BY ALEX STORY
“In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organised crime?” the 4th century AD theologian Saint Augustine asked about government.
The question is worth pondering in today’s Britain.
On what philosophical basis is our current State demanding ever more to deliver ever less, not to say the wanton destruction of our beloved country?
There are two standpoints:
The first, from the understanding of the taxpayer, is that the government’s number one priority is to secure the country’s borders and the protection of her inheritance.
Not far behind comes the defence of private property, the notion of free enterprise and access to a fair and reciprocal justice system through which disputes between parties can be resolved without recourse to physical violence.
Both parties must believe justice to be blind for stability to set in.
These functional expectations are rooted in the long-established view that an Englishman is born free, not least to think and say what he wants.
If he be ruled, it is only by consent.
He will not be whipped into subjugation.
In his DNA lives the view that Britannia, and by extension Britons, “never, never, never will be slaves”.
Having “no desire to make windows into men’s souls”, to control thought and speech, has been understood as the solid rock on which some measure of permanence took root in the land since at least 1559 when Queen Elizabeth I spoke these words.
The second, from the perspective of recent governments, Tory and Labour alike, is a very different understanding, judged as they should be by their fruits, not their words.
Our borders are meaningless.
The chaos that ensues from the practical application of this extraordinary experiment is “brushed under the carpet”.
Under the rug, though, shocking things are happening.
It followed an incident involving over thirty people armed with machetes and other such weapons.
Among the crowds of armed men, Messrs Bakir and Azeez were charged with wounding with intent and with possession.
Wakefield, never England’s richest city, but for centuries peaceful and beautiful in her own way, is a now a focal point of extreme violence.
That such low-level tribal warfare is greeted with a wall of silence, is a sign, some fancy, of acquiescence by the authorities.
It is, they would surmise, a heavy taxpayer-funded price to pay for an experimental multicultural society skidding way off track.
More widely, crime rates are on fire.
Burglaries for the year to June 2024 rose 10% to over 9 million incidents says the Office of National Statistics.
Detection rates for burglaries and shoplifting at 3.9% and 16.4% respectively, are suspiciously low. (They are even worse for grooming gangs).
More crimes, fewer sentences.
The obvious must be stated. It is neither an accident nor down to incompetence, it is policy.
Some wags ask what are the Police for?
The witness replies: to side with the burglar against the homeowner, with the shoplifter against the shop owner.
It is tacit redistribution.
A recent report by the Policy Exchange think tank put the cost of “soaring levels of crime” to £250 billion a year, or 10% of GDP.
Consider it another tax.
Why?
Well, our State does not believe in private property.
Indeed, Keir Starmer was aghast during the Wapping Strikes in the mid-1980s when, he wrote, the Police “put the boot in to defend free enterprise” and, by extension, private property.
He has never changed his mind.
Our family farms and countryside dwellers are experiencing this first hand.
The State aims to dispossess them of their farmsteads and decolonise rural England. They are only first in a very long line of targets.
Because an increasing number of people are noticing the accelerating shift toward a Maoist cultural revolution, ancestral freedoms of expression have become a nuisance.
Describing a scene accurately is now taboo, crime a thought not an action.
Keir Starmer, and much of our political establishment, desire to make windows into men’s souls, so running the risk of rekindling the religious and sectarian wars Elizabeth I was so keen to extinguish.
Falling foul of the State’s current orthodoxy carries with it the threat of a constable’s visitation, as Allison Pearson of the Telegraph found out, or much worse.
In short, while an Englishman, until only a few years ago, took it as read that the borders his forefathers defended for centuries were sacrosanct, that his property was his to hand over to his children unburdened, that free enterprise was a given and that for this to be true, theft had to be one of the worst of crimes and that he was free to call a “spade a spade” because he was freeborn; the UK state believes the opposite.
Under the new terms, though, the subject pays for his country’s destruction.
The upshot?
If government spending is not benign but malignant; If it redefines crimes from actions to thoughts; If the provision of “key services” is only window dressing to uproot millennia of our culture to subsidise state-funded Fabian nihilists; If it seeks to impose its deranged view and remove consent from national governance, amputating reciprocal Justice from the body of our laws, while introducing a caste system, based on race, religious and gender, into it, then, as Saint Augustine would have said, government in the UK is nothing more than “organised crime”.
Hungry for power, it has drifted far away from the consensus of what makes us Brits.
Government, evidently, does not have our interest at heart, only that of its own aggrandisement and that of those whose support it needs to keep the spigots of a devalued Sterling flowing.
As an exemplar look no further than Ed Miliband’s recent offer of a £525 000 salary per annum for a new Net Zero tsar to head the new Great British Energy quango.
Government appointees, from lowly to grandee, are getting fat on the toil of ever fewer actual contributors.
Our government’s debts and unsustainable deficits are financing our country’s de-industrialisation, de-agriculturalisation and cultural dismantlement.
In short, our taxes feed the beast.
So much has our Frankenstein government strayed that paying taxes should soon be seen as what it is: an act of treason.
It took a long time to see it, as other hypotheses advanced by men of good will all fell by the wayside one after the other, until none but the latter was left.
Is it not now time to accept this unpalatable truth?
Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.