America's Class Warrior

How many times has your paycheck been signed by a poor person?

Anonymous

Obama ran as the great uniter. Instead he has been the ultimate divider, not merely on issues of race, but even moreso on issues of class. While few in the MSM have played up this reality, across the pond, where class warfare became a staple of Labour politics, it now appears a defining feature of Obama's America. This from the Telegraph:

When David Cameron visits the United States this week, he will find a country whose national political argument has become more like our own in Britain than probably he – and certainly I – would ever have imagined. For America has learned, thanks to Barack Obama's crash course in European-style government, about the titanic force of class differences. The president's determination to transform the US into a social democracy, complete with a centrally run healthcare programme and a redistributive tax system, has collided rather magnificently with America's history as a nation of displaced people who were prepared to risk their futures on a bid to be free from the power of the state.

They are talking a lot about this in the US now. Suddenly the phenomenon of class resentment is a live political issue. . . .

There was a warning of what was to come during the election campaign with Joe the Plumber, to whom Mr Obama unwisely confided his intention to "spread the wealth around". Americans who have risen from poverty to become qualified tradesmen or entrepreneurs generally believe that they have a right to put what wealth they produce back into their own businesses, rather than trusting governments to spread it around among those judged to be deserving.

But Joe's warning was not heeded. Most of the constituency whose instincts were the same as his voted for Obama, and have now lived to regret it. This in itself is not especially surprising: it could simply be seen as the self-interested politics of personal survival. What is more startling is the growth in America of precisely the sort of political alignment which we have known for many years in Britain: an electoral alliance of the educated, self-consciously (or self-deceivingly, depending on your point of view) "enlightened" class with the poor and deprived.

America, in other words, has discovered bourgeois guilt. A country without a hereditary nobility has embraced noblesse oblige. Now, there is nothing inherently strange or perverse about people who lead successful, secure lives feeling a sense of responsibility toward those who are disadvantaged. What is peculiar in American terms is that this sentiment is taking on precisely the pseudo-aristocratic tone of disdain for the aspiring, struggling middle class that is such a familiar part of the British scene.

Liberal politics is now – over there as much as here – a form of social snobbery. To express concern about mass immigration, or reservations about the Obama healthcare plan, is unacceptable in bien-pensant circles because this is simply not the way educated people are supposed to think. It follows that those who do think (and talk) this way are small-minded bigots, rednecks, oiks, or whatever your local code word is for "not the right sort".

The petit bourgeois virtues of thrift, ambition and self-reliance – which are essential for anyone attempting to escape from poverty under his own steam – have long been derided in Britain as tokens of a downmarket upbringing. But not long ago in America they were considered, even among the highly educated, to be the quintessential national virtues, because even well-off professionals had probably had parents or grandparents who were once penniless immigrants. Nobody dismissed "ambition" as a form of gaucherie: the opposite of having ambition was being a bum, a good-for-nothing who would waste the opportunities that the new country offered for self-improvement.

But now the British Lefties who – like so many Jane Austen heroines looking down on those "in trade" – used to dismiss Margaret Thatcher as "a grocer's daughter", have their counterparts in the US, where virtually everybody's family started poor. Our "white van man" is their Tea Party activist, and the insult war is getting very vicious. It is becoming commonplace now for liberals in the US to label the Tea Party movement as racist, the most damaging insult of all in respectable American life.

So the Democrats, who once represented the interests of ferociously self-respecting blue-collar America, are now seen – under their highly educated president, who wholeheartedly embraces the orthodoxy of the liberal salon – as having abandoned their traditional following. Which is precisely what Labour did here when it turned its back on what used to be called "the respectable working class" because of its embarrassing resentments and "prejudices" against welfare claimants, immigrants, and anti-social youths. Bizarrely, among people who see themselves as profoundly empathetic, there was an utter failure to understand why the spirit of benevolent understanding and tolerance did not flourish among those whose daily lives were directly affected by a mass influx of foreign workers, or local delinquency, or a welfare system that rewarded inertia.

So who will speak – both here and over there – for the aspiring, the enterprising, the law-abiding, and, perhaps most important of all in these economic times, the productive classes? . . .

What is most depressing about this – apart from the injustice of it – is that the people who have been disenfranchised and disowned are the very ones on whom both countries' economic recovery depends.

I have written before that the UK has become a laboratory for socialism advanced perhaps half a century further along the socialist path than America. It would seem that Obama is trying to catch us up in his first term in office.

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A Hung Parliament - Updated

The election is over in the UK, but the byzantine maneuvering to create a government is just beginning. With the vast majority of results in, the BBC is predicting:

Tory - 306
Labour: 262
Liberal Democrats: 55
Others: 27

To form a government, there must be a party - or a coalition of parties - holding 326 seats. The Labour Party, which has deconstructed Britain over its past 13 years of socialist rule, still managed to lose only 100 seats. And even though the Tories will be by far the largest party in Parliament, the fact is that the Labour may well be able to retain power through a coalition with the Lib Dems - also a far left party - and a few of the far left minor parties. This from the BBC:

Gordon Brown may start coalition talks with the Lib Dems, who, Nick Clegg admitted, had a "disappointing night" .

The BBC projection suggests David Cameron's Conservatives will have 306 seats. If there are 10 Unionists elected in Northern Ireland then Mr Cameron might be able to command 316 - probably still slightly too few for him to be sure of winning a Queen's Speech.

But Labour and the Lib Dems together would have 317 seats, according to the BBC figures, which even with three SDLP MPs would still leave them at 320 - again probably just a few votes short.

So everything is still at issue - though Labour has a slight advantage. All of this is truly horrendous. David Cameron, who has misled the Tory Party for a decade, attempting to turn it into a light version of Labour, has managed to pull defeat from the jaws of what should have been a victory so thorough as to have banished Labour the halls of government for a decade or more. You could track the recent downward spiral of the Tory party towards this election from the date the boywonder officially reneged on his promise to hold a referendum on the issue of EU.

Assuming Labour forms the next government, Cameron should be booted so fast from the Tory leadership his head should spin. The Tories need to replace him with someone who is actually a conservative and who will actually be governed by his ideals rather than pure political calculation, though it might already be too late. Labour has so deconstructed Britain that it may well be the damage it has wrought cannot be undone. A few more years of Labour misrule - or Cameron misrule for that matter - will like insure the damage is permanent.

Update: It appears that the Lib Dems have already slapped down Gordon Brown and Labour, saying that the Tories should have the first opportunity to form a government. That is code for "make me an offer."

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What Labour Hath Wrought

LIke the RMS Titanic, the UK's ship of state is sinking. British journalist William Shawcross, writing at the NRO, tells why in a damning indictment of Labour and its 12 year stewardship of Britain. This from Mr. Shawcross:

A Foreign Office diplomat’s proposal to mark the Pope’s visit to Britain with Benedict condoms and by having him bless a gay marriage, open an abortion clinic, and set up a hotline for abused children is a perfect example of the ruling Labour party’s degradation of Britain. Former ambassador Sir Ivor Roberts said on Sunday, “I cannot think of a papal visit anywhere in the world where the host government has had to apologize so profusely and abjectly…for the appalling behavior of one of its officials.”

The truth is that the Foreign Office is no longer fit for purpose after 13 years of New Labour dogmas and a succession of weak if not feckless ministers, in particular the incumbent, David Miliband. Under New Labour, the idea that the Foreign Office should actually fight for British interests is considered passé, if not racist and imperialist. Instead, New Labour has forced Britain to become a mere piece of the bland but increasingly oppressive Bambiland of the E.U., promoting such PC global issues as gay rights (except in Muslim lands) and man-made climate change. . . .

Charles Crawford, a distinguished ambassador who retired early in despair at New Labour’s destruction of British diplomacy, says that in Euroland, “religious pieties plus national identities and symbols, and thus the role of national embassies, are all essential targets of postmodern pastiche.”

He is right — “postmodernism,” the disastrous creed that there is no objective truth and that everything is relative, is the defining characteristic of New Labour. The only force of which Labour (like most E.U. ruling parties) seems to be in awe is Islamism. No Foreign Office official would have drawn up a document mocking Islam. “Postmodernism” is in effect a form of appeasement.

And Gordon Brown has been a disaster for this country. As the all-powerful chancellor, he spent the first ten years of New Labour undermining what might have been sensible Blairite reforms to education, health services, and welfare. Brown and his allies wanted no success for Blair — instead, they simply threw money at unreconstructed and inefficient structures. Billions upon billions of taxpayer money is still being squandered. Perhaps most tragic is the lack of welfare reform. Brown has perpetuated the growth of a wretched, demoralized underclass, unwilling and increasingly unable to work.

At the same time, Labour has continually expanded its client state (70 percent of the workforce in Northern Ireland), which produces nothing. Every person in the U.K. now has £40,000 of national debt to his or her name.

The list of horrors is endless: Brown sold our gold at about the lowest price imaginable, he destroyed the country’s strong pension system, he broke Labour’s promise for a referendum on the E.U.’s Lisbon Treaty, and he has mortgaged Labour back to the trade unions. Harold Wilson had more courage.

Unforgivably, Brown has treated our soldiers with contempt. He has never given the armed forces the resources they needed to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many men have died in battle because of inadequate equipment. Recently Brown was forced to correct a lie he told the Chilcott Iraq Enquiry when he claimed that under him, defense spending had risen every year.

Labour boasts that 3 million new jobs have been created — but most went to immigrants. Labour deliberately let immigration rip but never put this controversial policy before the voters in a manifesto. Some leaked Labour documents suggest this was a deliberate policy “to dilute Britishness” and create a new class of voters grateful to Labour.

It is an outrage that the British people were never told the truth about Labour’s immigration free-for-all. Instead, Labour apparatchiks denounced anyone as racist if he or she complained. Those who hate the rise of the British National Party should blame Labour, not the poor white voters whom Labour abandoned and whose lives have been changed forever by uncontrolled immigration. Last week, two London taxi drivers told me that they were going to vote BNP because it’s the only party that cares at all about them.

It’s not just about immigration that they complain. People are grossly offended by the drunken anarchy that Labour has encouraged in so many town centres, with 24-hour drinking, the litter that everyone now feels free to throw, the noise, the anger, the increasing incivility. The quality of millions of peoples’ lives has really suffered.

This government has made countless attacks on our civil liberties and has constantly, carelessly undermined our constitution, which has been carefully crafted over centuries to protect us. The Lord Chancellor has gone, the Law Lords have gone, now the House of Lords, one of the last bastions of independent expertise, is also threatened by Brown, who wants to create an elected clone of the Commons. Nick Clegg would do the same.

Labour’s bullying “multicultural” ideology has been a catastrophe. The government has cosseted extremist Islamist preachers of hatred to a shocking degree. No wonder French security officials talk of “Londonistan.” At the same time, under New Labour’s “progressive” laws, ordinary Christians have been persecuted for their views. Gordon Brown boasts of being “a son of the manse,” but he cares far more about leftist ideology than he does about the religion of his father. Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has now taken up the cudgels on behalf of Christianity, its followers, and the fine tradition of British tolerance. It is a measure of the illiberalism of this government that he should have to do so.

“Orwellian” is an overworked phrase, but at least everyone knows that it means something destructive to society. It is a fitting description of the debasement of language, the ignorance of history, and the oppressive culture of “postmodern progress” controlled by thousands of highly paid apparatchiks that Labour has forced upon us. . . .

In his conclusion, Mr. Shawcross calls for people to vote for the Tories as their best option to right Britain's sinking ship of state. Perhaps if anyone heard from David Cameron words similar to Mr. Shawcross, they might be able to do so with some confidence. But by all measures, David Cameron is nothing more than a base political opportunist himself who has, once having promised a referendum on EU membership, reversed himself not long ago. Unfortunately, it appears that the only real conservative party in Britain, the UKIP, is rudderless at the moment. The upcoming election will no doubt be interesting, but I seriously doubt indeed if it will result in a positive change in direction for Britain.

Just to highlight one other point, note that Mr. Shawcross credits "Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury" as being the nation's best defender of Christianity, That is because the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, elevated to his current position by nomination of Labour PM Tony Blair in 2002, has proven utterly worthless in standing up for Christianity and the Anglican Church.

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British Diversity

From one of the most interesting blogs on the net, Police Inspectors Blog - run by an upper level police officer who blogs under the pseudonym, Inspector Gadget, the latest most wanted posters from Scotland Yard:





Notice any common threads?

This from a comment by the blogger at Thin Blue Line to the Police Inspectors blog:

Not sure about the number [of immigrants] paying tax, though there are figures available about those issued NI numbers, which might indicate the numbers on benefit. Here are a few lines from one of our recent posts that might give you an idea.

The Extra Cost To The Tax Payer Of Immigration :-

• Local Authority race relations £3.1m
• Higher Education race relations £6.7m
• Commission for racial equality £32m
• Translation costs £100m
• Ethnic minority awards scheme £169m
• Security £174m
• English lessons for immigrants £80m
• Treating immigrants with HIV £330m
• Border Controls £690m
• Money sent home by foreign workers £1.4bn
• Asylum support & processing £1.6bn
• COST OF IMMIGRANT CRIME £4bn

Crime related costs, at £4Billion is by far the largest cost attributable to immigration.

Labour’s ‘open door’ policy on immigration costs every household £350 a year, claims Professor David Coleman, an Oxford University academic, who puts the total annual bill to the taxpayer at almost £8.8billion.

In a submission to a House of Lords committee, he said there had been a commitment to increase the population by one million every five years. With the population having swollen by 2million since 1997, they’re well on track for that one.

Apparently, Nu Labour research prior to taking power suggested that 80% of immigrants would vote Labour if they acquired citizenship.

On topic, Panorama did a piece on immigration tonight but conveniently left out the effects of immigration on the social fabric and criminal justice system.

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Labour, The Scales of Justice & Our Far Left

In the UK, a group of knife wielding thugs invaded a home and terrorized a family, seriously beating at least one of the family members. They ran when two of the family members managed to arm themselves with clubs. The two family members caught up with one of the thugs - who also happens to have 50 prior convictions - and administered some severe street justice. The end result, the knife wielding thug was given a "two year supervised order" - i.e., probation - and the two family members who seriously beat this career criminal after he had threatened their lives end up sentenced to jail for over two years each. You can read the whole story at the Daily Mail.

As I've blogged before, see here and here, the British justice system is an utter travesty tearing at the fabric of British society. Average citizens are given criminal records, while people convicted of serious and repeated crimes go through the revolving door of the British justice system. Under the Labour government, the British justice system has devolved to become ever more lenient in the treatment of criminals. In Britain, "rehabilitation"takes precedence over punishment. Leaving aside for a moment the moral imperative of government to punish a criminal on behalf of the victim, If history tells us anything, it is that rehabilitation in the absence of punishment rarely occurs. Most criminals merely realize that they will not be punished and carry on. The people who get the book thrown at them are common citizens who commit the ultimate sin of violating one of the left's socialist policies - or, as in this case, act in their own self defense. Rob twenty houses, get probation. Make an anti-gay reference, prepare for legal proceedings.

At the heart of today's far left is the belief that the unwashed masses must be controlled by their governing superiors. At the turn of the 20th century, British citizens were able to carry weapons, including hand guns, and it was a much more crime free society. Today, but a decade into the 21st century, not only can you not own a hand gun or a rifle in Britain, you are not even allowed anything as innocuous as pepper spray or CS gas. The Labour government is utterly convinced that its subjects are incapable of acting responsibly and must themselves be completely disarmed and dissuaded by police power from all but the most limited acts of self defense.

The thing that ought to scare readers on this side of the pond is the realization that the far left who have run Britain for the better part of the past six decades are mirror images of are own far left. Everything that Obama is seeking to install in America is already in place in Britain. If you want to know where the path leads that our far left wants to take, you need look no further than the UK. And indeed, note that the UK is no longer even a country. It is now subdivided into separate provinces of the EU. That was accomplished without even a vote of the people, despite a promise to allow a referendum. The far left of the UK has no respect for participatory democracy. Neither does our own far left government. These people are dangerous.

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The BNP Making Sense On Global Warming . . .

The BNP (British National Party) has just gone another notch up in my estimation. The Guardian has posted the following exchange between the BNP's Nick Griffin and a BBC interviewer who had just spent five minutes trying to get Griffin to say something that could be characterized as racist:

Nick Griffin: The BBC is obsessed with race and immigration. It would be great to talk about something else for once.

Nicky Campbell: What would you like to talk about? What's the thing you'd like to say given this platform to speak to the nation this morning?

Nick Griffin: OK, how about the fact that I believe, along with the Czech politician [Vaclav Klaus] everyone is berating, that global warming is essentially a hoax. It is being exploited by the liberal elite as a means of taxing and controlling us and the real crisis is peak oil. We're running out of proper, real energy. And it is something with an immediate and catastrophic effect in a few years' time potentially — not worrying about floating polar bears in a 150 years.

That about sums up reality in a paragraph. And if he is making sense while the left is doing nothing but making ad hominem attacks, the BNP might find itself on a real upward trend over the next few years. Let's hope they moderate a bit more, though. They may see global warming as a hoax, but, as EU Referendum points out, they have previously said that the Holocaust was a hoax also.

Update: Add to the above this article from the NYT:

The British National Party opposes what Mr. Griffin calls the “creeping Islamification” of Britain, supports voluntary repatriation of immigrants and wants to take Britain out of the European Union and NATO.

. . . Mr. Griffin’s victory is the culmination of a campaign to modernize the party and shake off a reputation for anti-Semitism and the politics of incitement it earned in a previous era.

I don't know about that drop out of the NATO bit. I'll have to read up a bit more on that.

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Dr. Seuss & A Message For PM Gordon Brown

Tory MEP Daniel Hannan rips into PM Gordon Brown following the most recent elections in the UK, calling on Dr. Seuss to get his message across.



Hannan is a Tory member of the EU Parliament, as well as an author and a blogger on the Telegraph. He is highly critical of the EU and Britian's integration into that body and is a strong proponent of radical democratic reform in the UK. What's not to like.

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Labour's "Long, Dark Night Of Humiliation" - Britain & Europe Swing Right

Labour did not just lose the latest 4 June EU Parliament elections, they got toasted. According to the Guardian:

. . . Labour trailed humiliatingly behind UKIP in the European elections and was expected to garner about 16% or 17% of the vote, its lowest share since the First World War and below the party's worst expectations.

During a dramatic night of unremitting gloom for Downing Street, the Tories appeared to have pulled more than 10 points ahead of Labour, with UKIP in ­second. The BNP also secured its first ­significant wins in British politics when its leader Nick Griffin became an MEP in the north-west, and Andrew Brons – a former leader of the National Front - won in Yorkshire and Humber.

Read the entire article. The gains by the BNP in particular have the left spitting blood. The British left did all they could to demonize the BNP, including trotting out the Archbishop of Canterbury, the odious Rowan Williams, to rail against voting for the BNP. All to no avail, it seems, as the Daily Mail reports: "The triumph for the [BNP] neo-fascist party, which will now send two MEPs to Brussels - including its leader Nick Griffin - sent shockwaves through Westminster . . ."

I do not know if its fair to characterize today's BNP as a "neo-facist" party, but I do know that they seem to be the only party speaking out on taboo issues that threaten the very fabric of the UK, not the least of which is immigration. They are tapping into a lot of angst among the rank and file that the Tory Party, which has sought to emulate the Labour Party in so many ways, simply is not. I think the best possible thing for British politics would be for the BNP to have a stand on the national stage. So long as they don't evince overt racism, they may be able to spark a true national debate free of PC restrictions on such things as freedom of speech, health and safety, multiculturalism, nationalism, and immigration - all areas where socialist policies have done immense damage to the fabric of British life.

Indeed, having watched the socialists in Labour deconstruct British society and attack Christianity over the past decade and then turn Britain into a province of the EU without a vote of the British electorate, its nice to see the pendulum swing and swing hard. Certainly a good portion of this vote was a reaction to the scandal over MP expenses. But it was part of a greater movement all across Europe that saw big gains by right and center-right parties, including most notably Geert Wilder's anti-EU, anti-immigration party which "shot to second place behind the ruling Christian Democrats by taking 17 per cent of the vote in the Netherlands." Wilders is outspoken in his stance against the predations of Islamists throughout Europe and is perhaps best known for his production of the movie short, Fitna (see here).

This also from the above-linked Guardian article:

Labour's European meltdown was amplified on a continental scale last night as the centre-left across the EU suffered defeats despite an economic climate from which it should profit. The most significant outcome was in Germany, the EU's biggest member country, where the Social Democrats (SPD) came in 17 points behind Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats and their Bavarian CSU ally.

In France, and Italy the centre-right also scored victories while Spain's socialist government lost to the conservatives.

Now if we can only get our own socialist left out of power, perhaps there is yet a chance for Western Civilization to survive.

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Should Republican's Emulate The Tories?

With the GOP's star temporarily in retrograde, everyone is chiming in on what ails the Republican Party and how to fix it. Reagan is dead, according to Jeb Bush. The right's stand on social issues is what's killing the party, says Olympia Snow. Howard Dean has declared capitalism a failed experiment (I love the degree of utter historical ignorance needed to make that statement). People want big government and lots of social spending according to Paul Krugman. Rush Limbaugh is killing the party, according to Colin Powell. Have I missed anything? Oh yes, become like Britain's Tory Party. That was today's helpful suggestion from James Forsyth of the UK's Spectator Magazine.

Mr. Forsyth's suggestion is based on his assessment that Republicans of today are similar to the Tories of 1997, when the Tories suffered the most decisive electoral defeat in British history. According to Mr. Forsyth, if Republicans merely tone down the social conservatism, or make of it an economic issue rather than a moral one, as Tories are trying to do in Britain, then perhaps Republicans can revive their party. If you don't follow British politics that closely, it sounds like a reasonable suggestion. But the truth is that the Tory Party has repackaged itself as a light version of the socialist Labour Party and it is reasonable to expect that, while they will assuredly win the next election, they offer no viable solutions to the serious problems Britain is experiencing.

The Tory Party came to power in 1979 under Margaret Thatcher. She worked tremendous changes in Britain (a short recapitulation of which you can read here) until she lost an intra-party fight as leader of her party in 1990 over her opposition to further integration in the EU. John Major took her spot, but a series of problems led to an absolute trouncing of the Tories in 1997. There are at least three similarities between Britain of John Major's days and the Republican Party of today. Most importantly, there were severe economic problems that occurred on Major's watch. Interestingly, the worst of it, Black Wednesday, George Soros had a major hand in creating. Further, the Tory brand and their claim to family values became tarnished through a series of widely publicized scandals - most of them sexual. And lastly, the press, led by the BBC, and academia were virulently liberal. These at least mirror some of the problems Republicans have suffered through over the past few years.

So how is it now that the Tories stand on the precipice of power? A part of it is, as Mr. Forsyth suggests, that Tories have recast some conservative issues, such as marriage and children born out of wedlock, on economic grounds. But he ignores that the Tories have gone much further, in many cases adopting Labour policies and punting on the really big issues. For example, the Tory Party still has not taken a firm position on the two existential issues facing Britain, whether to allow the people a vote on the EU's Lisbon Treaty - which saw Britain surrender its sovereignty to the EU - and what to do about the problems of open border immigration and the massive Muslim influx.

Beyond that, in many cases, its been the Tories who have tried to outdo the socialists on avant garde issues. For example, not only have Tories jumped on the global warming bandwagon, but David Cameron's advisor on issues dealing with green policy was a key witness advocating that three people who sabotaged a coal plant last year should be found not guilty. When Bishop Nazir Ali went public with charges that there are Muslim areas in Britain that have become enclaves non-Muslims dare not tread and that multiculturalism was an abject failure, it was the Tory Shadow Minister who was the first to call the good Bishop misguided. And it was just a few days ago that another Tory Shadow Minister appearing on a BBC game show threatened to kill Carrie Prejean because she spoke out against gay marriage - such is the Tory attitude towards free speech and their embrace of the most radical gay agenda in the Western world.

Tory popularity today is not because of their "conservative" policies, its because the Labour Party has bulloxed up the country economically and pursued radical social policies that have, one, attacked Britain's proud history, and two, that have made a multicultural mess of the country. The Tory Party does not present a real choice for the British electorate, unfortunately. And nor would a Tory model present a reasonable model for the Republican Party.

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This Will Surely Improve His Image

If you follow British politics, you know that the Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is a deeply unpopular socialist politician who has no chance of surviving the next election. Indeed, the other day, he was described in the press as "dead politician walking." One of the charges against Brown is that he acts imperiously. It was about a year ago that he unilaterally signed Britain's sovereignty over to the EU without allowing the public a promised referendum. Yesterday, Brown produced a YouTube video in a doomed-before-it-began effort to rouse the British population. Part of this was shot at a school with a WWII montage dotting the walls:



That's bound to endear him more to the public. Obviously, even his photographer and handlers - to allow that shot to be taken - are ready for this guy to make his final exit.

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What's The Difference Again, Between Tory & Labour?

The left's stranglehold on Britain is complete, particularly since the Conservative Party in Britain, the Tories, are really nothing more than a light version of Labour - complete it would seem, with the same socialist-left animosity towards free speech and Christianity.

This is a BBC program in which the MP and shadow home secretary Alan Duncan says that he would like to kill the "silly bitch" Carrie Prejean, Miss California, for stating her view that marriage should only be between a man and a woman.



I have to admit, I was surprised when the other lefties on the Beeb show went slack-jawed in amazement, given the casual anti-Americanism I've seen on that station over the years. At any rate, the Tories will take power in another year or two, but I doubt that anyone in the UK will note any difference.

(H/T Gateway Pundit)

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An English Lesson For E.J. Dionne

Dionne really is such low hanging fruit, going after his insipid columns is akin to taking a few practice swings with a bat before stepping up to the plate. Today he completely mistakes what is going on across the pond as the basis for his suggestion that McCain make a sharp left turn to be more like Obama.
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You can find EJ Dionne's column here. Dionne's message therein to McCain today - ditch conservative principles and become more liberal, just like the Tories did, and you stand a chance of winning the election.

There are just a few problems with that. First and foremost among them is that Republicans lost power when they lost their mooring from conservative values. They spent our wealth like drunken Democrats. When the now indicted Sen. Stevens put the Bridge to Nowhere on the Senate map, all but a few Republicans walked across it like lemmings. But that aside, looking to the UK, it is true that the Tories would never be mistaken for conservatives in the U.S. They are Labour lite - but they have been that way for the better part of a century. Voters are not warming to the Tories because the Tories have suddenly changed brands. To the contrary, they are utterly rejecting Labour, whose ideas are pretty much the mainstream socialism that Obama promises.

I've been calling Britain a laboratory in modern socialism for years. If there is a lesson to be learned from the British experience, it's that socialism is a grand failure.

As to why the Tories lost power in the first place - they sacked Margaret Thatcher because of her opposition to the EU. When Thatcher came to power, she did so on the heels of hard economic times. She revamped the British economy and tore the economic heart out of British socialism. She was villified for it, and when she lost power, that did not mean the end to the Tory problems on Europe. That, plus a series of sex scandals and some bad economic times did in Thatcher's successor, John Major. The Tories imploded, much as Republicans in 2006.

Now, after eleven years of mucking things up like only socialists can do, we are being treated to the spectacle of Labour embracing conservative principles in an effort to hold onto power. The latest Green Paper on policing, promising a devolution of power, is about as far off the left playbook as Nancy Pelosi embracing drilling in ANWR. So, to the extent that there has been movement in the political parties over the past decade in the UK, its been the movement of Labour towards the center left occupied by the Tories.

That aside, EJ did chuck in a few laughers with the best being far and away to assert that Gordon Brown and Obama share a "broadly center left world view." Gordon Brown is anything but center left. And to claim that there is anything about Obama that can be characterized as "center" or even "center left" is laughable. This is a guy whose voting record is well to the left of the only self-proclaimed socialist in Congress, who wants to declare Iraq a defeat, and who wants to institute cradle to grave socialism in the U.S. That is "center" only if you are in Cuba or Venezuela. Even China has given up that ghost.

Oh well, Dionne may never get anything right in his columns, but he always provides fine entertainment - unintended, though it may be.

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Labour Calls For Local Election Of Police Chiefs In The UK

Hell may well be freezing over. Just as I wrote on the decline in law and order in Britain due to a perfect socialist storm, the Labour Party up and publishes a proposal to devolve power to localities to elect their own police leadership. That's the equivallent in the U.S. of Nancy Pelosi coming out for offshore drilling and Harry Reid endorsing free trade agreements.

At any rate, in addition, Labour plans to end most national policing targets and cut the mountains of red tape that currently ham-string local policing. While this still leaves the insidious problem of a breakdown in courts and punishment, it may well work a sea change to policing in Britain. Amazingly, though, many "conservatives," among them Mellanie Phillips, opposed this change.
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The proposals are contained in a Home Office document, the Policing Green Paper. It is long and dense, taking four times the words to say what is needed. That said, it actually appears to be a coherent plan that oculd work. Coming from the Labour Party - you could knock me other with a stick.

The plan calls for the locality to elect its police leadership who then must work within the regulatory framework set up by the Home Office and under the authority of the Home Office. This may or may not be problematic, depending on how steep a regulatory burden the Home Office retains and how much control they still try to wield, neither of which were clearly answered in the Green Paper.

An interesting point of the plan is to require regular, published inspections of the local police by a national Inspector General. This would provide information to the locals from a neutral third party and would provide a strong motivation to maintain standards. The plan also provides for the Home Office, at its discretion, to remove elected police officials if it becomes apparent that there is corruption or deeply substandard performace in any locality.

Interestingly enough, opposition to the plan is coming not only from Labour, but also from some well-known Conservatives. Mellanie Phillips commented on the proposed changes approximately a week ago in her blog, arguing strenuously against these changes. Her initial criticism was that allowing local elections of police would present a "very real danger of extremists and single issue pressure groups targeting these elections for their own ends."

The fundamental purpose of democracy is to give people a say in how they are governed at every level. It means trusting people to make their own decisions - a bedrock priniciple of conservativism - and locals are certainly in the best position to adjudge who they wish to run their local policing. If they make a mistake, well, that is why there are elections. It will, in the long run, mean policing that is far more responsive to the local communities.

That said, Britain does have a real problem with extremism. It is the problem of "two Britains" where there are areas in Britain that appear to have been directly transplanted from the rural hinterlands of Pakistan. Allowing elections in areas that have come to be dominated by radical Islamists is a double edge sword. Nonetheless, that is not a reason to deny local elections, nor is it a reason to assume even in these areas that the person elected by secret ballot would be problematic. Besides, the plan set forth in the Green Paper strikes the appropriate balance, maintaining the right of the government to step in if their is a corrupt police administration.

Beyond this particular objection by Ms. Phillips, whom I assume is indicative of those conservatives who likewise object, her further objections are simply non-sensical.

The independence of the police is crucial to maintaining Britain’s dispassionate tradition of law and order. The fact that that independence has been catastrophically eroded through control by central government does not mean that the remedy is to replace such control by other kinds of political interference.

. . . But it is a mistake to think that the danger of politicisation resides only in Whitehall. Elections offer the means for any number of obsessives, ideologues or fanatics to seize the reins of power. That’s bad enough when it comes to elected bodies themselves but when applied to the police it is a potential disaster.

. . . What’s broken in Britain is the culture and trade-craft of policing. It’s that culture which has to be repaired and restored. For sure, the first step must be to remove the means of political control from Whitehall. But then the police have to be taught, persuaded, cajoled, shamed -- whatever -- into rediscovering their lost professional ethic. And for that to happen their independence is vital. . . . But that’s what has to be done. Delivering the police from the Whitehall frying-pan to the fire of local extremists or other obsessives is most certainly not the answer

Ms. Phillips seems to be confused. There is always going to be some political entity in ultimate authority over the police in a democratic society. The only question is who will be that authority. There is no real option other than central control or local elections that will, directly or indirectly result in the choice of police leadership. There is a vast spectrum in between those two points where the government still sets the boundaries and mainatins some regulatory control. That is what is set out in the Green Paper. Britain has had the experiment in central contol now for decades - and it is failing, not catastrophically yet, but as I articluated here, the system is clearly broken. A significant change is needed.

Ms. Phillips also shows a troubling and fundamental distrust in democracy - a trait that shows up with uncomfortable regularity in many "conservatives" across the pond. That said, what I have read in the Green Paper suggests that Labour may actually have developed a workable plan that will be good for Britain. I would suggest to those conservatives who think otherwise that they actually sit down and read the Green Paper before criticizing it on the grounds that it provides too much democracy.

My hats off to Labour. If they are able to keep their statist tendencies at bay, they may have found at least a partial solution to Britain's policing problem. Now they need to work on the punishment side of the house.

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Labour Takes It In The Shorts

The socialist Labour Party was trounced in mid-term elections two months ago, and now, in a by election, have lost possibly the safest seat they had, Glasgow East. The Tories are publicly urging PM Gordon Brown to call another general election and even one Labour MP has now called for Brown to step down.
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This from the Telegraph:

Challenged by David Cameron, the Conservative leader, to call a general election after the loss of Glasgow East to the Scottish National Party, Mr Brown said he was "getting on with the job".

Preparing to meet trade union leaders in Warwick, the Prime Minister said: "We've got to listen and hear people's concerns and that's exactly what we are doing. People are worried every time they go to the petrol station for fuel and worry about the costs. These are concerns that are happening in every other country.

"My full focus is on taking people through these difficult times."

But Graham Stringer, a former minister and the MP for Manchester Blackley, added to the pressure on his leader by becoming the first Labour MP to publicly urging for Mr Brown to consider his position.

Mr Stringer said the Cabinet must have a "closed and honest discussion,” adding: “We need a new start and that can only come from a debate around the leadership.”

In one of the biggest electoral upsets of recent times, the Scottish National Party candidate John Mason last night overturned a huge 13,507 majority in Glasgow East and clinched the former Labour stronghold from the Labour candidate, Margaret Curran, by 365 votes.

Speaking earlier outside his home in west London, Mr Cameron said the result showed that voters were telling the Prime Minister: "We think you're failing and we want change."

Mr Cameron said: "I wonder whether we can put up with this for another 18 months.

. . . This morning Des Browne, the Scottish Secretary, admitted that it had been a "bad night" for Labour. But he said that the party had recovered from previous by-election disasters and could do so again. He maintained that Mr Brown was the best leader for the country in difficult times.

. . . The defeat sends a chilling message about Labour's electoral prospects to already dissatisfied party backbenchers, the majority of whom enjoy much smaller majorities. Labour's collapse in a working class area also suggests that the party's traditional support is joining the middle classes in turning their backs on the party.

This morning Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP deputy leader, said that if the result were replicated at the next general election, Labour would be left with only one MP in Scotland. She described the victory in Glasgow East as a "sensational, spectacular, epic result".

She said: "The cost of living, fuel prices and food prices were an enormous factor in this by-election. But also for the first time in history this was a by-election between two governments - the Labour Government in London and the SNP Government in Holyrood. Clearly the Labour Government is deeply unpopular."

Mr Brown has already seen a safe Labour seat lost in May when a 7,000 majority in Crewe and Nantwich was reversed by the Tories. Last month Labour came fifth in the Henley by-election. But for half a century, Labour has enjoyed political supremacy in the east end of Glasgow – the party's 25th safest seat in the country and its third most secure in Mr Brown's Scottish heartland.

In the poll, Mr Mason received 11,277 votes (43 per cent), beating Mrs Curran, who took 10,912 (42 per cent). The SNP's vote increased 26 percentage points on the 2005 General Election, while Labour's fell 19 points. . .

Read the entire article

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Deconstructing the Socialist's War On Law & Order In Britain (Updated)

In Britain, socialists, with their modern belief in multiculturalism, dominate government, academia and much of the news industry. Britain embraced socialism in the immediate aftermath of WWII as a means of righting a deeply troubled class based system. To their credit, the socialists solved that problem. But the socialists have gone far beyond, embracing multiculturalism and creating their own immense problems by undermining almost all of the pillars of British society. Britain is, in essence, a laboratory for the ills of modern socialism in an anglo democracy.

[Update: Within a few days of posting this, I was directed to a Labour Party proposal to allow for local elections of the police leadersip. This is a sea change and as about as unlikely an event as Nancy Pelosi embracing offshore drilling. It may well be a measure born of desperation, given the Sword of Damoclese under which the Labour Party electoral fortunes now sit. None the less, the plan looks viable. Interestingly, it is drawing fire from some conservatives. I have posted on it here. It obviously renders the first two points I raise below moot.]

I posted below, in Britain's Devil's Advocates, that perhaps the most dangerous way in which socialists were destroying British society was a failure to impose law and order. Soon after I had written that post, the Home Office released a report showing a 9% drop in violent crime in Britain. The report was trumpeted as proof of the success of the socialist Labour Party by arguably the most risible den of multicultural elitists in the whole of the chattering class – the BBC. It was all positively Orwellian.

This post is meant to analyze the why and how of what the socialists are doing to undermine law and order in Britain. The starting point is looking underneath the great statistics to see what is really going on:

Labour’s superlative crime statistics are an attempt to magically change chicken excreta into chicken salad. This from the blog Burning Your Money:

. . . Over the decade since that tough on crime supremo took over, police recorded crime is up 7% (1997-98 to 2007-08). And when you probe beneath the totals, crimes of violence turn out to be up much MUCH more.

As the chart above shows, the increase in really bad stuff is nearly 70%. What's that? Ah yes, of course - we're not allowed to make that comparison because during the last ten years, the Home Office changed its counting rules for recorded crime not once, but twice. Twice. Is it any wonder nobody trusts the stats? Well, you know what? We're making the comparison anyway. And we're saying to the Home Office and the BBC, the reason we don't believe you is that the official stats are about as reliable as a one-careful-owner Renault Megane from Arthur Daley. We'd rather believe the evidence of our own eyes - such as the letter I have in front of me right now from our local police warning us of a spate of violent break-ins, and advising us to phone 999 at the slightest sign of a sledgehammer coming through the frontdoor. . . .

What is happening in Britain is a case book study in why socialists / multiculturalists have no business being put in charge of running a lemonade stand, let alone a country. The problem is fourfold.

One, socialists are statists. They suffer under the dual fallacy that the common man is not to be trusted and that the world will function better only if they, the elite, are making the decisions. Democracy is merely a distraction for these people. They centralize and accrue power. And that includes centralized control over policing throughout the country. The local police are ultimately controlled and appointed by the central government. Thus it is no surprise whatsoever that the biggest complaint I hear from my friends in Britain is that the local police are not responsive to the community.

It would seem patently obvious that if you want to make the police responsive to local concerns, you would give the locals the hiring and firing authority over their local police leadership through elections. No more appointments from above and minimal regulation of standards.

Ah, but that would violate the very first tenet of the multicultural left - that they are superior and the decisions should be left to them. Therefore, when last year John Reid, Labour's then Home Secretary, pondered how to better increase the accountability of local police to the local populace, the mere mention of local elections did not even pass his lips. Instead, he suggested giving out phone numbers directly to the police station. It was stupefying.

But it gets worse. When you have centralized control, there is of course tremendous pressure to show that the central planners are doing their job well. Thus you get things such as proposed "policing standards" from the Home Office that curiously seem to have no connection whatsoever with police efficiency:

Guidelines ordering police to respond to emergency calls within three hours and to attend less urgent incidents such as burglaries within three days have been drawn up by the Home Office.

Three hours? That of course was not a standard drawn up to improve law and order. It was a standard drawn up in response to the public perception of failing law and order and a police force that is unseen and unresponsive. Clearly it was a gambit by the socialists in the central government so that they can claim in the future that police are responding to 99.99% of all calls within the prescribed time standard. Voila. A Labour statistical masterpiece to be reported prominently on the telly. Who are you going to believe about police responsiveness, Gordo and the Beeb news reader or your lying eyes?

Two, because socialists believe in their own superiority, what they do best – and most – is regulate. The answer to any problem is not to devolve power or deregulate, but rather to pass a new law or regulation on top of the existing ones. Thus you have an ever growing nightmare of bureaucracy and red tape that takes police off the streets and otherwise detracts from them doing their job.

Please do not mistake anything that I write here as a knock on the British police per se. I have no doubt that the average individual officers are as fine as you will find anywhere. The socialist system in control of the British police is another matter entirely. For example, this a few months ago from a British Police Inspector who blogs under the nom de guerre of Inspector Gadget:

We are very nearly finished in Ruralshire Constabulary. It is chaos and it can only be a matter of days. Someone has to turn off the life support machine. Politically Correct to the point of insanity (Home Office ‘Equalities’ Circular Number 10 of November 2002 is now being enforced in Ruralshire - this bans the use of the terms ‘homosexual or homosexuality’ and demands the use of the term ‘gay’ instead ) and immersed in the enormous chaos of another complete reorganisation of the Divisions various units, we are literally imploding.

We have just had to take another twenty or so officers off the streets to provide the staff for three new units. These units will be fighting a desperate rear-guard action for the next few months to increase our performance in the Customer Satisfaction area. These officers are not actually going to do anything to help our ‘customers’, they are simply going to concentrate on making hundreds of calls to victims to check their satisfaction levels.

And see his related posts on the effect of centralized control and massive overregulation of the police here, here, and here.

Onto the third component of imploding law and order in Britain. Socialists want to win elections, and thus those wonderful statistics you see that show crime ever dropping and more arrests being made involve a tremendous amount of gaming the system. This means targeted policing that distorts priorities and leaves everyone, the police included, jaded and cynical.

For example, there was this story not long ago:

Police spent months gathering statements from 542 people who donated money to a youngster who collected £700 for Comic Relief but then kept it.The case was then recorded as 542 crimes of obtaining money by deception, boosting detection rates even though the youngster only received a warning, the Police Federation conference in Blackpool heard yesterday. It also emerged that an unidentified child in North Wales received a "penalty notice for disorder" (PND) for chalking on the pavement.

The cases were highlighted as absurd examples of the "target culture" reviled by many rank and file officers in England and Wales, which is "criminalising middle England".

The critics say pressure to boost the apparent success rate against crime forces police to make ridiculous decisions and use arrests, cautions or fines for trivial incidents which would not previously have been treated as crimes.

Investigation of more serious offences is then neglected. . .

Read the rest of the story here. You can also troll through the archives of the Police Inspectors blog and find countless examples.

The fourth component of Labour’s destruction of law and order is by far the most insidious. It begins with the socialist / multiculturalist mindset - a philosopy right out of the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto - that Western society is at the root of today's problems. Indeed, it is so ensconced in the psyche of Britain's hard left socialists that there is largely a complete refusal to see reality on that score. For one crystal clear example, as I pointed out in the post Britain’s Devil’s Advocates, there is that dyed in the wool socialist, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury:

[The Archbishop] is doing to Christianity what Labour is doing to Britain. He is the man who prior to this day had praised Islam, damned America as an imperialist nation to a crowd of Muslims, blamed America for Muslim violence against Christians in the Middle East, refused to proselytize for Christianity among Muslims, and advocated implementing at least parts of Sharia law in Britain. The Archbishop's latest assault on the Christian faith has come in an apologia to Muslims for the violent history of Christianity and what seems an apology for one of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith - the Trinity.

I could give hundreds of examples, but one more will suffice - the BBC, with their recent drama showing a British Christian beheading a Muslim in an act of terrorism. Boy, that one has a real basis in reality. Counting Cats quotes Melanie Phillips on this issue: "It is really quite obscene that the BBC repeatedly portrays the victims of mass murder – Americans, Israelis – as its perpetrators and its actual perpetrators as victims."

Thus the logic is that Western society is bad and either should not be defended or the defense should be ameliorated by recognition that those attacking Western society are at least partially justified in doing so. Society itself is at the root of crime. With that mindset permeating the justice system, the system changes its emphasis. No longer is punishing the crime and bringing fair retribution to its victim the top priority. It is replaced as the top priority by rehabilitation of the offender. This is often accomplished using "alternative sentencing" rather then jail time. While rehabilitation is a laudable goal to be sure, the motivation to rehabilitate itself disappears when it is divorced from meaningful punishment. In other words, when socialists prioritize rehabilitation over punishment and no longer see punishment as a necessary element of rehabilitation, then law and order really begins to fall apart. And that is what we are seeing in Britain today.

Three examples highlight this last component. Inspector Gadget complains of this often. He has an example spot on in his blog today:

Interesting Radio 4 Interview at the "Foundation 4 Life" youth project this morning. They deliver ‘Behaviour Modification Workshops’ for young people who are offending or considered to be at risk of offending/ re-offending. . . .

Two of the youths involved were interviewed. Born and living in this country, they were, never the less, very hard to understand. One of them was asked about the new Government plan for 5 year sentences for knife crime:

"My Boys don’t care about no sentence. When they are doing what they are doing (carrying knives) they don’t care about no consequences"

He then went on to say that his most recent conviction was for street robbery. He had been found guilty and sentenced to 6 months; he had served 3 months and his comment was:

"Three months! That is good for robbery, man" He then explained that he had 32 previous convictions and had been to prison only twice. . . .

If this individual has 32 previous convictions, clearly he has been arrested and/or dealt with by police officers 32 times successfully i.e. a conviction was obtained.

In light of this, yet again, Inspector Gadget asks anyone who cares to comment:

"How exactly is this kind of repeat offending by violent, disturbed and feral youths (who have been dealt with time and time again by us) still the responsibility of the police?"

"What exactly are we NOT doing as police officers in this case?"

"What accountability is there for the Courts?"

We need some high profile ACPO officers to start telling the public about this. Apart form the horrendous public safety issues, we are getting sick of arresting the same people again and again with no tangible result and then being blamed for their behaviour.

Read the entire post. This unconscionably lax treatment of serious crime does not extend just to the feral youth culture. For example, On June 11, 2007, the Telegraph reported that "[t]housands of sex offenders including paedophiles and rapists have escaped with cautions rather than being jailed over the past five years." This is indicative of what is happening throughout the UK legal system.

Peter Hitchen's perfectly captures what is occuring in a recent column, noting the sorry state of any meaningful punishment and the latest mind-numbing recommendation that thieves, swindlers and burglars receive no jail time:

Here is the news, 20 years from now: ‘Government experts are urging that murderers should be given community service where possible, rather than jail terms. ‘The panel pointed out that there was little evidence that prison terms reduced reoffending, as most murderers committed fresh killings soon after release. And packed jails mean that only the most serious offenders can be kept inside. 'The Lab-Con-Lib coalition government’s crash programme to build new prison camps has increased places to 500,000, but overcrowding is still serious...’ Here the bulletin comes to an abrupt end because of a power cut resulting from a wind shortage.

Actually, 20 years may be too long. This week, a body called the Sentencing Advisory Panel (SAP for short) did actually say that convicted thieves, burglars and swindlers should not automatically go to jail. Their thinking, if it can be so described, is roughly as follows. The prisons are so full that offenders could only go to jail for a short time. During that time there is no chance of turning them into better people and it doesn’t keep them off the streets for very long. So why bother?

You will have noticed there was no storm of rage from the politicians. They, too, have accepted the half-witted, thought-free ideas that enslave the SAP. They loftily dismiss the suggestion that convicted criminals should be punished. They whimper that ‘deprivation of liberty is punishment enough’. They wince fastidiously at the idea that prisons should be seriously unpleasant places run by the authorities.

That is why burglary – which 40 years ago was a rarity and an outrage – has become so common. Why shouldn’t the same thing happen to murder? It already seems to be under way. Behind all this is the foolish idea that people who knowingly and deliberately do bad things should be ‘rehabilitated’ and ‘helped’.

Any fool knows it is wrong to break into someone else’s home and steal from it. He does it because he thinks he can get away with it, and because he is not afraid of what might happen even if he is caught. He is laughing at us.

Since these days you have to commit about 50 offences right in front of a CCTV camera before the police will act, those who arrive in our prisons are already experienced, habitual criminals. It is absurd to think they will be ‘rehabilitated’ by their time in these silly warehouses, run by the convicts and full of drugs.

Prison’s main purpose is to frighten potential criminals into staying within the law. The hundreds of thousands who now live criminal lives do so mainly because they are not afraid, as they once would have been. So we have to be afraid instead.

Read his entire post.

This is all a case study in why the philosophy of Karl Marx should have been interred with his bones. Instead, it is alive and thriving – much like a malignant cancer - in Britain today. Either Britain will dispense with socialism or Britain will eventually crumble. I am an optimist and an anglophile, and thus my bet is on the former. But I am also a bit of a realist. Given the stranglehold of socialists on all the reigns of power in Britain, and in particular in academia and the news, the latter is a real possibility also.

Update: Welcome to readers from Rightwing News and Likelihood of Success

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Brits Get The Right Of Self Defense

Until now, there was only a common law right to self defense in Britian that was at best unclear and which often functioned to make a criminal of a law abiding citizen doing nothing more than acting to protect their person and property. That is true no longer. Britain passed a law in September (I completely missed it) that goes into effect today outlining what appears to be a fairly robust right to self defense. This is superb news for Britain and it is a law I never expected a Labour Parliament to pass. I stand corrected. In a post written within the past 24 hours, Britain's Devil's Advocates, I took the socialists to task for the harm that they were doing to religion and law and order. My comments as to the former stand. My comments as to the latter, many of which were precisely on the British lack of a clear right to self defense, obviously are no longer accurate. It is not often that I am happy to be proven wrong and actually savor the taste of finely cooked crow.
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This from the Telegraph:

Home owners and “have-a go-heroes” have for the first time been given the legal right to defend themselves against burglars and muggers free from fear of prosecution.

They will be able to use force against criminals who break into their homes or attack them in the street without worrying that "heat of the moment” misjudgements could see them brought before the courts.

Under new laws police and prosecutors will have to assess a person’s actions based on the person’s situation "as they saw it at the time” even if in hindsight it could be seen as unreasonable.

For example, homeowners would be able stab or shoot a burglar if confronted or tackle them and use force to detain them until police arrive. Muggers could be legally punched and beaten in the street or have their own weapons used against them.

However, attacking a fleeing criminal with a weapon is not permitted nor is lying in wait to ambush them.

The new laws follow a growing public campaign for people to be given the right to defend themselves and their own homes in the wake of a number of high profile cases.

In 2000, Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer, was sent to prison for manslaughter for shooting an intruder in his home.

Earlier this year, Tony Singh, a shopkeeper, found himself facing a murder charge after he defended himself against an armed robber who tried to steal his takings. During the struggle the robber received a single fatal stab wound to the heart with his own knife.

The Crown Prosecution Service eventually decided Mr Singh should not be charged.

Until now people have had to prove in court that they acted in self defence but the changes mean police and the Crown Prosecution Service will decide on cases before this stage.

Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, said that people would be protected legally if they defend themselves "instinctively”; they fear for their own safety or that of others; and the level of force used is not excessive or disproportionate.

He added the changes in law were designed to ensure the criminal justice system was weighted in favour of the victim.

Mr Straw – and other Labour ministers – have previously repeatedly blocked attempts by opposition MPs to give greater protection to householders.

. . . The new self defence law, which came into force yesterday, is contained in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 and was announced by Mr Straw last September.

He is understood to have decided new laws were necessary after he was involved in four "have-a go’’ incidents, which included chasing and restraining muggers near his south London home.

. . . Mr Straw said: "The justice system must not only work on the side of people who do the right thing as good citizens, but also be seen to work on their side.

"The Government strongly supports the right of law abiding people to defend themselves, their families and their property with reasonable force. This law will help to make sure that that right is upheld and that the criminal justice system is firmly weighted in favour of the victim.

"Dealing with crime is not just the responsibility of the police, courts and prisons; it’s the responsibility of all of us. Communities with the lowest crime and the greatest safety are the ones with the most active citizens with a greater sense of shared values, inspired by a sense of belonging and duty to others, who are empowered by the state and are also supported by it – in other words, making a reality of justice.

"These changes in the law will make clear – victims of crime, and those who intervene to prevent crime, should be treated with respect by the justice system. We do not want to encourage vigilantism, but there can be no justice in a system which makes the victim the criminal.". . .

Read the entire article. You have to love how the law came about - the Home Office Secretary involved in chasing down criminals personally. One, my hat is off to him for his personal bravery. Two, the fact that his acts led to his support for a change in the law suppports a critical hypothesis that I formed long ago, that the elitist left has only a tenuous hold on reality and that their utopian attitudes change only through the rare personal exposure to reality. Now if Britain would only send the Lord Chief Justice and the Archbishop of Canterbury over to live in Saudi Arabia for a few months and get a chance to gain a greater understanding of Sharia law . . .

(H/T Bookworm Room)

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