Leader [translation: op-ed] in today's Sunday Telegraph.
"Two events last week highlighted the exasperation felt by the public towards law and order in Britain. In a Leeds magistrates court, David Francis Bieber was charged with the murder of PC Ian Broadhurst, accompanied on his short journey from a neighbouring police cell by an impressive escort of police armed with Heckler & Koch machine pistols.
On Thursday, Radio 4's Today programme announced the results of a poll in which listeners were asked: if you could create one new law, what would it be? The winning suggestion, backed by 37 per cent of the 26,000 listeners who voted, was a law "to authorise homeowners to use any means to defend their homes".
The right to defend themselves and their property was assumed by police in Leeds to an absurd degree. True, the murder of PC Broadhurst was the act of a vicious individual, but the suspect was already in custody, in handcuffs and unlikely to attract crowds of cheering supporters attempting to free him.
The very suggestion that members of the public be entitled to defend their property, by contrast, was greeted with horror. "My enthusiasm for direct democracy has been slightly tempered," the Labour MP Stephen Pound told the Today programme, appearing to backtrack on his offer to help bring the winning law onto the statute book.
Mr Pound was right on Christmas Eve, before the voting began, when he told the programme: "The great agony politicians have is that we are completely disengaging from the public."
It is not that the listeners who upset Mr Pound by voting for what he considered to be a bad law necessarily spend their nocturnal hours waiting with loaded gun for the opportunity to shoot an intruder, in the manner that the Norfolk farmer Tony Martin dispatched a 16-year-old burglar and injured an accomplice at his home near Wisbech in 1999. It is more that they regard as unjust a situation in which Mr Martin can be jailed initially for murder and his surviving victim free to sue him for damages, and believe this to be an issue which our political leaders have evaded.
The lack of understanding of crime shown by many MPs was typified by Andrew Stunel, a Liberal Democrat, on Friday's Today programme. The public should rest easy, he said: he had already committed himself to a Private Member's Bill which would "improve the crime-resistance of homes" by compelling homeowners to fit such things as burglar alarms and window locks. The first priority in the war against property crime, he thereby asserted, should be a measure to enable the prosecution of homeowners themselves.
It is precisely this inversion of justice which so upsets homeowners who have been burgled. Clearly the law should not condone the slaughter of scrumping children. But the balance of the law goes too far when it allows a burglar who cuts himself while climbing a fence the right to sue the owner of the fence. As we reported in our Crime in Britain survey last year, victims of mugging and burglary are sick of the apparent lack of interest shown in their plights, only to read of the bizarre lengths police forces will go to investigate groundless accusations of sexual harrassment or to prosecute motorists who forget to fill their screenwash reservoirs.
The problem of burglary cannot be tackled by new legislation alone. Burglary is, and has been for as long as society has been constructed, an offence. It is the practice of enforcement which is wanting. But there is one change in the law which needs to be effected if the general rise in crime since the Second World War is ever to be reversed.
We need to return to the concept of the "outlaw": a person who through his disrespect for the legal rights of others has forfeited his own right to protection under the law. Burglars should not be entitled to sue those whom they burgle. Neither should homeowners who attack intruders have the onus on them to prove, as they do at present, that they used "reasonable" force in self-defence.
What might seem reasonable in a courtroom, when it is known whether or not a burglar was carrying offensive weapons, is a very different matter from what a burglary victim might consider reasonable in the panic of the moment, in a dark house in the middle of the night.
Were the police to approach the task of protecting the public as seriously as they took that of protecting themselves at Leeds magistrates court last week, there would not be the anger that was demonstrated in the Today poll. If the police will not defend our property for us, the very least the Government can do is to prevent the law from persecuting us when we seek to defend our property ourselves.
"
