The Welfare of the People

Talking of Laban Tall and debunking stupid memes, he hits the nail on the head with his take on the latest Tony Martin 'revelations'. Hardly, had the echos of the first shot died away than the L3 and their TINO accomplices (and in fact the TINO has been very active in pushing this line) engaged in a campaign of personal destruction against Martin. Never mind the morality of this, LT sums up why this is legal nonsense:

Two points here. The first is that the question of whether he should have been imprisoned is nothing at all to do with his views. I'm surprised that Marcus (isn't he a lawyer ?) is able to ignore the distinction between opinion and action. The Birmingham Six were arrested while travelling to the funeral of a Republican activist. One of them after release gave a speech in Belfast urging republicans to send more British troops home in body bags. But vile as their politics may have been, it doesn't constitute proof that they killed twenty-four people in Birmingham in 1974. Only Government front-bencher Chris Mullin knows who did that - and he ain't saying.

Indeed - to spell it out, the law allows citizens to use reasonable force, with the test of reasonableness being their perception of the threat. That's it. That's the test. Nowhere does it say anything like 'reasonable force, except where the guy is kind of weird'. Tony Martin could be a cannibal and the test would still be the same.

What the Tony Martin case really proves is the total amorality of our governing class. Here we have people whose supposed justification for persecting Martin is the defence of the Rule of Law and the fear of anarchy and vigilantism. Well, here's a case where the law is clear, yet it is the self-same people who want to inject an extra-legislative element into it, to somehow 'prove' Martin is a murderer by dint of the fact he's nuts, as though 'equal under law' means 'equality, but only for Kool Aid drinkers'.

There's a Heisenberg Effect here too. We have a (morally) innocent man who was brought before the Courts, served his sentance and was released. Yet still the L3 persue him. He is overtly harrassed by the Filth, the slightest (and stupidest) allegations become banner headlines, while on page five alleged professionals write columns proving he's evil, sick, worse than.... Actually, the world would be a better place if the L3 could condemn people like Ian Huntley nearly as readily as they condemn a farmer defending himself against a gang of professional criminals. But they don't. For years on end the full force of the political establishment has been directed against Martin. And he's showing signs of madness ? Who'd have thunk it ?

It would have been great if Tony Martin looked like Hugh Grant, talked like Sean Connery and thought like Stephen Hawking. He doesn't, so we'll just have to rely on the facts of the case. Tony Martin was abandoned by the state, alone, isolated and under attack by a gang of professional criminals. Had he done nothing he may well have been one more dead householder (incidentally, compare and contrast the coverage of the slaughter of innocent householders in the L3 media against the bulk-order-of-onions spectacular over Martin's rehabilitation of a professional criminal).
Instead, he defended himself and found that the state not only had no interest in protecting him, it was antagonistic to his survival: calling the police useless is too kind - they're positively harmful.

That's why the case struck a chord. The public instinctively understands what Martin was going through. It what the're going through, the slowly dawning revelation that there is no sanctuary: nowhere and nobody is safe. Britain's going through it's very own 'Fall of Rome' except this time the Centurians are out there protecting the Huns.