The post you are reporting:
Rod Liddle writing in the Sunday Times.
We had the anti-terrorism Old Bill around my house a bit ago. They were there because I’m apparently on a list of people Allah believes is deserving of decapitation, inshallah. Allah and — more recently — Max Mosley, I fear. They just wanted to let me know, the coppers, without wishing to alarm. Have you or your neighbours ever been burgled, one of them asked. I said my neighbour, Pete, had his entire hedge nicked one night. Then he replanted the hedge and put a big fence in front of it. The following night the hedge and the fence were nicked. Police did nothing. I asked if they had advice as to how we might improve our security. “You could have a panic button,” said one. Mentalist Islamic warriors break in, you press the button and it sounds an alarm at the local police station. How long would it take them to arrive? “Oh, no more than 45 minutes.” Right, thank you. Anything else we might do? “You could improve your ambient lighting,” one of them said. Ah, yes. Cunning. Put some subtle low-level stuff in the garden so when the jihadists arrive they take one look and say: “Oooh, hasn’t he done this up lovely, Iqbal? Let’s go decapitate somebody else instead.”
It’s within this context that we should judge the actions of Richard Osborn-Brooks, a 78-year-old bloke who stabbed to death a man called Henry Vincent who was less than half his age, when Vincent tried to burgle his home in Hither Green, southeast London. The pensioner was arrested for murder.
Vincent had been armed with a screwdriver. His cousin told the press that, despite this, he hadn’t deserved to die. “The Henry I know, he was such a loving person,” she said. She may have added (who knows?): “OK, he’d slash your face open with a Stanley knife if you got on his bad side but he was a diamond geezer. Good as gold. Most of the time.” In fact, he was a career criminal from a family of career criminals specialising in targeting pensioners. Not just burglaries but fraud and extortion. John Donne enjoined us to believe the death of any man diminishes us, but I am not sure this is so with Vincent. I felt substantially undiminished when I heard of his demise. I thought Osborn-Brooks had done the world a bit of a favour. Almost everyone seemed to agree. The public was ready to crowd-fund his defence and the newspapers, politicians, pundits were united: a murder charge would be absurd and Osborn-Brooks should never have been arrested.
But there is a big gap between what the public thinks and what our liberal elite thinks. Burglary is an unfashionable crime, politically, and the police don’t have much time for it any more. It took them two days to decide not to charge him. It was almost as if they were saying: “You own a house? You are asking for it. There are people who don’t own houses. You are in a privileged position.” The head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, Sara Thornton, is happy to explain why the Old Bill won’t be bothering too much about burglaries. “We need to move from reacting to some of those traditional crimes,” she has said. What a brilliant term — “traditional crimes”. We should be concentrating on the online abuse of people, hate crimes, paedophilia and so on, she added.
A deputy assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan police, Mark Simmons, also admitted burglary was slipping down the list of stuff they were interested in: we have to balance the books, he said. Burglary is a thing we should all accept, without reacting too aggressively. Just an invasion of your home and the theft of your property — scarcely a crime at all, when you consider the social divisions that exist in this country. Take umbrage at it and we’ll lock you up. That’s the mindset. Mine, however, remains: keep a knife handy, because nobody else will help.