He stepped out of the dark with a gun… | Victoria Coren | Comment is free | The Observer.
Victoria Coren is upset that there are too many guns on our streets. Surprisingly, for someone writing in the Observer, the guns she is concerned about are those in the hands of the state.
They say a liberal (American sense) is a conservative who hasn't been mugged yet. Coren had a machine gun waved at her in the dark by a man who jumped out of an unmarked car. She had the courage, wit and reflexes to take evasive action before realising he was a police officer.
Her reflexes might have got her shot and she's upset. She has a point, but as so often happens when someone writing for Guardian Newspapers gets something right, her thinking is still at fault. She blames Tony Blair. He made the world more dangerous, apparently, by invading Iraq. It seems the odious Blair is becoming, as he hoped, the "heir to Thatcher", but only - amusingly- by inheriting her status as a national hate figure, blamed for all ills.
Coren understood why the bossy cop waved his automatic weapon at her once she realised he was a protection officer guarding the most vulnerable embassy in London. Given how many British crazies hate Israel, it could no more have an embassy there without armed protection, than Tony Blair could have a villa in Kabul. She also understands (though nostalgically regrets) the armed guards around the homes of her near-neighbour, David Milliband and other senior British politicians. She's just annoyed that the police have been armed without a national debate.
I was properly frightened when that man waved a gun at me in the dark, and angry when I noticed quite how many other "discreet" men were holding guns in other streets, and maybe – maybe – they are protecting the Israeli ambassador and the American ambassador and the foreign secretary, but they're not protecting me, and this is my home and nobody asked me if it was OK. And it bloody isn't.
Our teenage Foreign Secretary and his colleagues are targets and are certainly entitled to protect themselves. But unlike the Israeli Ambassador, they are also native politicians who deny us the right to self-defence. We may not own guns or employ armed guards, despite an estimated four million firearms in our country available for use by criminals. They do not so much maintain a regime of gun control as offer a state guarantee to criminals that their victims will not shoot back.
Yesterday I posted about Labour foot soldier Jim Devine, claiming with blithe stupidity that he was not a criminal because he didn't understand either (a) the criminal law, or (b) that ignorance of it is no excuse. He is a legislator who holds the electorate to higher standards than he expects for himself. So too is Mr Milliband and every other politician who accepts armed protection while denying it to others.If I could write a constitution for Britain, one key provision would read something like this.
It is beyond the power of the members of the Legislature and the Executive to create laws, impose policies or issue instructions to state agencies that give them any greater power, privilege, immunity from prosecution or other protection than any other citizen.
After all, they are great believers in "equality" are they not? This provision would entrench the only equality that really matters; equality before the law. If politicians had to live to the standards they impose on us, laws would either be so crafted that even simpletons like Devine could understand them, or there would be many more legal defences for those with no criminal intent. David Milliband would either sleep soundly with an unarmed bobby outside his door (believing himself as safe as he tells us all we are), or he would vote to give us back our right to self-defence.
The greatest inequality in modern Britain is that between the rulers and the ruled. Perhaps "Minister for Equality" Harriet Harman might like to turn her attention to that?
