The American sociologist Phillip Rieff, in his 1973 book Fellow Teachers, offered an interesting negative definition of culture: as an order whose limits are set by clear rules about “what is not to be done”. The British journalist Phillip Tinline offered a similar method for identifying a political culture in his 2022 work The Death of Consensus, which argued that a political consensus is normally defined as a set of taboos, rather than anything positive.
I was put in mind of all this when I saw left-wingers such as Owen Jones and Aaron Bastani united with Daily Telegraph journalists in their condemnation of the recent suggestion by Chris Philp, the Shadow Home Secretary, that consideration be given to legalising pepper spray.
This was a fascinating moment, not merely because of the increasingly unusual fact of such a bipartisan consensus but also because this consensus is, like so much about modern Britain, mere decades old. As recently as the 1990s, John Major’s partial handgun ban produced what was then the largest backbench rebellion in the long history of the Conservative Party; a century ago, the right to self-defence was so confirmed a “British value” that a man was acquitted of shooting his landlady as she attempted to force her way into his flat to wrongfully evict him (R v Hussey (1924) 18 Cr App R 160).
One suspects that the solidification of this new horror of armed self-defence is another artefact of our unique exposure to American news and culture. British commentators are wont to respond to the steady diet of mass shootings by contrasting our firearms laws with theirs, which is understandable even if, as both academics and government regulators have noted, the assumptions behind the comparison don’t stack up.
Advocates of legalising pepper spray will obviously not welcome any comparison to firearms; there is an enormous difference between lethal and non-lethal weaponry, and bad-faith opponents would surely leap on the comparison.
But with our anthropologist’s hat on, it is unavoidable, for how else to explain the fierce certainty of Philp’s critics than that they are merely transferring their certainties from the other, better-known subject? Robust statistical analysis of the impact of civilian (as opposed to police) use of pepper spray has scarcely been done; there seems little evidence that in isolation it moves overall crime rates appreciably up or down.
There is thus no basis for any certain claim that legalising pepper spray is an obviously terrible idea that would merely put new weapons in criminal hands — an argument which again seems to be merely copy-and-pasted from reasoning about guns. A regime of legal gun ownership might well risk giving the criminal classes easier access to deadly weapons. But they already have access to a vast range of close-range, non-lethal weaponry, all of which it is presently illegal for law-abiding citizens to employ; legalising one or more such weapons expands the options available to the victim versus to the perpetrator at a much more favourable ratio than would legalising firearms.
Support for violent self-defence tends to run much wider amongst the public than the policymaking classes
Whatever the basis for this very British consensus, however, it is being tested. The horseshoe chorus of criticism mentioned above only made itself heard because a member of the Opposition front bench publicly challenged it. Support for violent self-defence tends to run much wider amongst the public than the policymaking classes — if you doubt it, consider the public reaction to the commuters who pulled Just Stop Oil protestors off the roofs of trains.
But why is such sentiment bubbling through from Mumsnet to the rarified air of Westminster? As so often in modern Britain, the most likely suspect is the rapid and tangible decay of the state.
The idea that an unarmed citizenry is a virtue — in a democratic state, at least — is a modern one. Historically, it was autocracies and aristocracies which worried about the dangers of an armed people and sought to restrict weapons to the state’s military and certain privileged classes. Conversely, the republican tradition (small-r) made much of the citizen’s right to bear arms: America’s infamous Second Amendment is modelled on our own Bill of Rights 1688, whilst in France the revolutionary nation was forged in the Levée en Masse, the conscription of the people to the defence of the Republic.
Such attitudes seem utterly archaic now. But they persisted in this country until the middle decades of the last century, and it is likely not a coincidence that they declined across an era of unprecedented expansion in the scope of the state. This is, I suspect, not because governments at Westminster were secretly tyrannical and feared an armed populace, but rather because the armed citizen with a right to violent self-defence is a too obvious rebuke to any presumption of the omni-competence of the state.
For that is the modern bargain. The basic objection to the private ownership and employment of weapons is that people do not need them — not because the world is perfectly safe (that claim could hardly be made with a straight face), but because the modern state provides for their security instead.
In historical context, this assumption makes sense, at least inasmuch as it tallies with the wider outlook of the time; one could hardly make the case for the State administering in detail broad swaths of the economy if it couldn’t get the basics of law-and-order right, and in a country like Britain, which long enjoyed an extremely low rate of violent crime, the task of maintaining it must have seemed simple enough.
Yet popular acceptance of that modern bargain, that the state is sufficient protection for the citizen, depends upon the state being that. If it is deemed to have failed to uphold its end of the bargain, the whole bargain starts to unravel. Modern media makes this task harder than ever; a single instance of violence, filmed and transmitted across the internet, can take a much bigger toll on the public’s sense of security than it might a generation ago.
Unfortunately, if not untypically, the British State seems to have its priorities elsewhere. When even police officers are drummed out of their jobs for failing to adequately respect the rights and wellbeing of criminals, the official view of a private citizens’ right to self-defence is unlikely to be favourable, and indeed what protections we afford it are heavily qualified and conditional — hardly reassuring to someone having to make an on-the-spot decision in the face of attack.
For all that most seem to assume it axiomatically true that bans and restrictions improve public safety,one suspects that many critics of privately-held weaponry, including non-lethal weaponry, do not really consider our current regime as an active and conditional bargain at all, but as a hallmark of modernity and progress – and progress, being unidirectional, cannot be falsified.
It remains a bargain nonetheless. It is one thing to ask people to vest responsibility for their security in the police and the courts, but quite another that they divest themselves of it altogether. If the British State wishes to maintain a consensus around an unarmed and defenceless citizenry, it must be visibly tireless in its persecution of those who would threaten them. That is not, to put it mildly, the British State we currently have.
