Anarcho-tyranny is a term used to describe societies which obsessively regulate and punish law abiding citizens, while being unwilling or unable to protect them from crime, violence and abuses of their good nature. These societies are terrible places to live.
Many people believe that the UK is either already an anarcho-tyranny or close to becoming one.
That argument is strengthened by today’s report that the, ‘heroic yoga teacher stabbed in Southport attacks calls for ban on pointed kitchen knives’. I do not wish to diminish Leanne Lucas’s suffering, or her bravery. Axel Rudakubana stabbed her five times as she fought him off, and managed to save several young girls from him. Leanne is a hero and deserves all the honour and support we can offer her. The fear of knives she has developed since the attack is a perfectly natural response to such horrific trauma.
Violent, dangerous men will always find a way to improvise weapons
But her campaign for ‘a ban on pointed kitchen knives that can be used as weapons’ is deeply misguided.
Perhaps this doesn’t need stating, but those girls in Southport were not killed because kitchen knives have points, nor because Amazon sell knives. They died because despite identifying the risk he posed, the British state failed in its duty to protect its citizens.
Of course, blunt knives can be sharpened, or event improvised, as we have seen in the recent attacks at HMP Frankland. Violent, dangerous men will always find a way to improvise weapons.
So if this campaign were to be successful all that would happen is that life would be made harder for every single law-abiding person who cooks food and the state would be able to claim that it was doing something about knife crime, while ignoring the real issue – the very high number of violent young men who want to stab people. Perfect anarcho-tyranny.
We see this tyranny in the plague of barrier-jumpers on the London Underground, ignored by staff. In the soaring rates of sexual assault and rape while women are not permitted to carry pepper spray to defend themselves. We see it in the jailing of Lucy Connolly after a tweet last summer, when a police ‘protest liaison officer’ told an armed Muslim mob to stash their weapons at the local mosque. This week it has been reported that police tasered and pepper sprayed a 92-year-old man in a wheelchair who was brandishing a butter knife.
The British state’s capacity for force, its ability to control its borders, streets and even whole communities, has collapsed. Fewer than 6 per cent of crimes with a victim result in a charge. Our prisons are full and further mass early releases are inevitable. Our high streets are full of ‘shops’ which serve as obvious money laundering fronts. Economic growth eludes us, however much migration we welcome.
It’s hard to find a measure on which the state is succeeding. Perhaps that’s part of why it so visibly uses violence against those least likely to resist: the law-abiding majority who are most likely to comply. That exercise of force may serve as a way of showing that it can still act.
A state’s first duty is to protect its citizens. No state can be legitimate if it does not fulfil this duty. Banning points on knives while ignoring the real causes of knife crime does nothing to make us safer, and much to make our lives worse. However strongly she feels, and however much of a hero she is, Leanne’s well-meaning campaign should be rejected.
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