Sunday, January 10, 2010

An Englishwoman's home...

I'd never heard of Myleene Klass before about...oh, fifteen minutes ago. It appears that she's one of that very common breed of British celebrity mainly known for getting her kit off.

Which is all well and good and is, in any case, not what brought her to my attention; rather, it was an article about her having been warned by police for doing...well, something rather sensible, I'd have thought:

Klass was in the kitchen with her daughter upstairs when she spotted the youths in her garden just after midnight on Friday. She grabbed a knife and banged the windows before they ran away.

Hertfordshire police warned her she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an "offensive weapon", even in her own home, was illegal.

I admit that my verdict on the Hertfordshire police view of the matter--which runs something along the lines of 'fucking nonsense'--may be the result of having grown up in a country with, shall we say, a more relaxed attitude toward home defence.

But self-defence--even with 'offensive weapons'--is a fundamental right.

And it seems that the British police have a bit of a problem when it comes to recognising the important role of context when it comes to the use of weapons.

3 comments:

mikeovswinton said...

You might want to have a look at a post on Hopi Sen's blog on this story. Its an interesting tale of the media and politics, and suggests that the "facts" of the case are not necessarily the facts, if you get my drift.

JCWood said...

Very interesting. Especially so if so many different news organisations--and not just those more populist ones that push the police-are-soft-on-crime angle--reported the same story.

I'm not sure about Sen's apparently automatic assumption that the official police version is the most accurate, though.

The official statement is very reasonable however.

mikeovswinton said...

The Dibble (as we call the Bill in these here parts) are probably limited as to what they can actually say in any particular case. (Human Rights and all that. And actually probably a good thing in general.)

But lets face it; Richard Littlejohn? If he said 2 + 2 = 4 you'd have to be checking for the catch, wouldn't you?