Burglary isn’t a crime any longer

The Home Office data show that 213,279 police investigations into break-ins were closed last year without a suspect being identified.

That’s about 80 per cent of such crimes, which is bad enough. But even knowing the suspect doesn’t mean he’ll be arrested. If arrested, he won’t necessarily be tried. If tried, not necessarily convicted. If convicted, not necessarily imprisoned.

In fact, over 95 per cent of all burglaries in the UK don’t result in a conviction. And even if a burglar is convicted, he’ll usually serve only a derisory prison term, if that.

All this leads to the conclusion in the title. Add the qualifier ‘in effect’ to it, and the case becomes irrefutable.

The Lib Dems blame that appalling situation on the drop in neighbourhood policing teams and Police Community Support Officers. That lets them score political points off the Conservative Party, which is all they want.

Yet the causal relationship they’ve identified is as nonsensical as it’s indicative of the general level of political thinking in Britain (not that we are unique in that respect).

Years ago another leftie demagogue, Tony Blair, introduced the slogan “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. As far as he was concerned, the main causes of crime were a) not enough money given away in social handouts and b) the evil “forces of conservatism”.

This reaches the area where idiocy overlaps with evil. Believing that crime is caused by poverty is idiotic. Blaming the nonexistent forces of conservatism is evil. Yet correctly identifying the causes of a social malaise is essential to any treatment of it – at least the lefties are capable of such truisms.

There are enough policemen in the UK, over 180,000 to be exact, to reduce the number of burglaries and increase the number of convictions. In fact, our armed forces are considerably smaller, and they are expected to fight hordes of heavily armed enemies, not a few tattooed thugs.

And more than enough freeloaders live off the state to disqualify low social expenditure as the prime culprit. In general, arithmetic is the wrong discipline to apply to the situation. It calls for philosophy or at least serious thought in general.

Why are our police forces so ineffective? After all, during the late Victorian era, there were three times fewer cops in Britain, and real (as opposed to relative) poverty was rife, yet burglaries were extremely rare even in the impoverished East End of London.

Many tectonic shifts, social, political, cultural and above all philosophical, have had to occur to deliver personal property to thugs sure of their immunity. This isn’t the place to identify them all, but some can be sketched.

The police aren’t even investigating most burglaries because their employer, the state, has communicated to them either explicitly or osmotically that they have more important things to worry about. And the state gets away with decriminalising burglary because it has succeeded in indoctrinating the population in a new ethos.

Cops everywhere and in any epoch won’t kill themselves trying to solve crimes they know won’t result in a conviction – they have to justify their funding like any other government employees. Since both the Crown Prosecution Office and the courts clearly don’t see burglary as the heinous crime it is, the cops won’t bother to hit the streets.

The civilisational shift I’ve mentioned earlier affects the very nature and concept of legality. Thus, jurists used to distinguish between malum in se and malum prohibitum, the former reflecting an immutable injunction against attacks on life, liberty and property; the latter encompassing transgressions like not wearing a seat belt.

It has always been understood that the two are in a morally hierarchical relationship. For example, stealing a man’s horse is a worse crime than parking it on a double yellow line, and killing one’s wife is more reprehensible than making love to her without permission.

But no malum is really in se; evil and good are meaningless in the absence of a detached moral arbiter whose rulings can sometimes be interpreted but never questioned.

Take that arbiter away, and we have erased the absolute line of demarcation, making moral distinctions relative, which is to say inoperative. Indeed, we find ourselves beyond good and evil, in a space where things are distorted to a point at which malum prohibitum can be punished more surely and often more severely than malum in se.

The statistics I cited above are a direct result. In, say, Victorian England, it was understood that an Englishman’s home was his castle and his personal property was inviolable. Burglars transgressed against both principles, which is why they were punished with a severity that makes today’s lot wince.

Their crimes struck not just at their specific victims but at the very foundations of society – and society responded with commensurate force. Our society today, however, rests on different foundations. The same laws against malum in se may still be on the books, but they’ve slipped way down the pecking order.

Just one little example: a woman I know quarrelled with her neighbour and in the heat of the argument called him a “poof”. The neighbour, who is twice her size, instantly called the police and identified himself as a victim of a hate crime.

The police responded with an alacrity they never display when a burglary is reported. They turned up within minutes, arrested the woman and kept her in detention for 24 hours until her expensive lawyers turned up.

Another example: a journalist I know received a night-time visit from the police after publishing an article in which she argued in favour of tougher restrictions on immigration. She got off with a warning that time, but how many burglaries were committed while the cops lectured her sanctimoniously?

The existence of stupid, unjust and superfluous laws and injunctions undermines the whole legal system. People may still fear the law but they don’t respect it any longer, and fear alone isn’t a sufficient deterrent.

Also, Britons have been systematically corrupted over several generations to believe that a transfer of money from those who earned it to those who didn’t occupies a high moral ground. Few have retained enough of their critical faculties to question the validity of the state extorting up to half of what they earn.

The state has used its awesome propaganda machine to convince people that their money isn’t truly theirs. It really belongs to the state that then “lets them keep” some of it for their families, to use Gordon Brown’s expression.

Faith in the sanctity of private property thus weakens, while the belief in social (which is to say redistributive) justice strengthens. Hence a burglar stops being a vicious criminal,  becoming instead a somewhat naughty colleague of the state.

He too redistributes wealth, of which he has less than most of his victims. That makes him the real victim, while the people who complain about being robbed come across as greedy whingers.

This isn’t exactly the current state of affairs, but it’s definitely an accelerating trend. The state, abetted by the social groups it can rely on to disseminate its message and prime the population, will punish swiftly and mercilessly any infringement of its own interests. But it will smile leniently on any crime committed against private property.

This reminds me of the USSR, as, alas, more and more things do. The Soviets developed the concept of ‘the socially close’ to describe criminals of proletarian or peasant descent.

This was explained by Anton Makarenko, manager of the first Soviet colony for juvenile delinquents. The underlying assumption was that, because they were ‘socially close’ to the state, young criminals, many of them murderers, were not beyond redemption. They ought to be rehabilitated, not punished.

“It is only the intelligentsia, children of the upper classes, priests and land owners who are beyond redemption,’ wrote Makarenko. While today’s Western bureaucrats are unlikely to have read this, they proceed from similar assumptions.

An illiterate criminal in no way jeopardises state power. Ergo, every law devised by the state will favour the criminal over the victim – and in fact the whole notion of criminality will be stood on its head.

Put some more strain on society (financial, medical, military), and the whole system of justice may collapse. God save us then – even though most people have been brainwashed to think he doesn’t exist.