19th May 2012
Dear Sir,
I have spent the last seven days babysitting my grandchildren while my daughter went on a well-earned holiday. She successfully runs one of Coventry’s very few remaining manufacturing companies against great odds and the apparent determination of the European Union and Her Majesty’s Government to destroy her company. She finds it quite stressful.
Mary is seventeen and really has no need of my presence but Jane, at fourteen, is too young to be correctly left in the care of her sister. Mary has been revising for exams all week and has gone off to examinations on a few occasions. I have looked after the house and prepared several meals and cut the lawns and ensured an orderly household although, to be fair, I am sure they would have managed quite well without me.
We had several excellent after-dinner talks around the dining table and did a lot of what is nowadays called bonding but in my day was simply a good family mealtime. I became concerned that most of our conversations turned finally to warnings from me about the bad things to be found in this world. I found it difficult to draw a balance between the inevitable optimism of youth and the dim pessimism of age and experience.
Despite the inclement weather we all had a good time and had arranged to finish our week with a meal at Grandma’s. We arranged to take a dessert and arrived at 5:30 on Friday night. The meal was good and the main topic of conversation was camels.
Jane had the last football match of her season the next day and had fallen asleep in the chair so we went home at 10:00 O’clock. The family home is situated on a main road so it is advisable to back into the drive as backing out into traffic can be quite dangerous; but backing into the drive requires precise timing and positioning to avoid causing disruption to other traffic and the occasional aggressive driver. So I was rather puzzled to find a couple standing in the footpath exactly coincident with the entrance to my drive.
I parked and waited. Mary said that he was drunk and Jane affirmed it. They were standing looking back up the road towards the pub several hundred yards away. He was trying to go back and she was trying to drag him homeward. I waited about two minutes but still they did not move. I got out of my car, stood beside the door and asked quite politely if they would mind moving on so that I could use my drive. He answered “No” followed by a string of abuse.
I got back into my car and his partner managed to move him on. I reversed into my drive and he kicked the passenger door as I did so. I backed up the drive and then saw him coming towards the car. I locked the doors with the central locking button. At 72 years of age I had no intention of taking on an aggressive, drunk, thirty-year- old.
He did a lot of shouting and threatening and kicked my car three or four times. We all remained silent. He smashed his fist against my window and kicked the door panel again. His woman then stepped up to my door and held up her hand in a clear warning to me to stay in the car – not that I had any intention of leaving it. She then stood with her back to my door, thereby placing herself between him and me. Whether or not she took a great personal risk by her action I do not know but she did it with authority and, I suspect, with experience. She then managed to take him away. As she left I showed her my lighted phone and she threatened me “Be careful who you are phoning”. They walked away in the direction of a local housing estate.
When we got into the house, fourteen-year-old footballer Jane said “I wanted to get out of the car and have a go at him”. I joked “What would you have done, kicked him on the shins?” “No” she replied “I would kick him where it hurts a man.” Maybe I should have let her. At least she understands justice.
It is 4:00 am and I have not slept a wink. I am not scared but angry; and concerned that I shall not be here next week but my daughter and her two daughters will be. I think the girls have gone to sleep but I noticed that Jane’s light is on and she does not normally sleep with the light on. I shall start to deal with the trauma tomorrow, although I suspect that they might deal with it better than I.We are all trying to bring up the girls to be good citizens in a society that seems to think hedonism and destructive self-indulgence is normal. I try to explain fundamental philosophical matters to them in the simplest way I can. One of the fundamental principles of civilisation is that force is forbidden to every citizen. The use of force – or violence – is restricted to the government and may be used only within the limits prescribed by law. Any individual who resorts to violence breaks the law and should be dealt with severely. Failure to do so sends a message to all victims of violence that the society they live in is corrupt. A society that adopts violence – in any form – as its norm, is doomed to destruction. That is the lesson I have successfully taught my children and am trying to teach to my grandchildren. I wonder what lesson they learned last night?
If this had happened to me alone I would be outraged but that it should have happened to two young, vulnerable and impressionable girls on their own doorstep is not acceptable to civilisation. Tomorrow I shall counsel them – and their mother on her return - to agree to take the matter to the police. It is possible that it might be better to rely on the obvious good sense of his woman to keep him under control but that is an unknown.
I hate to have to think that I shall have to tell my grandchildren that they must lie down in the face of violence and cower in impotence while a drunken thug smashes up their property and attempts to cause them bodily harm. I would like to think that a thug should get his just deserts – and I am certain that I could find this man - and the police almost certainly know him already – but what if a stupidly lenient court lets him off to continue to threaten three vulnerable females of my family? This is a dilemma that I would not have to face in a moral society.
The blackbirds are singing now so I suppose dawn is soon to show. I shall listen to the dawn chorus for a minute and go to bed. In the morning I shall tackle these problems afresh.
Descriptions.
Male. Aged 30 Dark short hair. Thin build. Height 5’10”. Clean shaven. Dark jacket. Dark trousers. Thin face.
Female. Age 35. Oval, slightly chubby face. Medium build. Height 5’4”. Brown hair. Fringe swept to the right. Trousers and boots. Dark jacket.
19 May 2012
Mary did not sleep much last night either so we are both tired today. Jane played football today and they won and she has presentation night tonight so she is happy. Mary is not.
21 May 2012
Perspective.The argument for the control of force, or violence, in society is explained in a very short form above and is irrefutable. The prime reason anyone needs a government is for security: to protect against force. This is achieved in a moral society by restricting the use of force to the government. They exercise it by making laws which conform to a constitution and are exercised by a duly constituted police force which acts in accordance with the constitution. All other initiation of force against another person is a criminal offense.
Indeed there is a cogent argument that control of force is one of only two functions that must be provided by the government and are too sensitive to leave to private individuals. All functions must be provided on the ground by private people and they can, and should, control the provision of those services themselves. Government interference can never be beneficial. The control of force is clearly too liable to perversion to be not controlled by the government.
The other function that only the government can effectively control is the provision of money. Money is not wealth but is a vital token of wealth, without which, we could not trade with each other. A stable currency is vital to economic health and is in practice licensed by the government to private banks which have clearly perverted their licences and their power to effectively gamble with our money, pocket the wins and return the losses to the taxpayer. This is a foul and disgusting perversion of trust and is a violent criminal offence against the rest of society – but they get away with it by bribing politicians.
The man who attacked me may be a nasty drunken thug but he is probably not stupid and knows enough to be aware that the financial system is damaging his life. While nothing can excuse his behaviour, maybe he has a right to be bloody angry.
When I retired in 2000 I worked for some years within a department of the local council helping with community issues in the area in which I then lived. I learned a great deal about how a city is run and liaised with local police on many issues so that I knew around twenty local police officers on first name terms. I sat on a number of local panels such as Safer Neighbourhoods groups.
I learned that there are a lot of very nice people living in not-very-nice conditions on housing estates and also that there are invariably a good proportion of outright thugs who can – and often do – make their lives miserable. These thugs survive and thrive in these estates because inadvisable laws have “given” them rights to be housed.
The fundamental fallacy in this is that no-one can be “given” rights. Rights are a fundamental construct of philosophy which belong equally to every person and cannot be given. They can be denied by many methods but they cannot be given. They do not belong to you to give. People who are given houses, or any other benefit - often at small or no cost to themselves – are being given a benefit that has to be produced by someone else. They are thus effectively enslaving those who work to provide that benefit. Thus we have the very worst amongst us pandered to and subsidised by the very best in society - those who produce wealth. This is socialism gone mad.
This problem has been much exacerbated by the unbelievable requirement that all housing projects must now have an ”affordable housing” content. This is clearly a left wing tactic to ensure the destruction of the middle classes by demanding that every middle class housing project has a slum attached to it. Their justification for this evil tactic is to claim that these people are entitled to “nice” housing and that placing them in a “nice” environment will help to improve their behaviour. This is, of course, absolute rubbish; they take the rot in their souls with them and they soon spread their reign of terror throughout the neighbourhood which is then no longer “nice”.
I am not prepared to reveal my position in this but I still work within “the community” and know and face these problems personally on a daily basis.
Another inexplicable thing is that our police forces are being devastated by cutbacks when street violence – mostly alcohol fuelled - has to be tolerated almost nightly in many of our city centres. The police have already been emasculated by a whole raft of almost incomprehensible legal restrictions which make many of their legitimate tasks impossible to perform. The police in this city are so under-manned that they are taking “community officers” – paid for by the local council – off the streets to man police stations. And I and my granddaughters have to cower in our car hoping that a vicious thug cannot break the windows and then our heads while the rest of society cares not one shit.
The regulation of violence by the police is the prime function of government. Why can I not go peacefully to my own home?
Perhaps it is because the state pays fancy lawyers a lot of money to protect thugs who have committed a crime and claims it is protecting their “human rights”. The state has done nothing to protect me and my granddaughters and when I report this incident to the police - which I shall do - I can virtually guarantee they will do nothing. What about my rights to protect my life and my property? Where the hell are they?
I ran my own small business for much of my life and produced primary goods. I created a business that returned to the state vastly more in tax and National Insurance than to me, as well as giving over twenty people very good jobs. If everybody in this country performed the way I did this country would be unbelievably wealthy. My children continue this achievement and my grandsons and granddaughters are well on the way to self sufficiency plus. But the whole construct of the country in which they must operate is aimed at supporting the dregs of society and heaping ever increasing burdens upon the best - the competent who create the wealth - without which we cannot survive. The government is betraying the good by pandering to the bad.
My fundamental right within society is to be free from force. And I have been betrayed. And so has every other law abiding citizen.
Yours sincerely,
Colin Walker.