The burglar, the baker, the candlestick maker

In his 1840 novel A Hero of Our Time, Lermontov depicted as his Byronic antihero a disaffected aristocrat of the type later to be called ‘the superfluous man’. According to Lermontov, Grigory Pechorin represented the dominant type in Russia of the mid-nineteenth century.

(To be pedantic about it, he had in mind only a minute fraction of the Russian population. Most were illiterate peasants who were so busy trying to survive that they had no time to be disaffected.)

Fast-forward 178 years, move the narrative to Byron’s native land, and our time also has its hero: Henry Vincent. Vincent’s lineage was different from Pechorin’s, although equally homogeneous.

Pechorin’s relations were aristocrats; Vincent’s relations are criminals. In fact, they are more of a gang than a family, yet similarly close-knit.

Vindicating the adage ‘a family that robs together, stays together’, the Vincent clan including Henry himself, his father and five uncles specialised in expanding the number of ways in which vulnerable pensioners could be robbed, defrauded or burgled.

They cast their net wide in search of appropriate marks, all above a certain age. Their favourite trick was to provide some routine building services and then overcharge the customers grotesquely.

If a victim refused to pay, he was frogmarched to his bank and forced to make a cash withdrawal. Sometimes the ploy worked and sometimes it didn’t.

Henry, for example, spent 10 of his 37 years in prison. His last 6-year sentence was in 2009, when he charged an old man £72,000 to replace a single roof tile. And in 2003 several members of his family were sentenced to a total of 29 years for duping pensioners out of £448,180.

Henry’s father eventually decided to settle down and bought a £1.7m farm from another pensioner. The old chap accepted a £300,000 offer for the property, probably deciding that what was left of his life was worth more than £1.4 million.

But Henry himself was too young to stop working. His industry finally led him to arming himself with a sharpened screwdriver and breaking into the house where a 78-year-old pensioner lived with his wife crippled by arthritis.

At that point Henry’s luck ran out. For the plucky wrinkly Richard Osborn-Brooks resisted. In the ensuing scuffle Henry was fatally stabbed with his own screwdriver.

So far so good, or rather so bad. The police immediately arrested Mr Osborn-Brooks and charged him with murder, thereby acting according to their new job description.

That used to be protecting society from criminals; now it’s reshaping society according to the latest demands of our deranged modernity. The relevant demand in this case is that a victim of burglary has no right to harm the burglar when the poor youth is quietly going about his job.

For that’s what burglary is according to the modern ethos, a job. I remember the shock of my colleague shortly after I had moved to Britain from the US. We were chatting about burglary, and I casually mentioned that, if I caught a burglar in flagrante, I would try to harm him as much as I could. And if that involved killing him, it’s his hard luck.

My colleague’s reaction suggested he wouldn’t mind doing to me what I’d do to a burglar. “He’s just doing his job!” Since he was not only my colleague but also my boss, I restricted myself to muttering that a burglar isn’t a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker, and burglary isn’t a respectable job but a vicious crime.

To myself I thought of the tectonic shift in mores that had had to occur between the time burglary was a hanging offence and the time when it became a job like any other.

In the intervening 30 years the situation has got even worse, but not yet so bad that charging an old man with murder for protecting his family against a potentially murderous thug wouldn’t cause a public outcry. Mr Osborn-Brooks was released, all charges dismissed.

Yet things had got bad enough for another section of the public to feel outraged at that miscarriage of justice. Burglar or not, the thug was under the protection of the laws of political correctness.

A shrine was jerry-built outside the scene of the incident, with flowers and wreaths expressing the bereavement of the thug’s spiritual family: thugs like him and their champions, who see burglary as a sort of redistribution scheme similar to that done by Customs & Excise.

The neighbours, some of whom had themselves been burgled, displayed their retrograde scepticism of social justice by tearing the shrine down – only for it to reappear the next day. That charade continued until yesterday, when the thug’s funeral was held.

The funeral procession befitted one for a national hero about to be laid to rest at Westminster Abbey. The family’s ill-gotten £100,000 bought a silver Mercedes hearse and eight other Mercedes limousines. A caravan and a flatbed truck followed, bearing numerous floral tributes, one of them in the shape of a vodka bottle.

The mourners in the cortège provided the appropriately solemn accompaniment by rolling the windows down, sticking two fingers out and screaming obscenities. The bereaved crowd of onlookers responded with a barrage of rocks.

After the service, 100 of the thug’s family and friends, most of them sporting hoods and balaclavas, used similar projectiles on the crowd of journalists and photographers preserving the event for posterity. A full-blown riot ensued, the police ignored their social responsibilities and charged the poor socio-economically disadvantaged youths, yet only one arrest followed.

Had I witnessed the fun, I would have been scared – not so much of the riot (I’ve seen a few) as of what it said about our society. Growing segments of it feel sympathy for the victim of the crime, and I mean Vincent, not Osborn-Brook and his ill wife.

For them it’s the burglar, not his victim, who must be protected. And if a burglar is killed committing his crime – sorry, doing his job – he becomes a martyr at the altar of modernity. Before long scum like that will indeed be buried at Westminster Abbey.

It’s this kind of moral catastrophe that has made London more crime-ridden than New York. Johannesburg must be our next target.

In the spirit of fashionable humanism, I’d propose some immediate action. First, law-abiding subjects of Her Majesty must be told that, rather than being punished, they’ll be rewarded for killing a burglar. The new law should be communicated to the populace on television, to make sure the news reaches potential house-breakers, most of them less than avid newspaper readers.

And, should a thug be killed while burgling a house, no funeral procession should be allowed. The criminal should be buried in a nameless place at an unknown location to avoid any possible pilgrimage of mourners and their champions.

Meanwhile, the Osborn-Brooks will probably have to move: they’ve received numerous death threats, and the police aren’t going to protect them. They’re too busy doing their day job of social engineering.