An Englishman's home is his dungeon
By Mark Steyn
One of the key measures of a society's health is how easily you can insulate yourself from its underclass. In America, unless one resides in a very small number of problematic inner-city quarters or wishes to make a career in the drug trade, one will live a life blessedly untouched by crime. In Britain, alas, it's the peculiar genius of Home Office policy to have turned the entire country into one big, rundown, inner-city, no-go slum estate, extending from prosperous suburbs to leafy villages, even unto Upper Cheyne Row.
The murderers of John Monckton understood the logic of this policy better than the lethargic overpaid British constabulary. An Englishman's home is not his castle, but his dungeon and ever more so - window bars, window locks, dead bolts, laser security, and no doubt biometricrecognition garage doors, once the Blunkett national ID card goes into circulation.
All this high-tech protection, urged on the householder by Pc Plod, may make your home more secure, but it makes you less so. From the burglar's point of view, the more advanced and impregnable the alarm systems become, the more it makes sense just to knock on the door and stab whoever answers.
Mr Monckton's killers thus made an entirely rational choice. He was a wealthy man, living in a prestigious neighbourhood of £3 million homes, and he presumably had the best security system to go with it. But time it right, get him to the front door, and the state-enforced impotence of the homeowner makes him as vulnerable as any old loser in a decrepit urine-sodden block on Broadwater Farm.
Various reassuring types, from police spokesmen to the Economist, described the stabbing of the Moncktons as a "burglary gone wrong". If only more burglaries could go right, they imply, this sort of thing wouldn't happen.
But the trouble is that this kind of burglary - the kind most likely to go "wrong" - is now the norm in Britain. In America, it's called a "hot" burglary - a burglary that takes place when the homeowners are present - or a "home invasion", which is a much more accurate term. Just over 10 per cent of US burglaries are "hot" burglaries, and in my part of the world it's statistically insignificant: there is virtually zero chance of a New Hampshire home being broken into while the family are present. But in England and Wales it's more than 50 per cent and climbing. Which is hardly surprising given the police's petty, well-publicised pursuit of those citizens who have the impertinence to resist criminals.
These days, even as he or she is being clobbered, the more thoughtful British subject is usually keeping an eye (the one that hasn't been poked out) on potential liability. Four years ago, Shirley Best, proprietor of the Rolander Fashion emporium, whose clients include Zara Phillips, was ironing some clothes when the proverbial two youths showed up. They pressed the hot iron into her flesh, burning her badly, and then stole her watch. "I was frightened to defend myself," said Miss Best. "I thought if I did anything I would be arrested." There speaks the modern British crime victim.
Her Majesty's Constabulary has metaphorically put a huge neon sign on every suburban cul-de-sac advertising open season on property owners. If you have a crime policy that makes "hot" burglaries routine, it's a reasonable bet that more and more citizens will wind up beaten, stabbed or dead.
I've been writing on this subject in The Telegraph for the best part of a decade now and, to be honest, I might as well recycle the 1996 or 1997 column and spend the week in the Virgin Islands.
My argument never changes. All that changes is the increasing familiarity of Britons with violent crime. Mr Monckton was a cousin by marriage of The Sunday Telegraph's Dominic Lawson, who is leading a campaign to allow citizens to defend themselves in their own homes.
That this most basic right should be something for which he has to organise a campaign is disgraceful. In New Hampshire, there are few burglaries because there's a high rate of gun ownership. Getting your head blown off for a $70 TV set isn't worth it. Conversely, thanks to the British police, burning the flesh of a London dressmaker to get her watch is definitely worth it. In Chelsea the morning after Mr Monckton's murder, Her Majesty's Keystone Konstabulary with all their state-of-the-art toys had sealed off the street in an almost comical illustration of their lavishly funded uselessness.
But let's look at it from their point of view. Suppose, instead of more of these robberies going wrong, they went right. The homeowner cowered in the bathroom, while the lads helped themselves to the DVD player and the wife's jewellery, and then the coppers came round and took a statement and advised you to get another half-dozen door chains and keep the jewellery in a vault at the bank.
Is it reasonable to live like that? After some crime column or other last year, I had a flurry of letters from American readers who'd been working in Britain and had been astonished at the rate of "garden theft" - that's to say, stuff the average American would never dream of lugging indoors back home, but which, during his sojourn across the pond, had been half-inched from the patio in the course of the night.
The British establishment's current complacent approach accepts that ever greater and ever more violent crime is a fact of life, rather than a historical aberration encouraged by the unprecedented constraints placed on the law-abiding and the boundless licence extended to the criminal class. That policy leads remorselessly to more deaths, and to lives lived under small but ever more insidious and corrupting restrictions.
The Tories' big mistake was their failure to understand that "freedom" isn't just about consumer choices or buying your council flat. It's also about being free to defend your home - after all, you're there on the scene and the West Midlands Police 24-Hour Crime Hotline answering machine isn't.
And an assertive citizenry, confident in its freedoms and its responsibilities, is a better bet for long-term survival than the passive charges of the nanny state. If the Government declines to pay any heed to The Sunday Telegraph campaign, and if the police persist in victimising the victims of crime, then I hope we'll see widespread jury rebellion and a refusal to convict.
The right to protect your family does not derive from any home secretary or chief constable.
