Sunday, 11 January 2009


SATURDAY, JANUARY 10, 2009

Murdered Protecting The Family Business


The Village Postmaster has a special reason to be shocked about the gunning down of Craig Hodson-Walker: every day he and his family stand in the very same frontline as Craig.

We're just as shocked. Shocked that in 2009 Britain, we have armed gangs roaming the countryside, targeting quiet village stores in broad daylight, and quite prepared to murder anyone who gets in their way.

We're also angry. Angry that successive governments have totally failed to grip the long-term rise in murder and violent crime inflicted on law-abiding communities. And angry that the homicide rate has virtually trebled since the mid-sixties.

Now of course, there are all sorts of reasons that may have happened, but we believe much of it reflects a fundamental problem we have with deterrence: ie there isn't any.

As long-time readers may recall, we see a clear link between our soaring murder rate and the abolition of capital punishment - which is why many still call for its restoration. But we're not going to blog that, because it's never going to happen, and our self-denying ordinance remains in place.

Instead, let's consider the alternative deterrent foisted on the British public when hanging was abolished in 1965: life sentences.

As it happens, Tyler's Christmas pressie from Tyler Senior included Words and Deedes, a collection of articles written by the late great Bill. And in 1962 he wrote a piece highlighting some of the difficulties with the life sentences then being promoted by abolitionists (he personally favoured retention). In particular, he questioned whether Home Secretaries and others would actually have the stomach to keep people in jail for life: as he put it "not many want to substitute for sudden death by hanging slow death in gaol."

And how right he was. Although the public - three-quarters of whom opposed abolition - were promised a deal, under which "life really does mean life" for murder, these days "life" has actually come to mean an average of just 14 years. Our wonderful parole system releases convicted murderers sentenced to life imprisonment after an average of just 14 years.

What kind of deterrent is that to the hoodlum scum who shot dead Craig Hodson-Walker?

In 14 years or less, they could be out and about killing someone else. Remembering of course that an average of two victims every year are murdered by someone who has already been imprisoned for one murder, but released to murder again (see table 1.12 in the official Home Office stats).

What's more, the whole thrust of recent developments is towards even shorterprison terms for killers. In 2002, a notorious double-murderer used European Human Rights laws to stop our Home Secretary imposing minimum jail terms for lifers. And our liberal legal establishment whooped with joy.

Because those liberal lawyers of ours don't like life sentences one little bit. And worryingly, they deny there ever was a "deal" with the British public over life meaning life. Leading QC and founder of Amnesty International, Sir Louis Blom-Cooper, says:
"The notion of a bargain with the public that there would be substitution of very long sentences as a quid pro quo for abolition is nonsense. There never was any such bargain. When abolition took place the legislation was simply to get rid of the penalty."

That sure ain't the way we remember it. But it does underline how little say we had - and still have - in the decision.

The truth is that hundreds of innocent people die in this country every year because our rulers have shamefully failed to deter murderers.

14 years and falling simply doesn't do it.

As simple as that.

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FRIDAY, JANUARY 09, 2009

Enemies Of The People



Even by his own standards, Comrade Kaletsky's latest rant was pretty extraordinary:
"Punish savers and make them spend money

Near-zero interest rates and even a tax on bank deposits are necessary to force those with cash to use it productively 

...Instead of reducing taxes on interest payments, the Government could tax all bank deposits and other risk-free savings. This would create a negative risk-free interest rate, encouraging savers either to invest in property, shares and other productive assets - or simply to save less and consume more. In either case, the result would be more consumption and physical investment, less unemployment and faster recovery from the slump."

It's such a bizarre idea, it may be a comradely joke - the sort of joke Gulag guards used to crack for their prisoners. Or maybe, as Guido suggested, Mr K has simply flipped. Apart from anything else, why would anyone - except the weak and vulnerable - leave their cash in a bank account just so the Commissars could help themselves? Why wouldn't they switch it all into cash (Japanese Yen for choice) and store it under the bed?

But in truth, Kaletsky is doing no more than expressing what many in our ruling elite believe - savers are Enemies of the People.

When we blogged Punishing Savers last November, we focused on the Left:
"Ever since Uncle Karl explained how savers live off the backs of the workers, left-wing governments have routinely taxed them, dispossessed them, and if at all possible, shot them. Private savings are anathema to the well ordered state because they permit bourgeois anti-social elements to ignore the Will of the People."

And we noted how from his very first day in No 11, Brown set about the systematic dispossession of savers. It wasn't just his notorious multi-billion pensions tax grab, but also his abolition of tax-sheltered Peps and Tessas for small savers.

As for all those pensioners whose savings income is now being whacked so hard, his convoluted pensioner income guarantee and credit system was designed to disincentivise them from saving in the first place - so tough luck.

So in the current headlong rush to cram down borrowing rates, nobody should be surprised that Brown, his party, and his cheerleaders don't give a stuff about the interests of savers.

But we all know about the Left - as we've said before, the lesson of history has always been never EVER save under a Labour government (and as we can see from the chart above, most of us have remembered that again over the last decade). More worrying is that many mainstream commentators have come to share the same general view - savers are now the enemy. The FT's Martin Wolf is no Kaletsky-style extremist, but he too lays into Tory plans to help savers.

This is a very slippery slope. Even if you don't care about the unfairness to the millions of people who've actually saved for their old age, and who have already seen their pensions shredded, you have to recognise that it's Britain's chronic unwillingness to save that is a key factor behind our current crisis. Taking the long view, higher savings are a necessary condition for our future prosperity.

And we surely have to take the long view here. Penalising behaviour that is an essential condition of our long-term prosperity is classic dictatorship of the proletariat stuff. You have to believe that commissariat beastliness to bourgeois elements is purely temporary, and that we will soon emerge into a sunlit workers paradise in which all citizens will spontaneously start doing the right things. Except somehow nobody has ever got that far.

Savers may be temporarily inconvenient, but we need to nurture them. In the long-term they are the true friends to the people.

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