Equally suprisingly, Mark Steyn is a daft cock who misses the point. Yes, policemen are frequently daft officious wankers. No, this has absolutely fuck all to do with the fact that police authority boundaries are drawn up to reflect current population distribution rather than historic county lines…
When you want to call the cops, you don’t need to think, "Hang on, am I in South Mercia or West Avon?"
No, you just dial 999. Though I guess he’d prefer 911.
I can’t see from this piece where he implies that the one causes the other – he seems to be saying that they are symptoms of the same politically correct outlook & drive to ‘renew’ processes that infects so much public service nowdays….
The fool, it’s obvious that police forces should be divided along the lines of the Saxon Heptarchy; Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia, Essex, Sussex, Wessex and Kent.
He also appears to believe that the term "hate crime" has a legal meaning in the UK; this is not exactly the only instance of his seeming belief that he is in America.
Regardless of whether "hate crime" has an official legal meaning in the UK (which Steyn didn’t say it does), we do now have hate crime legislation. It is illegal to speak in certain vaguely-defined ways about any religion, and it is more illegal to stab a man because he’s black than a woman because she answered back. I haven’t kept up with the current state of play as regards anti-gay slurs.
Al – but that would mean that Wales, Scotland and Ireland ended up as nothing more than lawless, primitive backwaters. Oh, wait…
There are some fairly decent reasons why ‘hate crimes’ perhaps ought to exist in our legislation. If a man stabs a woman because she answered back – as in your example – this crime is the result of a specific interpersonal interaction. If a man stabs another man because he is black, then the motivation and circumstances of this crime will be repeated (though the crime itself may not) everytime that man meets another black man.
Of course, the example you gave of a non-hate crime involves circumstances that mean we could resonably expect it to be generalised and repeated aggression and violence against women (or people in general). But we can imagine a situation where someone is stabbed that does not involve the element of generalised violence, understandably arising from (though not justified by) individual interpersonal circumstances.
Also, this is not to say that one needs to be ‘punished’ any more than the other. But the way we consider these crimes as social problems ought to be different.
"It is illegal to speak in certain vaguely-defined ways about any religion" – Squander Two
Really? Isn’t it just Christianity under the blasphemy laws and Judaism and Sikhism under the incitement to racial hatred laws?
Andrew,
All true, yes. Thing is, judges used to be given rein to take motive and character into account. What the hate crimes legislation has done is allow racists to cop to a lesser plea and forced the police to prove motive, which is technically impossible, if they want a conviction.
John,
I don’t think Steyn has missed the point. The police’s attitude to the British population is part of the widespread British belief that the government own the country. Bureaucratic disregard for real geographical regions is part of that. All countries have local population fluctuations, but not all of them respond by moving boundaries around. Can you imagine the response if the Berlin Government tried to merge Bavaria with some other region and call it Donauland? The Bavarians wouldn’t stand for it, on the simple and correct grounds that Berlin can’t move or rename something they don’t own. And that’s the Germans, one of the most statist populations on the planet.
Chris,
Oh, maybe it is, although you missed out Islam. Oops. Still a hate crime, though.
"real geographical regions"
The definition of which is what?
Geographical regions (in this context at least), and what we call them are human constructions (that is the ‘region’, not the land contained within its boundaries – except in places like Holland). They were defined and named by people, and there is no intrinsic harm or moral evil in redefining and renaming them. If the people of the region do not want their region to be redefined/renamed, and the arguments in favour of such a change cannot convince them, then this would be an unjustified imposition. But in the case of the renaming of British regions, most people don’t give a damn, and redefinition/renaming in an effort (not necessarily effective) to improve the provision of services tends to pass without any great degree of opposition.
And I can still write my address as being one of the Ridings of Yorkshire, regardless of administrative changes.
"the way we consider these crimes as social problems ought to be different"
If you are stabbed because your attacker is drunk, and he gets a year in prison, only to see a similar case draw a heavier penalty because the reason for the stabbing was because the stabbee was gay, are we not in danger of saying that the crime committed on you was the lesser of two evils, simply because of what was in the mind of the perpetrator?
Crime is crime & wrong no matter what the reason for it.
We are not in danger of saying that, no.
We have to consider what the purpose of our criminal justice system is. One thing that it ought not be for is producing a ranking of evils according to how severe the sentences hand down are.
We already asses the motivations of an action when we seperate cases where the victim has dies into murder and manslaughter. We sentence murderers to a longer time in jail as we make the reasonable inference that someone who intended to murder his victim is more dangerous than someone who intended to hurt, but not kill, his victim.
This doe not mean that the person guilty of manslaughter is a good guy. It does not suggest that the person killed is any less dead or their suffering was any less.
"Crime is crime & wrong no matter what the reason for it."
No-one said it wasn’t. However motives for a crime are taken into consideration all the time, this is even the case if you kill someone.
"Can you imagine the response if the Berlin Government tried to merge Bavaria with some other region and call it Donauland? The Bavarians wouldn’t stand for it, on the simple and correct grounds that Berlin can’t move or rename something they don’t own"
This though rather makes the point. The Brits do stand for it because (with some obvious exceptions) most of them don’t really care about traditional names and have no particular regional pride. In fact most of us in London seem quite willing to change the name of the region we live in at the drop of a hat if it sounds classier.
Steyn’s argument is particularly weak given he thinks the world’s oldest police force, the Met, which hasn’t materially changed its boundaries for decades, is the worst in the world.
AI – yes, we see the wisdom of this in the histories of Frithfroth, self-appointed Earl of South Yorkshire, and his brother Eggnog, the so-called Thane of Greater Manchester. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (closing prices edition), they organised their followers into so-called police forces which were so dangerous to the populace that at a Witangemot in 1005, King Ethelred the Unready advised the Earl of Northumbria to get shut of them.
"Why bother?" replied the Earl. "It’ll all be the same in a thousand years’ time."
‘One thing that it ought not be for is producing a ranking of evils according to how severe the sentences hand down are’
And a ranking of evils according to the reasoning behind an unprovoked assault (just drunk & looking for trouble = bad, racist/homophobic = VERY bad) is somehow better? Sorry, I just can’t see that. It comes dangerously close to punishing people for holding the wrong opinion, rather than for committing the wring action.
No, not at all. It is the reasonable belief that someone who stabs someone else because that person is black poses a greater continuing threat than someone who stabs someone because a long running argument has boiled over.
If it is about committing ‘wrong action’, is death by dangerous driving, or even drunk driving, the same as running someone down? The large scale physical description of these actions may all be identical. The crime, and how we punish/deal with it within our legal system, depends on more than simply an apersonal discription of the physical events. The same goes for murder/mansluaghter.
In any case, the ‘wrong opinions’ are not, ‘I hate black people’. But rather, ‘I hate black people and believe that it is legitimate for me to express that through murder’.
Motives are always taken into account in violent crimes; for example, it is considered less serious to stab someone who has provoked you than someone who hasn’t, more serious to shoot a policeman than a crack dealer and so on.
Also, although Steyn doesn’t say that "hate crime" is a legally meaningful term in the UK, he does say that the UK hands out £80 fines for making homophobic remarks, which it doesn’t, you bunch of fucking poofs.
"Motives are always taken into account in violent crimes"
A lot of Conservatives wish to take this further, arguing that you should have the right to kill anyone on any part of your property you have the slightest suspicion might be a burglar, without any legal sanction at all.
A lot of Conservatives wish to take this further, arguing that you should have the right to kill anyone on any part of your property you have the slightest suspicion might be a burglar, without any legal sanction at all.
Really? Even if it’s the local hunt?
GERROF MOI LAAAND!
> Steyn … does say that the UK hands out £80 fines for making homophobic remarks
No, he says that the Oxford Police recently handed out an £80 fine for making homophobic remarks (which they did).
> in the case of the renaming of British regions, most people don’t give a damn
Well, I’ve heard so many people whinging about it for so many years that I think they do give a bit of a damn, but, yes, you’re right that they don’t give enough of a damn to bother stopping it. That was actually my point. When I wrote "the widespread British belief that the government own the country", I meant a belief held by the British, not just by the British Government. Personally, I think that chattel mentality is a huge problem. I reckon it’s got a lot to do with the lack of popular opposition to ID cards.
I’m aware that geographical regions and their names are human constructions. Thing is, my name’s a human construction too, but I wouldn’t want the government to change it in order to make their admin a bit more convenient. I, on the other hand, am entitled to change it, because it’s mine.
Most people form an emotional attachment to where they’re from. That emotional attachment may not stand up to rational analysis, but that’s no reason to disregard it.
> Steyn’s argument is particularly weak given he thinks the world’s oldest police force, the Met, which hasn’t materially changed its boundaries for decades, is the worst in the world.
That would make his argument weak, yes, if his argument were that the one phenomenon causes the other, which it isn’t.
"the ‘wrong opinions’ are not, ‘I hate black people’. But rather, ‘I hate black people and believe that it is legitimate for me to express that through murder’"
Well, it would never be legitimate for you to murder someone (as defined as illegal killing), regardless of the reason for it.
What this law does is put a tariff on an act based on the reason for the intent to murder. I would say it matters little to the chap who is murdered whether it was because he was black, Jewish, homosexual, or because he spilled someone’s pint in a pub. Dead is dead. If you are the type to randomly attack strangers on the basis that they spilled your pint, or wore the wrong footie shirt, are you somehow less of a threat to society than because you attack strangers for any of the other reasons?
And as for "A lot of Conservatives wish to take this further, arguing that you should have the right to kill anyone on any part of your property you have the slightest suspicion might be a burglar, without any legal sanction at all" I haven’t seen anyone with anything serious to say on this subject suggest any such thing….
Sure, there are idiots on both sides of the self defence argument (as any other argument in the blogosphere), but that doesn’t seem to be the position of any of the supporters of the bill I’ve read.
"What this law does is put a tariff on an act based on the reason for the intent to murder."
As Dsquared said this is not a new thing. Of course it matters little to the chap who is murdered (or even say if they were seriously injured) but it matters a lot to other potential victims of the murderer, ie the public. I think courts would deal more seriously with someone who murders people merely because they spilled his pint than someone who killed a burglar.
Talking of which, if you haven’t seen anyone advocate this policy you haven’t been looking very hard. Tory MP Roger Gale issued a private members bill (http://www.rogergale.co.uk/hcb36.pdf) which (you can click on the link but I have cut bits out for clarity and capitalised bits for emphasis) would make the law:
A (the householder) is NOT GUILTY of an offence by reason of ANY act done by him in relation to the person …(B)…who is in the dwelling or is attempting to gain entry to the dwelling…if A believes REASONABLY OR NOT, that …A is acting …in self defence, in defence of another person…to preserve or protect property…or to apprehend B…
Which I think justifies my statement, particularly the reasonable or not bit (and note dwelling in English law means your garden too).
JuliaM
What this bunch of liberal bedwetters is saying is that some lives are more valuable than others. They are being judgemental and discriminatory (nothing wrong in that of course) but, being liberal bedwetters, they cannot bring themselves to admit it.
‘Which I think justifies my statement’
Well hardly. I’ve read the pdf & it’s not really James Bond’s licence to kill, is it..? And what is your point regarding the garden? Are you expecting to see a homeowner standing over the neighbor’s kiddie’s corpse saying ‘Yes, I know officer, it turns out he was just retrieving his ball but I thought he was a burglar’ if this law passes?
It appears if he did there could be no legal sanction. I never said lots of Conservatives want to give everyone a James Bond style licence to kill, so I don’t really understand you. I said:
"A lot of Conservatives wish to take this further, arguing that you should have the right to kill anyone on any part of your property you have the slightest suspicion might be a burglar, without any legal sanction at all"
Which is exactly what the bill allows, in fact it doesn’t even require the suspicion to be reasonable, as it says "reasonably or not".
To be fair, the reason it says "reasonably or not" is the way "reasonable" has been defined by the Government regarding force. The trouble with "reasonable" is that it’s a carte blanche for future governments to redefine it to mean "no". That being said, there’s probably a better solution to that problem than stating "reasonably or not".
I think there’s a substantive difference between reason for killing and intent to kill. The difference between murder and manslaughter is the difference between a murderer and a non-murderer.
Besides, no-one’s discussing whether character and likelihood to reoffend should be taken into account with sentencing, since they always were. The problem with the law on racially aggravated murder is that it stopped likelihood to reoffend being taken into account at the sentencing stage, shifting it to the evidence-gathering stage and the plea-bargaining stage, making it more difficult to obtain the appropriate longer sentences. But, hey, it sent the right message. Oh, joy.
Decent Conservatives also reject the ‘any’ action, preferring ‘not grossly disproportionate’. I think that’s silly, but it’s certainly better than ‘any’.
"not grossly disproportionate" is another totally ambiguous phrase for lawyers to argue over at 500 quid an hour. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some laws which actually said what you may or may not do, so that you’d know when you’d broken them?
The codification of all circumstances is not just practically imossible, but logically impossible.
I didn’t say "all laws".