief author that this risks undoing months of painstaking negotiations.
The Government will issue a White Paper in early September setting out its ‘red lines’ – the issues that it will not compromise on – in the final round of bargaining for the constitution that will be launched by European Union leaders in October. Senior officials said the issues include a determination to remove a mutual defence pact that would undermine Nato, clauses regarded as a backdoor attempt to harmonise taxation, and proposals for an EU public prosecutor.
For once the Conserative opposition sounds almost reasonable. Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative defence spokesman, said:
They said the constitution was just a tidying-up exercise. They have realised late in the day that it’s much more than that. Even if they win on their red lines, they have already given much more away, not least the principle of having a constitution in the first place.
Mr Jenkin maintains that, despite phrases ostensibly respecting countries’ obligations to Nato, the draft constitution would give the EU primacy over the transatlantic alliance. It is not yet clear how far Britain will resist the proposals to create a common defence policy.
Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president who presided over 16 months of debate at the European Convention, has warned all sides that tampering with the text risks creating a free-for-all.
And we wouldn’t want that, right?
The BBC is to show a series of documentaries exploring the gun and gang culture among Britain’s urban underclass, it said yesterday. The Guns & Gangs Season on BBC2 will look at the rise of gun crime and whether groups such as So Solid Crew contribute to the culture of violence.
For the uninitiated So Solid Crew are at the centre of a debate over rap music and gun crime after a government minister said the increase in violence was down to “idiots like the So Solid Crew glorifying gun culture and violence”. Culture minister Kim Howells was speaking about the shooting of four girls in Birmingham at a New Year party – two of them were killed. Gun crime has doubled in the last five years, and he reckons the music industry is part of the problem:
For years I’ve been very worried about the hateful lyrics that these boasting macho idiots come out with from these rappers and so on, it is a big cultural problem.
There you have it. It is obviously not the fact that you are not allowed to defend yourself but rap music that makes criminals bolder. And the BBC just adds to the blunder. Other programmes in the season include a documentary examining the alleged links between the gun culture and rap music, another about the source of illicit arms and Sons And Guns, about the mothers of men murdered in gang-related killings in Manchester. In the new £97 million BBC2 autumn season, the corporation promises to focus on “the harsh realities of the modern world”.
Oh dear. So off the mark, you can’t even see the target…
I think it safe to say that all those people in the British political and media classes who want this country to be ‘more European’ have good cause to feel quietly satisfied today because parts of Britain are, indeed, starting to resemble East Germany:
The image of hundreds of people queuing to register with an NHS dentist provided a stark reminder of the problems people encounter in finding an NHS dentist, experts say.
They need ‘experts’ to tell them this?
The queue was prompted by the announcement that a practice in Carmarthen, Wales, could take on 300 more patients – but many more were hoping to register.
The TV news has now picked up on this story and are reporting that over 600 people turned up in the hope of getting state dental treatment. They lined up along the street and had to be issued with lottery tickets in order to prevent disputes breaking out. Over half of them were turned away.
Dr John Renshaw of the British Dental Association told BBC News Online: “That picture evoked a Third World country, where you have to queue to access what ought to be part of NHS care.”
No, that picture evoked life behind the Iron Curtain where people queued up all day to get a meal. And for the same reasons!
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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