Headline: It's Official You can Batter a Burglar

HOMEOWNERS who “bash a burglar” — even if they shoot or stab one in the heat of the moment — will escape prosecution They will be allowed to use “disproportionate” force while fearing for their safety. However, if householders use “grossly disproportionate” force, they face being hauled before court.
Mr Grayling will also tell the Tory conference in Birmingham he is binning Ken Clarke’s soft-touch community sentences. Current laws only allow people to use “reasonable force” against intruders.
In his speech to the Conservative conference, Mr Grayling will say: “Being confronted by an intruder in your home is terrifying. The public should be in no doubt the law is on their side.
“That is why I am strengthening the current law. Householders who act instinctively and honestly in self-defence are victims of crime and should be treated that way. We need to dispel doubts in this area once and for all.”
“Grossly disproportionate” force — carrying out a sustained attack over a long period — could result in prosecution. (The Sun Oct. 2012)

Reading these words makes me feel awkward, something is catching at me, like a fingernail on a woolly jumper.

Something is bothering me and I feel lost, too far out from the shore, holding onto an inflatable ring and the tide is rising.

I am bothered by questions, by sets of uneasy ideas and trains of thought that are like tins stacked high up on supermarket shelves; as I stretch up to grab them, my fingers slide them further back.

What if the burglar is in the same class at school as your kids?

What if the burglar is pregnant?

What if the burglar was your teenage daughter and/or pregnant?

What if the burglar gets a custodial sentence, does an NVQ comes out as a plumber?

What if the burglar does a runner and gets hit by a bus?

What if the burglar gets a custodial sentence, and spends the time inside learning how to the do the job properly?

What if they're tripping their faces off and find themselves in your house with no idea where they are or why?

What if the victim was your elderly dad, at home alone, tied to a chair and beaten unconscious?

What if the burglar turns out to be a tramp foraging in your bins, eyeing up your shed for the night?

What if they'd lost their memory and you'd gone and forgotten to lock the door and they're just looking for their Uncle Kevin from 1956?

What if they're dirty gyppo scum and deserve everything they get?

What if it turned out to be true love, you know, like, “Our eyes met across the ransacked room”?

What if they've never burgled a house before and this is their initiation to the gang?

What if they'd been trafficked into this country?

What if it's not for the drugs, but for the thrill?

What if it's a Sun reporter hacking your mobile phone?

What if it's public servants claiming £2000 for the maintainance of the moat around their second or third home?

What if you had to sit and a watch a film of your every act of dishonesty played on a giant screen in Picadilly Circus?

What if you went out one night and never came back?

What if you walked under scaffolding and a length of metal piping landed on your head and you lost that part of memory that allows you to recognise faces and that part of your brain that allows you to feel emotion?

What if I stopped reading this comic-book-faux-news-paper and just sat here in the window chuckling to myself at a selection of terrible but topical jokes?

Why do anarchists drink herbal tea?
Because proper-tea is theft.

What do you call a thief who steals meat?
A beef burglar.

How did the cake thief see the police behind him?
He used his profiterole vision.

How did the cake thief sense the police were on his trail?
He was an eclair-voiyant.

What if those people at the next table aren't really laughing along with me, but at me?

What would happen if I found a way to frame the question that's really bothering me? It's something like...

Is it 'allowed' for me to empathise with a criminal?

And....Does that belittle the victim's victimhood? Does it somehow rob them of dignity?

But there's more, like....Is the right to private property a...er no...I mean...

Why is....um...Am I totally unrealistic? Just spouting more of the predictable drivel of a bleeding heart liberal?

A fantasy left wing new age soft option dream world? Maybe, but

Is the western super-capitalist concept of the individual's right to private property overshadowing what it might mean to be human?

Is a piece of property more valuable than a person?

If we looked at this differently, would the system collapse?

Crime spiral out of control?
Levels of childhood depression rise?
Mental illness?
Addiction?
Prisons become filled beyond capacity?
Riots?
Would politics degenrate into corruption and the 'self-regulating' free economy melt-down, crash, fold and lead to.....Oh.