The mountain is made of mole hills.

I think I am losing it.

What am I losing?  I don't know - but I'm losing it.

All of my life I have been bothered by those 'little' things people do which are wholly illegitimate.  Those 'little' lies excused as 'white lies'.  Those self contradictory statements that you are supposed to allow past your rational filter on the grounds that 'you know what it means'.  Well if it is supposed to 'mean' something else why don't they say it.  It has taken me a lifetime to even begin to fathom the depths of what is really going on.  And I still don't understand well enough to know what to do about it.

I have just read a little story in the Grimsby Telegraph entitled "Firearm threat made to council tax bailiff".  It turns out that some bloke went upstairs and got his air rifle in response to the bailiff's implied threat to take his car.  It is a difficult to work out quite what happened because the report is a little scant but it seems the bloke (Mr Capes) was not at home and the bailiff was at Mr Capes' house.  It seems that they were speaking on the phone and Mr Capes arrived home five minutes later somewhat agitated by the bailiff's suggestion of taking Mr Capes' car.  (Incidentally I wonder if an air rifle is actually a 'fire' arm.)  What bothered me was that the judge (Judge Peter Clark) said that Mr Capes should have known better than to threaten a man "who was just doing his job".

The reason this bothers me is because it goes straight to the heart of a fundamental problem in our society.  One very important concept in any civilised society is 'due process'.  Due process seems to be the issue that if the right to action is removed from an individual that the 'authority' is obliged to act lawfully.

The idea that you should not "take the law into your own hands" is only serviceable if the law acts legitimately and with due process.  If you are not allowed to defend yourself then the law must.  But if the long arm of the law is acting illegitimately then the net result is that the authority is simply an oppressive dictatorship.

It seems that our culture is in serious decline.  There are any number of contradictory issues going on and they are more and more in favour of the rich and powerful and against the poor and vulnerable.  One example is the way the law was recently changed such that any housing benefit was paid directly to the claimant instead of to the landlord.  The next stage was to introduce the 'Bedroom Tax' which means a 14% reduction in housing benefit if the claimant is deemed to have a spare room. (The details of this piece of incompetent legislation are subtle and it is referred to as the "under-occupation penalty" by the government literature.  It has recently been re-dubbed as the removal of the "spare room subsidy" which is just a ridiculous manipulation of the language and disgustingly depraved of the government to be playing this cheap linguistic game.)  It is IN FACT a tax because the government is removing the money from the claimant's bank account before it gets there.  What this arrangement achieves is that the legal issue is now between the landlord and the tenant instead of between the landlord and the government which is where it should lie if the claimant has a right to adequate housing.  So the government is not paying the full amount of the rent and leaves the private landlord and the claimant fighting a battle in court.  This results in eviction and more serious trouble for someone who simply cannot afford it.  Oh and to add insult to injury the right to legal aid has been removed such that many of these claimants cannot get due access to legal protection.  It is all Mafioso tactics.  There are also the changes to the Department of Work and Pensions  and disability payments as well as the unemployment benefits.  These changes are being introduced in stages with each stage having some veneer of justification but the irony is that the justification is different for different stages and if it were all put together is blatantly contradictory.  It results in unqualified people being employed at very low rates of pay being effectively given impunity to 'sanction' (there's another doublespeak term - people refer to 'sanctioning' the claimant - in fact even the DWP's literature says the claimant can be sanctioned - NO - the sanction is of the otherwise illegitimate behaviour.  In other words it is illegal to steal someone's legitimate payment but by way of 'forcing' people to comply with your wishes the illegal act of stopping someone's payment is 'sanctioned'.  So it is the illegitimate action that is given sanction and NOT the claimant.) the reduction of a claimants benefit payment.  This is the beginnings of a very nasty authoritarian and fascist style oppression and control.  The low paid workers in the DWP and Atos are handed the power to destroy other people's lives but their own meagre wages are threatened such that if they don't achieve certain 'targets' they will lose their job.  This is how you get people to push others into the gas chamber.  And as Philip Zimbardo well understands this social arrangement will cascade out of control.  Philip Zimbardo being the professor famous for the Stanford prison experiment.  You can watch a very revealing short talk by him entitled "What Makes People Go Wrong?" on another page of ToxicDrums' blog.

The summary of all this is that the government is denying our right to act in our own self defence and then not being duly responsible on our behalf.  The net result is that abuse is on the increase and, worse, is increasing at an ever increasing rate.  I have more and more frequently encountered cases where government officials, police, councils, even NHS personnel instruct, quite incorrectly, with an assumed authority way above their position.  But if you question them you are deemed to be causing trouble and the issue suddenly becomes about the trouble you are causing as if it weren't related to the original cause.

This is what strikes me about the case of Mr Capes.  Who is to say he wasn't in arrears because of the illegal behaviour of the government.  Even IF there were any legitimacy to the argument that he owed money to the council they simply do not have the legal right to remove his car.  But in assuming that whatever they think they can do must be right and even suggesting to Mr Capes that they 'could' remove his car is irresponsible in the extreme and quite illegal.  So you have a dishonest thief on your doorstep and you 'frighten' him off with an unloaded air rifle and the judge says he was "just doing his job".  No!  The judge is 'assuming' he was doing his job but he certainly didn't ascertain if that fact were true.  If he was acting outside the legal domain of his job then he was acting illegally as a criminal.  he was precisely NOT doing his job.

But in this current oppressive climate can we expect anyone, let alone a self interested judge, to actually examine the facts before passing judgement?

I might be accused of making a mountain out of a mole hill but I can assure the reader there is a significant mountain being made out of mole hills.