Well done tourists!

A suspected burglar fell 30 feet from a top-storey window of a London hotel after being disturbed by guests.

He is fighting for his life after plunging face first on to the pavement from the second-floor window of the building in Victoria.

Five men, all of whom are believed to be tourists and guests at the hotel, are being interviewed by police. "Two men have been arrested and are being held at a central London police station," a Scotland Yard spokeswoman said.

Witnesses heard shouting and smashing noises from the top floor of the building just before the man fell at 6pm last night.

The man is believed to have been disturbed by two Italian guests returning to their room at the Cedar Guest House in Hugh Street.

Detectives are trying to establish if the intruder fell trying to escape or was pushed during a struggle. The police spokeswoman would not confirm the man was a burglar but said it was one of several lines of inquiry.

Because there are so very many alternative explanations for why he was poking through someone else's hotel room.

As with the similar case of Patrick Walsh, my sympathies are firmly with the two arrested men. While Mr Walsh's situation was somewhat worse - he was one-on-one with the burglar, who disturbed him as he slept in his flat, while these two tourists were two against one, and appear to have disturbed the burglar in the practice of his trade - I support the right of all law-abiding people to use whatever force is necessary to defend their property, no matter how little. From the information that we have at this point, this appears to be precisely what has happened here. And if the burglar gets injured, and if he dies, then that's just his hard luck. He chose to go out and break the law, and he must take whatever negative consequences accrue to him as a result of that decision.

A real community punishment!

The man in the above picture is, as his placard makes clear, a drug dealer. His patch was in an area of South Belfast and, on Sunday evening, he was tarred and feathered by two men, while a crowd of local people looked on. This vigilante attack appears to have been carried out by members of the Ulster Defence Association, after the police repeatedly failed to act.

Now, the UDA is itself a reprehensible terrorist organisation, not to mention one which is involved in a range of criminality, including drug dealing - its members deserve tarring and feathering themselves. However, to my mind the principle underlying the tarring and feathering of this man is a perfectly good one. It is, that when the police consistently fail to act against criminals, then the public are entitled to take such action as they see fit. After all, local people generally know who the thugs and other lowlife who blight their communities are, even if the police are not interested, and therefore they generally know against whom they should direct their ire.

It would be nice to see this kind of action spread to Great Britain, in addition to Northern Ireland. Here too there are communities infested with low-level thugs, who make the lives of the local people miserable, and who have gone unchallenged by the police, and unpunished by the courts. If the decent majority were to take action themselves against the yobs who wreck their communities, then, not only would that teach them a lesson, but it would also have a salutary effect in reducing the fear with which they are regarded by many people, and which they use to intimidate those who might otherwise stand up to them. A few months ago I wrote about the American woman who was convicted of stealing from Walmart, and who was, upon conviction, ordered to stand outside Walmart wearing a sandwich board bearing the legend "I am a thief, I stole from Walmart". Ideally we would have similar judicially-sanctioned punishments in the UK, or at least a toughening up of existing sentencing, but until we do, and until we have a police force that is actually prepared to take serious action against the thugs, the public themselves have the right to take appropriate action against those who threaten them.

Criminal "justice": from strength to greater strength

In the early hours of Monday morning, 56 year-old Patrick Walsh, of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Greater Manchester, awoke to find a burglar in his flat. Now, as we all know, the correct, police-sanctioned, method of dealing with burglars is to offer them a cup of tea, and point them in the direction of your more valuable possessions. You should then call the police, who will arrive late, if at all, take down the details of the offence, and then do nothing whatsoever. Thus, society and the rule of law endure.

Unfortunately, Mr Walsh, who is clearly a very wicked man, had the nerve to do something that the police specifically tell homeowners not to do: he confronted the criminal. There was a struggle, and the criminal fell from the window of Mr Walsh's third floor flat, suffering severe head injuries. I imagine that readers can guess what happened next...

Yes, that's right: after calling the police, Mr Walsh found himself arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm with intent, an offence which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. The police, who are supposed to protect the law-abiding public against criminal lowlife, chose to treat as the villain of the piece a man whose only "crime" was to wish to defend his property, a right of paramount importance in a free society.

There are very few people who are prepared to openly deny the principle of a right to self-defence. Even though liberals may well want it completely taken away, they will not admit it. However, what we heard a lot of in the case of Tony Martin, was that, while one has a right to defend oneself and one's property, Mr Martin, in shooting a burglar, had gone over-the-top in exercising this right. Perhaps the same will be said of Mr Walsh.

The law does indeed require that any force used in self-defence be reasonable. However, as far as I am concerned, all force used against an active aggressor is reasonable. Only when the aggressor has actually stopped moving, does the use of force even potentially become unreasonable. And, in any event, I fail to see how Mr Walsh's action can be ajudged as anything less than reasonable. Was he supposed to stop grappling with the burglar when they got to within a few feet of the window, lest someone got hurt? Sadly, it's not that easy to just stop in the middle of a fight. Had he done so, it is probable that he would be the one lying in intensive care tonight. Perhaps the police would prefer that. Certainly, it seems that they would prefer to see Mr Walsh deprived of his property, and the burglar off scot free, than to see the burglar suffer for his criminality, and the law-abiding Mr Walsh keep his property.

Whatever the police may think, I applaud Mr Walsh, and hope that any charges that the police may threaten him with collapse quicker than David Cameron's poll ratings. Personally, if I caught a burglar in my house, then I hope I would do the decent thing and confront him, and I hope that I'd kill him. Whether I'd subsequently inform the police, would be quite another matter. It seems to me that homeowners who do kill or seriously injure burglars might be rather better off if they just quietly disposed of the body without telling anyone...

Update: It seems that the burglar has died of his injuries since this post was written. Could we now be looking at another Tony Martin-style murder trial, perhaps?

Update (2): It has now been revealed that the dead burglar, Terence Sandiford, was a habitual criminal who was actually on bail awaiting trial for going equipped to commit a burglary when he broke into Mr Walsh's flat.

Well done prisoners!

A man jailed for plotting synchronised attacks in Britain and the United States is "scarred for life" after being attacked in prison, his lawyer said on Sunday.

Mudassar Arani told British broadcaster Channel 4 News that Dhiren Barot, who was imprisoned for life last November, had "lost all hair on his head and he's got scarring all over his face up to his neck".

"Somebody threw hot oil and hot water on my client, whereby he's been scarred for life," she said.

"He's being detained in healthcare at the moment and is receiving medical care."

Channel 4 said the British prisons service confirmed that an inmate was scalded on his head and back, and the police had been informed.

Arani said the attack supported her argument that Muslim inmates should be given special protection because they were "being targeted".

Yes, Miss Arani. It's "Islamophobia" at work, isn't it? And, of course, this attack has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that this man had actively worked to inflict unbelievable suffering on the people of this country, and of our ally, America. No, it's just irrational hatred.

Personally, I am quite glad to see that Barot has been given a good thrashing. If our government had any guts, then people like Barot would not be in prison at all: they would be executed. If he is to be in prison, then he should be as miserable and unhappy as possible while he is there, and should suffer a small taste of what he tried to do to others. So well done to the prisoners: anyone who does this to a terrorist can't be all bad!