How to deceive without lying

As someone who spent 30 years in advertising, I consider myself an expert in the eponymous technique. But I have to admit that no adman has ever achieved the subtle mastery displayed by The Times today.

The paper was covering the story of yet another miscarriage of justice perpetrated by our legal system, although it clearly doesn’t see it as such.

Richard Osborn-Brooks, 78, was in bed with his disabled wife, when an armed burglar broke into his London flat. The thug forced the pensioner into the kitchen, where a scuffle ensued, in the course of which the criminal was fatally stabbed.

The report makes it unclear whether he was stabbed with his own sharpened screwdriver or a kitchen knife. One way or the other, he died, his accomplice fled, and Mr Osborn-Brooks was charged with murder.

This is what I, or for that matter any sane man, would call a gross miscarriage of justice. Surely a man has a right to protect his family, himself and his property by whatever means at his disposal?

That’s how things used to be in Britain, when an Englishman’s home was still his castle, rather than an arena for social engineering. That’s how things would be in any country where law and justice haven’t yet gone their separate ways.

But, once the balance of power swings from the individual to the state, the state insists on having the monopoly on violence.

After all,  freedom-minded individuals, if allowed to protect themselves from criminals, may at some point decide to protect themselves against the state. That can’t be allowed, and if preventive measures leave people at the mercy of criminals, then so be it.

Of course, self-defence would be unnecessary if the legal system could protect people on its own.

But in a statist society, the state doesn’t see this as its first priority. Its first priority is to protect itself, and that includes emasculating the population by force-feeding the state’s ideology. Ours is based on denying evil and assuming equal virtue all around.

If some people don’t act in a virtuous way, they need help. Hence the police and the penitentiary system increasingly become extensions of the social services, and the whole legal system appears to be designed for the criminal rather than his victims.

That’s why the police in London is led by the useless, not to say actively subversive, Commissioner Cressida Dick, whose only qualifications for the job seem to be based on her sex and sexuality. And that’s why we have the outrage of early release from prison, with some 10 per cent of all London murders being committed by criminals on parole.

In a country where the state can legally extort more than half of the people’s income, the people’s right to protect their property isn’t really recognised as real. Burglary is now seen by many as a kind of redistributive tax, which is why most burglaries aren’t even investigated.

And in any case, we’re supposed to give a thug who has put his foot through our window the benefit of the doubt. How dare we attack him if he ‘only’ came for the TV set? The counter question I always ask is “And how do I know that?”

It’s my moral right – and if my wife is at home, my duty – to assume the worst: the thug has broken in to kill or rape. He isn’t entitled to benefit of the doubt – if he’s penetrated my house with criminal intent, he has left his civil rights outside. That’s how it should be.

Is this how The Times has covered the story? You know that’s not the case by just looking at the title of their article: Pensioner Arrested Over Death of ‘Burglar’.

Why quotation marks? In this context, they’re the same as the negative particle ‘not’. The implication is that the poor young man wasn’t really a burglar. He must have dropped in for a cup of tea, and the beastly pensioner killed him just for the hell of it.

In the very first paragraph the criminal is described as “an alleged burglar armed with a screwdriver”. I dare say, if he’s uninvited and armed, he’s no longer just alleged. Yes, in the legalese language of the courts he remains alleged until convicted. But a newspaper isn’t a court of law, is it?

Most of the rest of the article is a compendium of interviews with the neighbours, who all describe Mr Osborn-Brooks as an extremely nice man.

What does that have to do with anything? He could be the male reincarnation of Mother Theresa or a dyed-in-the wool bastard – it’s utterly irrelevant to the case.

The only relevant question is whether or not he was within his right, moral and legal, to protect himself and his wife from what he could reasonably judge to be a murder attempt.

So was he? Here the paper provides misleading information: “The law allows homeowners to use ‘reasonable force’, which may include a weapon, to protect themselves from intruders. The test applied by prosecutors is that they did what they honestly thought was necessary.”

First, the law no longer talks about just ‘reasonable’ force. That was the case until 2004, when John Monckton, a wealthy financier from a good family, was murdered by a burglar in an expensive neighbourhood.

At that time ‘reasonable’ force was defined as exactly matching that offered by the burglar. The homeowner was allowed to defend himself with a knife against a knife or with a baseball bat against a baseball bat (not with a gun against a gun: we aren’t allowed to have guns).

That has every hallmark of a rotten law eventually boiling down to arbitrary judgement. What constitutes reasonable force? What about resisting a knife with a baseball bat or a baseball bat with a knife? What about a frail old man using either implement on a huge young thug waving nothing but his football-sized fists?

Such questions began to be asked after the Monckton murder, and in 2013 the phrasing was changed, marginally for the better.

Now we’re allowed to use ‘disproportionate’, even lethal, force to repel an intruder. Sounds good, doesn’t it? A thug breaks in, you do what you must, including killing him if that’s what it takes.

Oh, if only things were as simple as that. The law leaves an out for itself by stating that ‘grossly disproportionate force’ is still illegal. Who decides? Well, the state, of course.

In this case the state has decided that an old man who stabbed an armed burglar should be charged with murder, which charge carries a life sentence. The force he used has been judged to be grossly disproportionate.

What force would have been simply ‘disproportionate’ or, for that matter, ‘reasonable’? Letting the thug get on with it, hoping he only came to steal, not to kill or rape?

The article raises no such questions. It’s completely even-handed in judging evil and an attempt to defeat it. I can only applaud the technical mastery involved in such even-handedness.

The paper doesn’t lie – it deceives by omission. The reader is supposed to feel sympathy for the dead young man, who may or may not have been a ‘burglar’. Allegedly.

And Mr Osborn-Brook may spend the rest of his life in prison. As far as the state is concerned, there’s nothing alleged about his crime.