From Free Life, Issue 26, December 1996
ISSN: 0260 5112

One

You will not believe, dear Readers, how often and bitterly I upbraid myself for idleness. I intended this issue of Free Life to appear last June. When that passed without a word written by me, I promised August, then September, then October. At last, I steeled myself and swore on all that I hold dearest that it would be out early in November. Well, here it is at the end of November.

I offer no excuses - only apologies, and a promise that issue 27 will be out before the end of December. I must arrange this last because, while I have been idle, my writers have not, and I now have enough material on my hard disk for another complete issue. And so, my dear Writers, if you do not see the article in this issue that you sent me months ago, and had praised to the skies by me over the telephone, be not angry - just wait till Christmas.

Two

Last 19th July, a Friday, a young West London man called Dean Payne got into his car and began to drive to work at Johnsons of Heathrow, which is a newspaper distribution company. In Portobello Road, he was stopped by the Police. I am not sure why - though, as I suspect he is black, I probably have no need to ask for any specific reason. His car was searched and three knives were found. Since his job involved cutting the straps around newspaper bales, and his employer provided neither cutting tools nor anywhere to store them, these were plainly the tools of his trade.

However, the uniformed thugs of the Metropolitan Police decided they had found a good reason to break someone. They arrested Mr Payne and charged him under the relevant section of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 with possessing sharp objects in public without reasonable excuse or lawful authority.

His case was tried in October at Marylebone Magistrates Court, David Kennett-Brown presiding. His defence was ignored. According to the report in The Evening Standard for the 31st October 1996, Mr Kennett-Brown told him:

Mr Payne was sent to prison for two weeks.

Now, I am not sure whom to denounce most for this act of tyranny. Obviously, the Police behaved just as they always do. Even with the middle classes nowadays, they conduct themselves like an army of occupation; and no one who has encountered their peculiar mix of brutality and incompetence can ever be surprised by what they do.

Just as obviously, Mr Kennett-Brown should never have been appointed to the Bench. There is no evidence in my newspaper report that he regards his position as an opportunity to do justice. Instead, he serves the ends of absolute, arbitrary despotism. "I have to view your conduct in the light of the great panic public fear of people going around with knives" he said. Now, the whole reason why we have a judicial system and not lynch mobs is that the former is supposed to be impartial and not swayed by public opinion. It would be nice to call Mr Kennett-Brown a worthy successor to Scroggs and Jeffreys. That would leave him with too much dignity, however. He is better compared with the sort of scum who presided over the "people's courts" in the old Communist régimes.

Otherwise, I could turn to Lady Olga Maitland, the Conservative MP who introduced the recent toughening of the 1988 Act under which Mr Payne was persecuted. Two weeks were not enough, I heard her trilling on the wireless after his sentencing: for having three knives it should have been longer, she added. Granted, she is half Serbian, and so has been exposed to a culture in which our English notions of justice and limited government are quite unknown. But this is not a mitigation I feel inclined to press. My flesh crawls at the very thought of her supidity and hypocrisy. It is objectionable, though little more, to campaign for the retention of nuclear weapons by the British Government. It is the same to campaign for the disarming of ordinary British citizens. But Lady Olga's combining of the two is quite remarkable. In her own way, she stands equal with David Mellor in epitomising the moral degradation of the Conservative Party.

But denunciation in Free Life is less useful than recommending action. I invite my readers to send the following letters:

First to Mr Payne, at Brandon Walk, Notting Hill, London W11 - commiserating with him on the disgusting travesty of justice that he has just suffered;

Second, to Mr Kennett-Brown, at Marylebone Magistrates Court, London W1 - calling on him to send a public letter of apology to Mr Payne, to compensate him from his own pocket, and then to resign before he jails another innocent man;

Third, to Johnsons Newspaper Distributors, Heathrow, Middlesex - asking that Mr Payne should not lose his job on account of his having been made a victim of tyranny.

Subscribing to the Libertarian Alliance and to Free Life are steps towards the restoration of freedom and decency in this country. But let us not overlook the demoralising effect that even short letters of complaint can have on the enemy; nor how letters of support can do something to cheer those who have been crushed by the weight of despotism.

Three

During the past eight months, David Botsford and I have been moving from one studio and meeting hall to another, arguing against gun control - also known as victim disarmament. We have had our little victories. I am proud of how I made Anne Pearston of the Snowdrop Campaign confess on air to wanting live in a slave state - I am told she now refuses to debate with me in the media. I am pleasantly surprised at how my bitchy news release about Dr Tobias Ezra Berstein of Society Against Guns in Europe (SAGE) led to his unmasking as William Bernson, a convicted fraudster just let out of prison. I have also made about £1,000 in media fees from doing all this. I am sure Mr Botsford can report similar achievements - one of them, indeed, is a wonderful book review that I am pleased to carry in this issue of Free Life.

Our problem is, however, that there are only two of us in the whole country. With a few bright exceptions - I particularly mention Guy Savage, and retract the sneering comments about him that I made in a Libertarian Alliance pamphlet earlier this year, and Peter Jackson, Administrator of the Cybershooters list (send e-mail to pjackson@forge.demon.co.uk) - the gun lobby is filled with the worst blockheads imaginable.

They understand neither how they have allowed themselves to be regarded in the country, nor the nature of the enemy that is trying to destroy them. They think that, because they are often middle class people with nice houses, they are part of the British Establishment and therefore immune from the sort of persecution that Dean Payne has to take for granted. They are wrong. The country is actually ruled by a mafia of Guardian readers who want nothing more than to make England into a satrapy of the New World Order - a place in which ordinary people will be stripped of all freedom and dignity, and electronically tagged, and perhaps genetically modified as well, to keep them in their appointed places. There can be no room for gun owners in this world of high-tech despotism. They would have the means to resist. Even their continued existence would carry the minds of other people back to an age when individual rights and responsibilities were respected. And so their demonisation as evil gun freaks, just waiting to shoot up another school.

Even worse, this is a demonisation in which they have helped. No one who has seen these people in action will be surprised that a woman so plainly wrong and stupid as Anne Pearston has beaten them. We must all have seen them in television studios, looking shifty and uncomfortable in their suits, as they talk about the need for tight gun control that will let them go on shooting at clay pigeons, and about how they too have children. Well, this first is an admission that the public safety requires gun control, plus an assertion that their right to enjoy themselves is greater than the right of the Dunblane children to stay alive. The second just alerts the social workers to a new form of "child abuse".

The fact is that we have a right to defend our life, liberty and property by all means required to secure them. We have no right to go beyond what is necessary - for example, by shooting beggars when they accost us in the street - but we have a plain right to use whatever force a reasonable person would think the minimum necessary in the circumstances. So far as I am concerned, this means a right to shoot muggers and rapists and burglars. It also means a right to shoot at state officials when their oppressions pass beyond what is commonly bearable. This is the real justification of the right to keep and bear arms. This is why the Bill of Rights - both English and American - so clearly asserts the right.

The gun owners of this country never say this in public. In part, they have good reason for keeping quiet. By making the wrong sort of noise, they will bring the Police round one Sunday at 3:00am - just checking that the firearms storage regulations are being complied with. Evidence of some infringement will be found or planted, and that will be followed by months of legal harassment ending with confiscation of all weapons. I can understand why no one will want to bring this on himself. But their quiescence goes much further than personal caution. If, after Hungerford, they had financed a campaign led by people like me and David Botsford - people who have no guns to be taken away - they might not be facing extinction today.

Wherever I look, I see evidence of moral decay. Is the England that I have tried throughout my adult life to save already dead? Are my fellow subjects no more the heirs of Hampden and Somers than the mediæval Romans were of Cato and Cicero? It may be so.

Four

The next issue of Free Life - note how I have mentioned its name in every one of these Jottings: this is because they go out separately on the Internet - will include articles on the Union with Scotland, on sex with children, and on a certain person's latest difficulties with the law. This latter I cannot discuss now, because I have yet to see the papers and to have his permission to write about his case. If nothing else, this should spur me to produce the additional issue promised before Christmas.