Liberal Authoritarianism
The more liberal you are with criminals, the more authoritarian you must be with citizens.
The more liberal you are with criminals, the more authoritarian you must be with citizens.
The British state’s liberal approach to law and order has enabled criminality to become endemic in society. Our political system refuses to use the one tool with which crime can be effectually reduced: the exemplary punishment of known, convicted criminals. In response to the widespread disorder which our penal policy has produced, the state instead attempts to manage this problem by imposing ever-more tedious and inconsequential restrictions, regulating ever-wider areas of our life. These measures do nothing to reduce crime, but simply add further offenses to the statute book and inconvenience law-abiding citizens. Just as criminals who transgress the old laws are perfectly willing to flout the new ones, the same government which is unwilling to punish criminals for transgressing the original offences is similarly unwilling to punish criminals for transgressing the new offences.
In order to remedy this, the government, facing rising concern about crime, engages in the slow dissolution of our core civil liberties, attempting to ‘look tough’ on a problem which their own impotence has created.
‘Something Must be Done’
Because politicians are unwilling to target specific and convicted criminals with exemplary punishment, they instead seek to regulate ever wider spheres of public behaviour in a futile effort to assuage public feeling and look as though they’re being proactive.
The Sentencing Council boasts that it takes repeat convictions for carrying a knife before a token two-month sentence is served. What is the consequence? In 2024, over 50,000 knife crimes were committed in England and Wales (excluding Greater Manchester) alone. Four people die in the UK from stab wounds every week. In September 2024 the government’s response was to add zombie knives to the list of prohibited items. BBC investigations in the months following the imposition of the ban showed that these restrictions were being ignored. And why shouldn’t they be? Criminals who are willing to carry around large, serrated knives with the intention of gutting enemies are not deterred by making the exact form of knife they carry illegal to possess.
The brutal Southport murders have provoked proposals to restrict yet further the facility with which ordinary people can purchase domestic kitchen knives. But Axel Rudakubana had been apprehended carrying knives ten times before his massacre. He had been referred to Prevent on three occasions following concerns about his violent fantasies. Axel Rudakubana was at liberty to commit his crimes, not because of the absence of double-ID verification on Amazon purchases, but because the British state refuses to remove known, radicalised, knife-carrying men from our streets.
This same pattern - of inconveniencing the innocent whilst indulging the guilty - is not limited solely to knife crime. It emerged in a recent suggestion that young drivers should be banned from having passengers in their cars whilst driving. This recommendation came following an incident in which an 18-year old crashed his car, killing all three passengers. He was driving at 100mph whilst filming himself inhaling laughing gas. An additional regulation specifying what passengers he could have in his car would hardly have deterred him if he was so indifferent to existing legislation. This rule would only be adhered to by those who were never a danger in the first place.
Thomas Johnson drove his car into a tree while overtaking another vehicle and inhaling laughing gas, causing the deaths of his three passengers
Unable to confront the fact that our response to crime is inadequate, we further criminalise tangential behavior, and expect criminals who have ignored the first laws to abide by the second. An MP is murdered in his own constituency by a deranged Islamist? A cross-party selection of MPs will demand an end to online anonymity. Youth stabbings are rampant in London? Idris Elba, a member of the Coalition to Tackle Knife Crime, goes on national TV to suggest we only sell blunt kitchen tools. Why imprison knife offenders when you could curb the ease with which someone makes a roast dinner?
Crime is rife, not because we don’t have enough laws; but because we don’t enforce the laws we have.
Promotional photo for ‘Our Knife Crime Crisis’
David’s Law
In recent years - inspired by highly emotive tragedies which ought to prompt some soul-searching in Westminster - a number of laws have been passed which have been inspired by, and ‘named’ after, individual victims. Although these crimes are invariably a consequence of systemic state failure, the government attempts to propitiate the victims and their families by the addition onto the statute book of some novel (and irrelevant) proposal. Blinded by ideological ossification from addressing the root cause, politicians instead introduce new restrictions and further encroachments of civil liberties.
Currently working its way through the Parliamentary process is ‘Martyn’s Law’, named after Martyn Het, a victim of the Manchester Arena bombing. This seeks to prevent a repeat occurrence of the attack by requiring any venue which can accommodate 200 people to put in place public protection measures against the possibility of a terrorist attack. The Home Office website explains why this law is needed: “Since 2017, Counter Terrorism Policing assesses that there have been 15 domestic terror attacks in the UK (not including Northern Ireland-related terrorism), and agencies and law enforcement have disrupted 43 late-stage plots.”
Thus, it now falls on church halls and restaurants to prevent terrorist attacks. The threat of terrorism does not come from insufficient security checks, but from our laissez-faire immigration policy, which has allowed the creation of a demographic within British society of people willing to engage in the mass slaughter of innocents. Once this has been established, there is no law or restraint which can be put in place to prevent it: there will always be a busy coffee-shop or bus which is vulnerable. Manchester Arena had much greater security in place than anything a village fête can establish; but guards who were suspicious of the perpetrator felt inhibited from raising their concerns for fears they’d be smeared as racists. How will Martyn’s Law address that? The British government is trying to regulate its way out of a problem that cannot be regulated.
Clare’s Law is in place to enable women to discover whether their partners have a history of domestic abuse. But Clare Wood would never have been at risk had her eventual murderer been kept in prison for having held a former partner at knife-point for 12 hours. Sarah’s Law gives parents greater knowledge of whether convicted paedophiles have access to their child, but Sarah Payne would still be alive if the criminal justice system had not released a man convicted of abducting and indecently assaulting a child after just two years. The personal names and emotive character of these cases can blind people from seeing the same pattern being repeated: increasingly bureaucratic measures are put in place to deal with the fact that known and violent men are consistently released onto the street to reoffend. If punishment was appropriate then none of these measures would be necessary.
Liberal Authoritarianism
The rate at which we introduce additional regulations is compounded by our willingness to erode core civil liberties for the same end. Liberal politicians will exploit public concern about widespread disorder and increasingly prevalent terrorism to extend the range and authority of the state. With one hand, former Home Secretary Roy Jenkins diluted the penal system, whilst with the other he undermined his own citizen’s right to jury trial through the introduction of majority verdicts. Tony Blair, promising to be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ did not attempt to reintroduce exemplary punishment of convicted criminals, but instead introduced extended detention without trial, the abolition of double jeopardy, and sought (but failed) to impose ID cards.
For more than half a century Britain has pursued liberal policies in relation to law and order. We have diluted sentences, whilst revising the sentencing guidelines to ensure that serial offenders are consistently released onto our streets leading to surging levels of crime. Rather than admit that the policy may have been misguided, we pass increasingly impotent and ineffective laws to constrain the law-abiding citizen in ever more tedious ways.
The overwhelming majority of crime and disorder in society is caused by a small minority of individuals. By targeting convicted criminals with stern treatment, we can maintain a free and ordered society, in which peaceable citizens are protected. If we fail to properly target specific and convicted criminals then we create the conditions in which governments increasingly attempt to control the lives of conscientious, law-abiding citizens, in a futile effort to manage the problem they’ve created.