Deconstructing the Socialist's War On Law & Order In Britain (Updated)

In Britain, socialists, with their modern belief in multiculturalism, dominate government, academia and much of the news industry. Britain embraced socialism in the immediate aftermath of WWII as a means of righting a deeply troubled class based system. To their credit, the socialists solved that problem. But the socialists have gone far beyond, embracing multiculturalism and creating their own immense problems by undermining almost all of the pillars of British society. Britain is, in essence, a laboratory for the ills of modern socialism in an anglo democracy.

[Update: Within a few days of posting this, I was directed to a Labour Party proposal to allow for local elections of the police leadersip. This is a sea change and as about as unlikely an event as Nancy Pelosi embracing offshore drilling. It may well be a measure born of desperation, given the Sword of Damoclese under which the Labour Party electoral fortunes now sit. None the less, the plan looks viable. Interestingly, it is drawing fire from some conservatives. I have posted on it here. It obviously renders the first two points I raise below moot.]

I posted below, in Britain's Devil's Advocates, that perhaps the most dangerous way in which socialists were destroying British society was a failure to impose law and order. Soon after I had written that post, the Home Office released a report showing a 9% drop in violent crime in Britain. The report was trumpeted as proof of the success of the socialist Labour Party by arguably the most risible den of multicultural elitists in the whole of the chattering class – the BBC. It was all positively Orwellian.

This post is meant to analyze the why and how of what the socialists are doing to undermine law and order in Britain. The starting point is looking underneath the great statistics to see what is really going on:

Labour’s superlative crime statistics are an attempt to magically change chicken excreta into chicken salad. This from the blog Burning Your Money:

. . . Over the decade since that tough on crime supremo took over, police recorded crime is up 7% (1997-98 to 2007-08). And when you probe beneath the totals, crimes of violence turn out to be up much MUCH more.

As the chart above shows, the increase in really bad stuff is nearly 70%. What's that? Ah yes, of course - we're not allowed to make that comparison because during the last ten years, the Home Office changed its counting rules for recorded crime not once, but twice. Twice. Is it any wonder nobody trusts the stats? Well, you know what? We're making the comparison anyway. And we're saying to the Home Office and the BBC, the reason we don't believe you is that the official stats are about as reliable as a one-careful-owner Renault Megane from Arthur Daley. We'd rather believe the evidence of our own eyes - such as the letter I have in front of me right now from our local police warning us of a spate of violent break-ins, and advising us to phone 999 at the slightest sign of a sledgehammer coming through the frontdoor. . . .

What is happening in Britain is a case book study in why socialists / multiculturalists have no business being put in charge of running a lemonade stand, let alone a country. The problem is fourfold.

One, socialists are statists. They suffer under the dual fallacy that the common man is not to be trusted and that the world will function better only if they, the elite, are making the decisions. Democracy is merely a distraction for these people. They centralize and accrue power. And that includes centralized control over policing throughout the country. The local police are ultimately controlled and appointed by the central government. Thus it is no surprise whatsoever that the biggest complaint I hear from my friends in Britain is that the local police are not responsive to the community.

It would seem patently obvious that if you want to make the police responsive to local concerns, you would give the locals the hiring and firing authority over their local police leadership through elections. No more appointments from above and minimal regulation of standards.

Ah, but that would violate the very first tenet of the multicultural left - that they are superior and the decisions should be left to them. Therefore, when last year John Reid, Labour's then Home Secretary, pondered how to better increase the accountability of local police to the local populace, the mere mention of local elections did not even pass his lips. Instead, he suggested giving out phone numbers directly to the police station. It was stupefying.

But it gets worse. When you have centralized control, there is of course tremendous pressure to show that the central planners are doing their job well. Thus you get things such as proposed "policing standards" from the Home Office that curiously seem to have no connection whatsoever with police efficiency:

Guidelines ordering police to respond to emergency calls within three hours and to attend less urgent incidents such as burglaries within three days have been drawn up by the Home Office.

Three hours? That of course was not a standard drawn up to improve law and order. It was a standard drawn up in response to the public perception of failing law and order and a police force that is unseen and unresponsive. Clearly it was a gambit by the socialists in the central government so that they can claim in the future that police are responding to 99.99% of all calls within the prescribed time standard. Voila. A Labour statistical masterpiece to be reported prominently on the telly. Who are you going to believe about police responsiveness, Gordo and the Beeb news reader or your lying eyes?

Two, because socialists believe in their own superiority, what they do best – and most – is regulate. The answer to any problem is not to devolve power or deregulate, but rather to pass a new law or regulation on top of the existing ones. Thus you have an ever growing nightmare of bureaucracy and red tape that takes police off the streets and otherwise detracts from them doing their job.

Please do not mistake anything that I write here as a knock on the British police per se. I have no doubt that the average individual officers are as fine as you will find anywhere. The socialist system in control of the British police is another matter entirely. For example, this a few months ago from a British Police Inspector who blogs under the nom de guerre of Inspector Gadget:

We are very nearly finished in Ruralshire Constabulary. It is chaos and it can only be a matter of days. Someone has to turn off the life support machine. Politically Correct to the point of insanity (Home Office ‘Equalities’ Circular Number 10 of November 2002 is now being enforced in Ruralshire - this bans the use of the terms ‘homosexual or homosexuality’ and demands the use of the term ‘gay’ instead ) and immersed in the enormous chaos of another complete reorganisation of the Divisions various units, we are literally imploding.

We have just had to take another twenty or so officers off the streets to provide the staff for three new units. These units will be fighting a desperate rear-guard action for the next few months to increase our performance in the Customer Satisfaction area. These officers are not actually going to do anything to help our ‘customers’, they are simply going to concentrate on making hundreds of calls to victims to check their satisfaction levels.

And see his related posts on the effect of centralized control and massive overregulation of the police here, here, and here.

Onto the third component of imploding law and order in Britain. Socialists want to win elections, and thus those wonderful statistics you see that show crime ever dropping and more arrests being made involve a tremendous amount of gaming the system. This means targeted policing that distorts priorities and leaves everyone, the police included, jaded and cynical.

For example, there was this story not long ago:

Police spent months gathering statements from 542 people who donated money to a youngster who collected £700 for Comic Relief but then kept it.The case was then recorded as 542 crimes of obtaining money by deception, boosting detection rates even though the youngster only received a warning, the Police Federation conference in Blackpool heard yesterday. It also emerged that an unidentified child in North Wales received a "penalty notice for disorder" (PND) for chalking on the pavement.

The cases were highlighted as absurd examples of the "target culture" reviled by many rank and file officers in England and Wales, which is "criminalising middle England".

The critics say pressure to boost the apparent success rate against crime forces police to make ridiculous decisions and use arrests, cautions or fines for trivial incidents which would not previously have been treated as crimes.

Investigation of more serious offences is then neglected. . .

Read the rest of the story here. You can also troll through the archives of the Police Inspectors blog and find countless examples.

The fourth component of Labour’s destruction of law and order is by far the most insidious. It begins with the socialist / multiculturalist mindset - a philosopy right out of the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto - that Western society is at the root of today's problems. Indeed, it is so ensconced in the psyche of Britain's hard left socialists that there is largely a complete refusal to see reality on that score. For one crystal clear example, as I pointed out in the post Britain’s Devil’s Advocates, there is that dyed in the wool socialist, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury:

[The Archbishop] is doing to Christianity what Labour is doing to Britain. He is the man who prior to this day had praised Islam, damned America as an imperialist nation to a crowd of Muslims, blamed America for Muslim violence against Christians in the Middle East, refused to proselytize for Christianity among Muslims, and advocated implementing at least parts of Sharia law in Britain. The Archbishop's latest assault on the Christian faith has come in an apologia to Muslims for the violent history of Christianity and what seems an apology for one of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith - the Trinity.

I could give hundreds of examples, but one more will suffice - the BBC, with their recent drama showing a British Christian beheading a Muslim in an act of terrorism. Boy, that one has a real basis in reality. Counting Cats quotes Melanie Phillips on this issue: "It is really quite obscene that the BBC repeatedly portrays the victims of mass murder – Americans, Israelis – as its perpetrators and its actual perpetrators as victims."

Thus the logic is that Western society is bad and either should not be defended or the defense should be ameliorated by recognition that those attacking Western society are at least partially justified in doing so. Society itself is at the root of crime. With that mindset permeating the justice system, the system changes its emphasis. No longer is punishing the crime and bringing fair retribution to its victim the top priority. It is replaced as the top priority by rehabilitation of the offender. This is often accomplished using "alternative sentencing" rather then jail time. While rehabilitation is a laudable goal to be sure, the motivation to rehabilitate itself disappears when it is divorced from meaningful punishment. In other words, when socialists prioritize rehabilitation over punishment and no longer see punishment as a necessary element of rehabilitation, then law and order really begins to fall apart. And that is what we are seeing in Britain today.

Three examples highlight this last component. Inspector Gadget complains of this often. He has an example spot on in his blog today:

Interesting Radio 4 Interview at the "Foundation 4 Life" youth project this morning. They deliver ‘Behaviour Modification Workshops’ for young people who are offending or considered to be at risk of offending/ re-offending. . . .

Two of the youths involved were interviewed. Born and living in this country, they were, never the less, very hard to understand. One of them was asked about the new Government plan for 5 year sentences for knife crime:

"My Boys don’t care about no sentence. When they are doing what they are doing (carrying knives) they don’t care about no consequences"

He then went on to say that his most recent conviction was for street robbery. He had been found guilty and sentenced to 6 months; he had served 3 months and his comment was:

"Three months! That is good for robbery, man" He then explained that he had 32 previous convictions and had been to prison only twice. . . .

If this individual has 32 previous convictions, clearly he has been arrested and/or dealt with by police officers 32 times successfully i.e. a conviction was obtained.

In light of this, yet again, Inspector Gadget asks anyone who cares to comment:

"How exactly is this kind of repeat offending by violent, disturbed and feral youths (who have been dealt with time and time again by us) still the responsibility of the police?"

"What exactly are we NOT doing as police officers in this case?"

"What accountability is there for the Courts?"

We need some high profile ACPO officers to start telling the public about this. Apart form the horrendous public safety issues, we are getting sick of arresting the same people again and again with no tangible result and then being blamed for their behaviour.

Read the entire post. This unconscionably lax treatment of serious crime does not extend just to the feral youth culture. For example, On June 11, 2007, the Telegraph reported that "[t]housands of sex offenders including paedophiles and rapists have escaped with cautions rather than being jailed over the past five years." This is indicative of what is happening throughout the UK legal system.

Peter Hitchen's perfectly captures what is occuring in a recent column, noting the sorry state of any meaningful punishment and the latest mind-numbing recommendation that thieves, swindlers and burglars receive no jail time:

Here is the news, 20 years from now: ‘Government experts are urging that murderers should be given community service where possible, rather than jail terms. ‘The panel pointed out that there was little evidence that prison terms reduced reoffending, as most murderers committed fresh killings soon after release. And packed jails mean that only the most serious offenders can be kept inside. 'The Lab-Con-Lib coalition government’s crash programme to build new prison camps has increased places to 500,000, but overcrowding is still serious...’ Here the bulletin comes to an abrupt end because of a power cut resulting from a wind shortage.

Actually, 20 years may be too long. This week, a body called the Sentencing Advisory Panel (SAP for short) did actually say that convicted thieves, burglars and swindlers should not automatically go to jail. Their thinking, if it can be so described, is roughly as follows. The prisons are so full that offenders could only go to jail for a short time. During that time there is no chance of turning them into better people and it doesn’t keep them off the streets for very long. So why bother?

You will have noticed there was no storm of rage from the politicians. They, too, have accepted the half-witted, thought-free ideas that enslave the SAP. They loftily dismiss the suggestion that convicted criminals should be punished. They whimper that ‘deprivation of liberty is punishment enough’. They wince fastidiously at the idea that prisons should be seriously unpleasant places run by the authorities.

That is why burglary – which 40 years ago was a rarity and an outrage – has become so common. Why shouldn’t the same thing happen to murder? It already seems to be under way. Behind all this is the foolish idea that people who knowingly and deliberately do bad things should be ‘rehabilitated’ and ‘helped’.

Any fool knows it is wrong to break into someone else’s home and steal from it. He does it because he thinks he can get away with it, and because he is not afraid of what might happen even if he is caught. He is laughing at us.

Since these days you have to commit about 50 offences right in front of a CCTV camera before the police will act, those who arrive in our prisons are already experienced, habitual criminals. It is absurd to think they will be ‘rehabilitated’ by their time in these silly warehouses, run by the convicts and full of drugs.

Prison’s main purpose is to frighten potential criminals into staying within the law. The hundreds of thousands who now live criminal lives do so mainly because they are not afraid, as they once would have been. So we have to be afraid instead.

Read his entire post.

This is all a case study in why the philosophy of Karl Marx should have been interred with his bones. Instead, it is alive and thriving – much like a malignant cancer - in Britain today. Either Britain will dispense with socialism or Britain will eventually crumble. I am an optimist and an anglophile, and thus my bet is on the former. But I am also a bit of a realist. Given the stranglehold of socialists on all the reigns of power in Britain, and in particular in academia and the news, the latter is a real possibility also.

Update: Welcome to readers from Rightwing News and Likelihood of Success

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Britain's Devil's Advocates (Updated)

In the movie "Devil's Advocate," Satan returns to earth as a defense lawyer with the goal of destroying society by destroying respect for the law. Whoever wrote the script was incredibly insightful. Maintaining the rule of law is the foundational responsibility of government. If the government can't provide order, than society breaks down and individuals supply their own justice. A millenium ago, British society gave up, for the most part, trial by combat and private justice when the government instituted a fair system of laws and applied them with some balance. But what has taken the British a millenium to build up, the socialists are destroying at simply an amazing pace. Their new draft police guidelines could only have been drafted by an utter fool or a person bent on the destruction of British society. And what the socialists in Labour are doing to government and justice, the socialist occupying the position of Archbishop of Canterbury is doing to Christianity.
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This from the Daily Mail:

Guidelines ordering police to respond to emergency calls within three hours and to attend less urgent incidents such as burglaries within three days have been drawn up by the Home Office.

The astonishing proposals were designed as 'national standards for local policing' in England and Wales.

They laid down a three-hour target for officers to reach an incident which 'requires policing intervention'.

And they allowed police to wait a leisurely three days where 'there is less immediate need’ for their presence.

The leaked draft targets were to be included in the Government's long-awaited Green Paper on police reform.

But after a barrage of criticism from the Opposition yesterday – which accused the Government of being out of touch with the public – Home Office officials insisted the targets will not appear in the final version of the paper when it is published tomorrow.

The apparent disarray follows Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's startling U-turn over proposals to force knife-crime offenders to confront victims in hospitals. That plan was floated and ditched within 24 hours.

The proposals for response times – part of a ‘Police Pledge’ to the public – appear to be so modest that they would be of little value as performance targets.

. . . The suggestion that householders who have suffered a burglary should wait up to three days for a visit raises serious questions about the fate of any forensic evidence left at the scene.

. . . A major review of policing earlier this year by watchdog Sir Ronnie Flanagan warned that police were becoming increasingly ‘risk-averse’, and that ‘excess bureaucracy’ was encouraging them to ‘overrecord and under-deliver'.

Read the entire article. This all takes on even more sinister ramifications when one realizes that British law essentially has disarmed the populace and that anecdotal evidence suggests that self defense is likely to send you to jail quicker than committing an actual crime. [Update - That is no longer true. Britian's new law of self defense came into effect about ten hours after I wrote this post.]

And even if one is actually are apprehended for a crime, Britain is simply not enforcing its laws with realistic jail sentence. There is an insane leftist bent on emotional catharsis as providing both punishment and redemption instead of the true punishment of repaying a debt to society in a jail cell. You can see it Jacqui Smith's call for the perpetrators of knife crime to be made to "confront" their victims. When I was Britain in 2003, I can recall a plan being debated on the BBC to significantly adjust jail sentences downwards if the perpetrator would issue a formal apology to their victim. Britain's socialists suffer from the dual disabilities of, one, not trusting individuals to manage their own lives - including to be armed and to act in self defense when police are on their three hour meander over to the scene of a serious crime - and two, looking at law enforcement and justice from the standpoint that society is somehow the root cause of crime. This is a disaster in the making. Were the Devil's Advocate based on reality, one could well imagine Satan leaning back in his office next 10 Downing St. feeling quite confident that all was on schedule.

And then there is Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Cantebury, doing to Christianity what Labour is doing to Britain. He is the man who prior to this day had praised Islam, damned America as an imperialist nation to a crowd of Muslims, blamed America for Muslim violence against Christians in the Middle East, refused to proselytize for Christianity among Muslims, and advocated implementing at least parts of Sharia law in Britain. The Archbishop's latest assault on the Christian faith has come in an apologia to Muslims for the violent history of Christianity and what seems an apology for one of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith - the Trinity. This from the Daily Mail:

Christian doctrine is offensive to Muslims, the Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday.

Dr Rowan Williams also criticised Christianity's history for its violence, its use of harsh punishments and its betrayal of its peaceful principles.

His comments came in a highly conciliatory letter to Islamic leaders calling for an alliance between the two faiths for 'the common good'.

But it risked fresh controversy for the Archbishop in the wake of his pronouncement earlier this year that a place should be found for Islamic sharia law in the British legal system.

. . . The Archbishop's letter is a reply to feelers to Christians put out by Islamic leaders from 43 countries last autumn.

In it, Dr Williams said violence is incompatible with the beliefs of either faith and that, once that principle is accepted, both can work together against poverty and prejudice and to help the environment.

He also said the Christian belief in the Trinity - that God is Father, Son and Holy Ghost at the same time - 'is difficult, sometimes offensive, to Muslims'.

Trinitarian doctrine conflicts with the Islamic view that there is just one all-powerful God. . . .

Read the entire article. Its hard to know where to begin with idiocy of this magnitude coming from a man charged with defending the Anglican Christian faith.

Let's of over some basic facts for the Archbishop's benefit:

1. The use of force motivated by Christian beliefs is a part of the historical record. The use of force motivated by the desire to impose Islam is a matter of current events. The two are not morally equivalent.

2. Any original sin Christians suffer was wiped off by Christ's forgiveness on the cross. Any historical use of Christianity thereafter as a basis for violence was not done by anyone alive today. There is no need to apologize for it. There is an absolute need to demand that Islam break with violnece in the here and now.

3. A look at the historical record will show that, but for the Crusades, Christianity has been on the receiving end of Islamically motivated violence for approximately 1,300 years.

4. Even the Crusades were not an act of Christian aggression. They were a counterattack initiated after Christian lands had been steadily conquered by Islam for half a millenium and only after the Egyptian Caliph ordered the destruction of the most holy Church in Christendom, the Church of the Holy Sephulchre in Jerusalem.

5. Pretending that violence is not a part and parcel of how some of the sects of Islam interpret their religion today - including Salafi and Wahhabi sects - is suicidal and wholly out of touch with reality.

6. Apologizing for the Trinity is just beyond belief. If the good Archbishop has a firm belief in his convictions, then it would be impossible for him to apologize for his faith.

Archbishop Rowan Williams is every bit of a danger to Christianity as is Wahhabi Islam. Who will rid us of this troublesome priest, eh? That said, I am sure the Devil's advocate would want him to remain in place.

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The Malignant Effects Of Socialism In The UK

I am a rabid anglophile by any measure. I believe that Britain has, over the last millenium, had the single greatest positive impact on the world of any nation. That said, as I wrote here, Britain today sits amidst a perfect storm brought about by its near century embrace of socialism and its membership in the EU. A read through the British papers today shows some of the truly malignant effects of socialism – one on crime and policing, the other on the war against Christianity.
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Socialists are by definition anti-democratic statists. A core tenet of the socialist philosophy is to centralize control instead of allowing locals to make their own decisions on local issues. One of the areas where the deleterious effects of centralization can be easily seen is in policing.

Local police chiefs in the UK are appointed and controlled from the central government. The locals do not control their police through the ballot box. Not surprisingly, one of the biggest complaints I hear from my British friends is that the police in the UK are nowhere near as responsive to the locals they serve as they should be.

Since all is centralized, what has inevitably evolved is policing based on targets and quotas set by a government that wants to show good statistics to the people in advance of elections. Indeed, if you read the Labour crime statistics, they are inevitably impressive. But get below the statistics, and what you find is a country that has spiraled so far down in terms of law and order that a person living in Britain today is less safe from violent and serious crime than if they were living in the Balkans. Indeed, the government’s quota system is not only an incompetent and incredibly cynical game of smoke and mirrors, it is having an adverse effect on Britain’s middle class, as discussed in a report just released:

The middle classes have lost confidence in the police, a stark report has warned. They fear they have been alienated by a service which routinely targets ordinary people rather than serious criminals, simply to fill Government crime quotas.

The attitude of some officers has also led to spiralling complaints about neglect of duty and rudeness. The report from the Civitas think-tank says incidents which would once have been ignored are now treated as crimes - including a case of children chalking a pavement.

. . . The report warns that a generation of young people - the police's favourite soft targets - are being criminalised, putting their future prospects at risk.

. . . The report details how officers are expected to reach a certain number of 'sanction detections' a month by charging, cautioning or fining an 'offender'. Arresting or fining someone for a trifling offence - such as a child stealing a Mars bar - is a good way of hitting the target and pleasing the Home Office. Amazingly, the chocolate theft ranks as highly as catching a killer.

Miss Sergeant says performance-related bonuses of between £10,000 and £15,000 a year for police commanders depend partly on reaching such targets. This leads them to put pressure on frontline officers to make arrests for the most minor misdemeanours. . . .

Read the article.

Meanwhile, the socialist Labour Government continues its war on Christianity - and as the Bishop of Rochester pointed out the other day, it is a war the government is winning at perhaps existential cost to British society. Indeed, it is a war that has been going on since the inception of socialism. "It is a profound truth," declared the British Socialist Party in a 1911 manifesto, "that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion." And today, we have the story of a man who regularly rented out a castle for weddings. The state is now closing his business because he refused to make the castle available for a gay couple to be wed there. The man is a devout Christian, such unions violate his faith, and the castle is his private property. The state is using its police power to punish him for his Christian faith and to promote its socialist, anti-religious agenda.

There is finally a push-back going on in Britain. The socialist Labour government is being slaughtered in local elections and faces the abyss come the next general election. That said, the “conservative” party in Britain, the Tory party, seems little more than Labour-lite. As such, it is doubtful that even a crushing Tory victory can salvage Britain with its historical anglo-saxon values in tact. That is certainly true as long as Britain remains in the EU. Britain is just too far down the socialist / EU road to survive in even its current form beyond half a century. If the Britain of Churchill is ever to return, it will take some near disaster to move the British of today from their complacency, though I of course hope that I am proven wrong in that prognostication.

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The Nature of The Tories

The Tory victory in the UK's local elections, discussed in the post below, has not made Britain's conservative columnist Peter Hitchens a happy camper. He sees the modern Tory party, led by David Cameron, as a light version of the socialist/marxist Labour party - a criticism that you will find repeated often on this blog. Given the existential challenges Britain faces, I suspect the revitilization of the Tories or the mark of their demise will come in the next few years when they retake control of Britian and have to choose what to do about the EU.

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This from Peter Hitchens writing in the Daily Mail:

. . . What I am in favour of is, above all, national independence in which we choose our own destiny. Without it we would just be the serfs of whoever ruled these islands from far off and it would be pointless to discuss politics because we couldn't affect our destiny. We are rapidly approaching this point as the EU increases its powers over us, and no seriously patriotic party can continue to avoid the issue of withdrawal from the EU.

Next, I am favour of the liberty of the subject in a society governed by the rule of law, in which law-abiding people (who have made their own laws to supplement the force of conscience) are able to live freely according to their consciences.

I believe that these conditions are only possible in a country where the married family is strong and the state is weak, except in the matters of national defence and criminal justice, where it should be strong. They also rely on adult authority over children and a strong, generally accepted morality based on Christianity. That's what I'm in favour of, and I judge all political actions by these tests.

. . . [T]he most urgent and important task, before all else, [is] to get rid of the Tory Party. I learned from discussions with leading Tories that they loathed and despised my views and did not share my objectives. I realised that neither I, nor anyone who shared my views, had any chance of entering Parliamentary politics as long as the Tory Party occupied the position which ought to be held by a properly conservative, pro-British political formation. there is no mechanism in the Tory Party for reform or policy change, so there was no possibility of working within it. If I was serious, then my first task must be to destroy it.

. . . Patriotic? [The Tory's are] the party that got us into the Common Market, that actively supported staying in, in the 1975 referendum, that agreed the 'Single Market' and the 'Single European Act' that ended our national veto, that rammed Maastricht through Parliament. This is the party that devastated the armed forces with cuts at the end of the Cold War. And, I might add, it was the party that failed hopelessly to rearm until the last minute, in the face of the German threat in the 1930s, and which tried to dump Winston Churchill as an MP when he objected to this. Patriotic, my foot.

Law and Order? I could go on for hours (see my book 'The Abolition of Liberty' , where I do go on for hours). But the Tories have been specially useless on this. They did nothing to save or reinstate the death penalty, and many of their MPs have always voted against it. They did nothing to reverse Roy Jenkins's abolition of foot patrols in the 1960s. And this is the party that passed the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which subjected the police to a spider-web of politically correct codes of practice, designed by Guardian-reading liberal lawyers, which are the source of most of the 'form-filling' everyone pretends to be against.

Then there are prison sentences. It was the Tories, in the 1991 Criminal Justice Act, who first thought of defrauding the public by automatically halving almost all prison sentences, letting voters think that the Burglar Bill was going down for four years, while Burglar Bill knew perfectly well that he'd only serve two. Labour have been adept pupils in this game, but it was the Tories who thought of it.

The family? What did the Tories ever do for the family? The 1989 Children Act, a body blow to all types of adult authority, was once again a Tory Bill, inspired by United Nations Marxoid piffle about 'Children's Rights' (which mean social workers' rights to poke into private matters). And have you noticed the Tories trying to make divorce harder, or reforming the Stalinist laws that mean a man who wishes to stay married to his wife can be told he is divorced whether he wants to be or not, dragged from his own home by the force of law, denied access to his children and deprived of his rights in his own property?

Have you seen any Tory opposition, since the sad death of Janet Young (whose brave, honest conservatism was loathed by much of her party), to the spreading of anti-marriage propaganda in schools? On the contrary. the Tories now proudly endorse the entire agenda of the sexual revolution. You might also have noticed that it has been Tory local authorities which have persecuted people who protested against homosexual propaganda in public libraries, Tory authorities which have enforced politically correct rules to prevent conservative-minded parents from adopting, Tory local authorities which have snooped on the private lives of parents.

If there's a moral, cultural or political battle to be fought anywhere in this country against the revolutionary left, it will be the Tories who won't be fighting it. Office is all they want, and they'd promise to guillotine the Queen if they thought it would get them back into Downing Street.

. . . I defy you to tell the difference [between Labour and Tory] in practice. Sure, the slogans on the posters are different, but in reality, the only function of the Tories in our system is to continue to implement Labour policies while pretending to be against them, so providing a safety valve to vent discontent, whole leaving Labour policies untouched. The pattern of our government since the war has been intense revolutionary periods of Labour rule (1945-51, 1964-70 , 1997-????) succeeded by long years of do-nothing Toryism in which the Labour revolutions were not challenged, and the clock not put back by a single second. (the 1974-79 period is really just a mess of drift, since nobody had a proper majority, but Labour still managed to do quite a bit of damage).

This isn't the place to argue in depth about the Thatcher period, but even she failed to reverse the huge growth of the public sector, merely diverted it from the productive (coal, steel, gas, electricity, telecoms) to the unproductive (the NHS, armies of social workers, state education, local authorities) and she completely failed to challenge its egalitarian campaign to destroy proper learning and authority in schools, or to challenge its revolutionary social and moral agenda, undermining personal responsibility and family life - and eventually threatening liberty too.

Anyway, to the extent that she did challenge any of this, Margaret Thatcher was furiously opposed by her own party - and when she began to see the danger of the EU, which she had till then supported, the Tories savagely dumped her - as they would again dump any leader who took a genuinely pro-British position on anything. The myth that she was scuppered by the 'poll tax' is just that, a myth. It was her Maastricht speech and her 'No! No! No!' to Brussels rule that brought out the assassin's knives. Her replacement, John Major , was the first New Labour Prime Minister. The policy gap between Major and Blair in 1997 was minimal.

What's more, that gap has become even more tiny since 1997, as the Tories have done what they always do, and agreed to accept Labour policies as the condition of being allowed back into office ( see my last week's blog for a rare case of this brutal fact being stated in public) .

. . . I don't want a Brown government any more than I wanted a Blair government, and I am on record as about the longest-lasting and most consistent opponent of this lot in British journalism, from the days when some surprising people (you know who you are) were making their peace with New Labour and having drinkies at Downing Street. But if you do vote Tory you (and I ) will get five more years of Gordon Brown policies, and quite possibly five more years of Mr Brown too. The Tories are still a very weak party, and it will take an electoral miracle for them to win a working majority. They are, as they have been since 1997, the only opposition Labour (whose own vote is also shrivelling) can beat.

The Blairite media are now running a campaign to turn Mr Brown into a sort of political Jade Goody, a national hate figure so loathed that he has to go round with a bag, or a blanket, over his head. This is interesting in itself. Ask why the very people who put Mr Blair in power ( and never turned on Blair on this way, though he is just as responsible for it) now want Mr Cameron in office? Is it because they want a change? Or is it because they want things to stay the same, only to employ the safety valve and so ensure that a real re-examination of the way we are governed does not take place? A Cameron victory would mean the final crushing of all remaining conservatism in the Tory Party, and ten more guaranteed years of what we have now - universal political correctness, a bulging welfare state, gargantuan taxation and of course continued absorption into the EU and unending lawlessness and disorder.

. . . [I]f the Tories collapse there'll be a new party. . . . It's the best hope there is. The alternative is just years of the same, until the country, riven by crime and disorder, sinks beneath the waves of welfare bankruptcy and becomes a wholly subject province of the EU state, governed largely by force. Or we might get some kind of thug-nationalist government, swept to office by desperation. You want that? Stick to the Tories.

I suspect that what people don't like about this idea is that it is so harshly realistic, and requires too much of them.

. . . The British seem to need to face almost total defeat before they are interested in fighting to save themselves. Dunkirk has to come before D-Day. Well, think of the collapse of the Tories as a necessary political Dunkirk. I can't guarantee that victory will follow. That will be up to us. But I can guarantee that, as long as the Tories occupy the place which should be taken by a proper opposition, there's not the slightest hope of real change for the better. So please don't vote for them. It only encourages them.

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