Sunday 17 January 2010

An Englishman’s castle

The pseudo-libertarians make a lot of fuss about the law favouring the criminal over the householder. They will complain that people don’t have the right to beat the shit out of any ne’er-do-well that breaks into their house. They complain that people should have the right to protect themselves and their property. Whilst I have some sympathy for this viewpoint it doesn’t actually solve anything. Yes it’s expedient because it dispenses rough justice in an immediate manner, but any change would leave the law open to some terrible abuses. There would be nothing to stop a householder leaving all their doors open and hiding in the darkness with a 12 bore. A little extreme and hardly an everyday occurrence but I think you know the message I’m trying to get across. You would only need a few sensational stories of have-a-go heroes dealing pain and suffering to intruders to encourage would be intruders to start ‘tooling’ themselves up. My post of the first of January sums up how I feel.

We live in an unjust society. We have people that earn and own obscene amounts of money, whilst at the other end we have great poverty and deprivation. How unjust is that? Until we have a fair society we are never going to solve issues of crime like burglary and violence. History has proven that extreme punishment doesn’t prevent crime. You could bring back hanging for petty larceny, as no doubt some pseudo-libertarians would love, but it wouldn’t cut crime. We live in an unjust society. A society of double standards where the rich get richer by fleecing the rest of us, and get away with breaking the law by hiring the best legal people. Where the middle classes think that it is perfectly acceptable to break the law by tax evasion or speeding and where everybody is part of the Me, Me culture.

It is a well worn cliché, but I believe it to be true, if you eradicate the causes of crime you will eradicate crime to a very large extent. Of course you will get some people that will no doubt have criminal tendencies regardless of their circumstances, but I believe those to be a small minority. If we have a fair and just society we will largely have a law abiding society. The hard bit will be to elect a government that is capable of bringing it about because it is the will of the people.

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