Notes and Queries

A few responses to comments. On arming the police, the main point is that the death penalty (at least until the 1957 Homicide Act) protected the police, and all of us, from armed crime, by effectively deterring criminals from carrying firearms and knives. I think this effect is unquestionable, and my arguments for making the connection are to be found in full in the relevant chapters of my book 'A Brief History of Crime'. I simply haven't the space to set them out here, but would urge readers hostile to this conclusion not to dismiss it until they have read this material. I would personally prefer to be against the death penalty. I endorse it because facts and logic so insistently support its return.

Abolishing the death penalty led to an increase in armed crime and the stealthy arming of the police, transforming their relationship with the public. The numbers of shootings by the police, which I think will rise, are not themselves the issue. It is the fact that they take place at all, and that the officers responsible are almost invariably granted anonymity and exonerated, which is the point. I expect the numbers to rise, in any case. We never had very many executions either, at any time in the 20th century, but that didn't alter the principled objections of campaigners who felt the death penalty was wrong. Nor should it have done. Principles are principles, even if they are misguided.

On the distinction between my solitary call for people to withdraw votes from the Tory party (which I really wish had been as effective as one correspondent alleges), and the near-unanimous propaganda of the political media, which has in turn been used to destroy Margaret Thatcher, to install Anthony Blair, to destroy Iain Duncan Smith, to destroy Gordon Brown and to elevate David Cameron.

One, my column is an open expression of my personal opinion. It does not operate by nuance and selection of facts, by tone of voice, by ensuring that my side gets the last word in discussions whose direction is partially chaired by supposedly impartial presenter, nor by systematically choosing unflattering pictures of those I wish to undermine, while using flattering pictures of those I wish to build up. It makes no pretence at impartiality. And it is solitary. Nor by presenting subjective judgements of speeches as facts.

My complaint against the press and TV pack (I agree that the press alone could not achieve this, but the same structures apply to the BBC and some independent broadcasters) is that they are unanimous, and collective. And that their bias is not openly declared, but concealed, made highly effective through the subtle methods I outline above.

A note to Mr 'Un'. I apologise for speculating on his sex, but not for anything else I said (not that it matters much, since nobody knows who he is anyway). I have been the target of some spiteful personal attacks, in which the person involved sought to wound me by references very similar to the ones made by Mr 'Un'. I thought this person might have been trading under a false flag. Plainly I was wrong, but if I were Mr 'Un', I would not take it as a compliment that I had this suspicion. Attacking me in this way seems to me to be low in general, since the attacker knows I am debarred from any robust defence of myself that might not also involve in an unwanted quarrel with my brother. It is even lower when the attacker knows that my brother is very ill, as Mr 'Un' obviously does. Shame on him, and on others who use this grubby method to avoid proper argument.

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