How does a modern western society function?
This blog is an observation on how human society lives on planet Earth. It asks how the functioning of a society measures to the True Facts. It is therefore not religious, is not a sect, which also has a person as the focus, but if any name is required it is purely pagan, referencing only the true facts of Helios, Earth, gravity, and human survival of water, food, shelter and procreation, if it wants to continue that is.
The western world sees itself as the fulfilment of the point of civilization. Tribal societies, indigenous peoples, the still very few hunter gatherer wise humans would say otherwise. For the western world there are many complicated questions to answer, such as how it keeps law and order within a diverse population. The ‘UK’ has the added complication of Scotland being under Roman law and England and Wales under common law with Northern Ireland similar to England’s common law but with many distinct legal bodies. All three are under the UK Supreme Court.
The bobby on the beat, the affectionate nickname from Sir Robert Peel’s forming the Metropolitan Police in 1829 for those not familiar with British history, is the front facing reality of law and order in ‘UK’ society, with the beat being the pavement. BBC TV’s Dixon of Dock Green, shown from 1955-1976, was in a world of largely continuous societies over decades, centuries, and in some regions of Britain, 1,000s of years. Cities were diverse, Birmingham in particular, Leicester, London, as trading cities are all over the spinning Earth, and rural and fishing areas were a strong network of local families, a central market town, seasonal knowledge, often with itinerant labour as required, just like France used to use foreigners to come and pick grapes when needed. Everything worked fine, enough for survival of a society, and back in the 1960s and 1970s that’s all most people were thinking of, and satisfied with that.
Fast forward half a century and the ‘UK’ is the fragmented and chaotic system and society that it is. From bottom up, law and order is collapsing and that is said by the social sciences, the psychologies, the sociologies, the genders, the ethnicities, the welfare supporters, and in the social structures of schools and shops where now police and a social worker are on many school sites and shop lifters can walk into pretty much anywhere and walk out with an armful of £50 whiskey bottles, watched by many people but who would be prosecuted if they so much as laid a hand on her, and some him’s as well.
In the ‘UK’ the police on frontline duty of being that link between law and order, the citizen and the government, do not carry guns. In France they do. The other countries, the few of them, on this spinning mass of rock in space called Earth who do not arm their police force are largely Norse lands where population is sparser and the people stronger so probably a simple fight sorts most things out, and some small islands like the Cook Islands, and a few other countries. All ‘developed’ western countries have armed police. Why is this? Well, in a nutshell, to enable them to keep law and order.
The natural world keeps its order, because it knows resources are limited and the balance between predator and prey is carefully balanced between them to enable survival of all. In social science terms, the top down predator is bad, and even further, now is male, so altogether bad, in the modern view in the ‘UK’. However, this avoids the necessity to look at society itself. Violent crime is now everywhere, knives, guns, drug county lines having spread out from London and destroyed many young lives, all with police powerless to do much, because Dixon of Dock Green, dealing with the petty crime of the 1960s would look terrible with a gun slung over his shoulder.
This human was passing through Birmingham New Street train station, several times recently, and on one occasion a group of policemen were out in high viz jackets, looking obvious and ready for action. Furthermore, two were armed with some sort of gun, this human is not familiar with armorment vocabulary, but it was a big gun, loaded, and ready for action if necessary.
Now, how much would society actually settle if the public facing police, or a few of them in each medium to large urban centre carried one of these? The response from the lefty soft supporting all people types is that it would be the quick way to ‘become like America.’ This blog seeks to disagree. The average household in the ‘UK’ does not own a gun, that is a fact. In the USA many individuals own a gun. A big gun like in this picture is far superior in power to most weapons that are carried, by those who carry weapons, and still most individuals in the ‘UK’ do not carry a weapon. If the police were armed, and had the confidence to know that their societal position from that would automatically filter downwards, as governance must do, how much better would British society be? How much more confident would the citizens be? Like the argument against ID cards, and strangely held by Reform as well who it would think are looking to restore some societal coherence, it is seen as just ‘not British’, but if it were acknowledged that the Days of Dixon of Dock Green are long behind us now, and the disintegration is happening at a gathering pace, whichever government is prepared to give the confidence to the police I am sure would get a lot of votes.