The Rhetoric May Change. Nothing Else Will

 

The cruel killing of two police officers has ignited a row so phoney that I hesitate to join in. Nothing of any interest or use will happen as a result of these two sad and irreparable deaths.

As the astute old liberal Kenneth Clarke has rightly said of the government’s crime policy in general ‘The rhetoric may change but the substance will stay the same’. This is as true of penal and police policy in general as it is of the present government, though I see the new Injustice Secretary has already given an interview in which he pretends to be ‘tough’, and nobody has laughed (except me).

 And let us here pause for a moment to consider the waves of grief and loss, spreading out over years and decades, caused by the violent ending of these two women’s lives.

Forget all the soppy talk about the deceased person only being in the next room. Even for religious believers, who retain the hope of eternal life,  death is still a slammed door, an end, a silence and an impenetrable barrier.  What use it if the person is ‘in the next room’ if no effort of will or love can find the door to that room, let alone unlock it?

So many people have been robbed of hopes. So many people’s lives now lack a purpose they used to have. So many good things which would have happened will now never happen.

And the reason? We do not know and cannot speculate upon who committed this crime. That, I am glad to say, is still a matter for an impartial court of justice with the presumption of innocence.

But we can say with near certainty that the culprit, whoever it might be, had this single characteristic , the common feature of all criminals  - arrogant selfishness.

Such a characteristic, unchecked either by moral force or the fear of punishment, is, if let loose in a society, as dangerous as a nuclear bomb. We are only just beginning to see the consequences of the amoral, punishment-free experimental society we so blithely allowed to be imposed on us 50 years ago.

The long afterglow of Christian moral law, and of Victorian and Edwardian law enforcement, is finally fading into twilight. Those who retained the habits of older British people, of deference to law they had made themselves, and whose principles they had been brought up to understand and respect, are dying fast. Our ordered peace existed in their hearts. When they are gone, it will be gone too.

Then there will be darkness. And I do not know what force in our society will be able to take us out of the dark age that is coming.

‘Bring back hanging!’ . The logic of this is in my view unanswerable. That is why those who advance it logically are not met with reason but with fury and scorn. But how can a post-Christian society accept a punishment based largely on the idea that even murderers have souls, and of course on the deeper idea, that human life is so uniquely valuable that the deliberate taking of it for evil ends is a crime of special horror? It will not happen now (though when this country finally sinks into the enlightened paradise for which the left have worked so hard for so long, I expect it will eventually return. It is in left-wing countries, such as Communist China and Communist Vietnam,  that the death penalty is most commonly used, but without any of the safeguards that would make it acceptable).

‘Arm the police!’ Well, we already have an armed police. This has been done, and will continue to be done, without legislation.  I see armed police officers every day. And I note that the uniforms of most forces are now designed to look semi-military, and give the impression that the person is armed even when he or she is not. Add a gun-holster to the ensemble already dangling from the average uniformed officer’s waistband, and it wouldn’t be a shock. The near unanimity with which media outlets described the two murdered officers as ‘unarmed’ made me wonder if there had been a briefing of some kind in which this fact was stressed. From what I have seen, there is little evidence that they would have been much safer if they had been armed. Nor would they have been. Handguns are largely useless weapons at the best of times,  except to threaten people with, and even heavily-armed soldiers often die in surprise attacks. 

If we do get a  fully-armed force, they will of course increasingly find themselves imposing an informal, unjust, ill-regulated death penalty, against which all the powers of Amnesty International and Mr Clive Stafford Smith will not prevail, because it will not ever be admitted that it is in fact a death penalty. But it is an entirely useless one, since it has no moral purpose or consistency.

By the way, I often point out that the deterrent effect of the death penalty does not simply affect murder.  It restrains criminal violence and the use of weapons in general. I’ve also pointed out that modern medical techniques save many lives which would have been lost in the 1950s and 1960s, so making ‘then and now ‘ comparisons of homicide figures rather misleading.

This morning I read an example of such a case in my own local newspaper, the Oxford Mail. This sort of thing is now counted too trivial to get into the national papers, though I think it once would have done.  You may read it here
Note that the victim nearly died and was left with his intestines exposed and a punctured lung.