Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Liberals ♥ Prison

If the Martians had landed in the week after the then Home Secretary Michael Howard declared that 'Prison works!', we'd never have heard about it amidst all the girly hysteria about that brute Howard!

Still, Liberals have at last found folks who deserve to be in jail: these guys.

It's ironic that these guys have been jailed for perverting the course of justice, when actual perversion passes judges by. Or, to put it another way, you can bang a schoolgirl on the back seat of your Ford, and the only risk will be driving through a speed trap on the way home.

Needless to say, this type of thing explains why the most common modifier used with the word 'judge' is 'unelected'. The legal system long ago uncoupled itself from any archaic ideas about reflecting the common morality and the like. Instead, we now have a system that's obsessed with modernity, virulently atheistic and supposedly utilitarian. The trouble is, to twist an old phrase, once you take the morality out of the law, you don't clear the way for logic, you clear it for anything.

Freed from constraints like morality and tradition, the legal system in this country has degenerated into just another nationalised industry: bloated, inefficient, politicised and nasty. Judges jail speeding ticket fiddlers while freeing perverts for the same reason cops set speed traps on motorway sliproads in the first place. It's not because they think blind, geographically-challenged five year olds might stumble onto the M1 while carrying their puppy back from the doggie hospital. It's not even primarily for the cash - though that helps. Nope - to borrow a phrase from Richard Littlejohn - it's to show us who's boss.

Judges release perverts while jailing speeders simply to ram home the point that they, and they alone, will decide what the law is and isn't. The public expects predators to be jailed, hence they are freed. On the other hand, no one lies awake at night worrying about 77 year old point-swapping felons, but they have blasphemed the gods on the bench, hence no sentence is too harsh. Ditto, as I said earlier today, the obsession with press ganging worthwhile members of the public - and even jailing those who show insufficient enthusiasm for their captivity. It's all about the chance to enforce dhimmitude on the public.

Indeed, the speed trap really is the perfect exemplar of their approach to governance. Instead of law enforcement protecting the innocent and preserving public order, you've now got them metaphorically hiding behind bushes next to dual carriageways, ready to jump out and shout 'A-ha!'. It's the difference between the traditional British ideal where a citizen going about his normal business need encounter no arm of the government except for the Post Office, and the Nu Brit ideal of citizen's rights only existing by sufferance of the state.

All of which is by way of saying that we need not get caught up in the specifics of legal reform, all we really need is a few trees and enough rope.

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