HOW MUCH MORE CAN THE BRITISH PUBLIC take of the kind of criminal behaviour that lead to the death of 90-year-old Geoffrey Bacon, who was brutally attacked on his doorstep and killed by a mugger who escaped with the princely sum of £40.
Mr Bacon loved his country and served it well during the last war. He served as personal driver to both Montgomery and Eisenhower, and volunteered for secret missions against the Nazis.
Of course what was meted out to Mr Bacon was not a one off. If it were then maybe there would be a far greater display of public outrage than has occurred. This is because such wickedness is almost a daily occurrence on our streets and in our homes; and sadly the public have been made immune to its awful nature. A crime that would have at one time caused outrage because of its unique character, is today just another statistic that has joined a list - a list that once never existed: and no, I am not looking through rose tinted spectacles.
I am 60-years-old and live in a seaside town on the east coast. When I was a child there was a murder in the town, and the town talked of nothing for days on end. But in the last ten or so years there have been several murders with the local people taking nothing more than a passing interest – just another statistic which they feel impotent to do anything about.
The fact is, is that the people know all too well that when or if Mr Bacon’s murderer is caught, and the criminal justice system intervenes to first of all, prosecute and send him to trial, and once found guilty punish him; then the people know that the punishment will not fit the crime. Life rarely means life and the criminal knows it; and the people know it. The idiocy behind our criminal justice system has no deterrent effect whatsoever. Yet, Ken Clarke, our new Justice Secretary, believes that many in prison should not be there because they are adding to overcrowding…and this is a ‘conservative’.
What if Mr Bacon’s killer turns out to have reams of previous stored on a Scotland Yard computer; what if he turns out to be another Bradley Wernham the serial burglar (700 at the last count) who recently appeared before a judge and was given 5-years, and probably out in two?
NO WONDER THE public are apathetic – or maybe they do seethe, but silently, knowing that they cannot use effectively the only power they have in a democracy; the power to vote. In theory, as was once so in practice, the political class were in tune with the wishes of the people on the issue of crime, as well as the forms of punishment dished out.
But today politicians of every party have learnt and abused the art of rhetoric. The first rule of which is to tell the people what they want to hear in opposition…those seeking power will prostitute every principle they may or may not hold, in order to gain power.
Once in power, the hard rhetoric of opposition – the kind the electorate believes in, particularly on the issue of crime, is put on the back burner and the liberal consensus once more overwhelms. Politicians who are in power, or hope someday to be in power are either large or small ‘l’ liberals. Just as in decades past, the political class (and by this I mean those in power) were of a centre right disposition; so, for the past 45 years, on social issues, we have had the tyranny of liberal values; and this is why Mr Bacon may never have true justice meted out to his murderer.
I DO NOT BELIEVE FOR one moment that our politicians would ever allow a vote on the return of hanging; in the same way that all three of the main parties stopped short of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. But if such a proposition on hanging magically appeared to be voted upon, then, if opinion polls were to be believed, capital punishment would once more have to be written into statue.
However, this does not mean that any modern jury would convict for a capital offence. So what we are left with is what the people of this country once thought would happen as a compromise. This is that Life should mean Life for murder. Today, however, you have to wipe out a whole community before the justice system honours what was supposed to be an assurance by the state in the 1960s.
I would also disbar prisoners from challenging their living conditions under legislation drawn up by the European Court of Human Rights. Too many lawyers are getting fat at the expense off the legal aid budget. A budget, I hope, in the interest of saving the British economy, this ‘government’ will trim back as freely as they feel ready to do with the Defence Budget.
WHAT MR BACON’S MURDER shows is that the world he belonged to in his youth had well anchored values that today no longer exist; and must have lead, at some point to the confusion those members of his generation still alive today also feel.
These values incorporated patriotism, and would never have displaced the nation state - the very entity they were sent abroad to fight and die for. They were men who were forced to leave their families and friends to fight on foreign soil. They may not have wished for the fate they were given, but they fought because of their country’s history, just as those serving today in Afghanistan also do, as well as their regimental history; but they are a diminishing few.
Geoffrey Bacon belonged to such a brotherhood. The kind of military brotherhood that today, in the febrile atmosphere of dominant liberalism, produces a squeezing of the nostrils accompanied by a snooty disdain from everything military.
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