England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland use the common law system, whereby unless something is explicitly prohibited, it is permissible. It is a sensible legal system, and has been inherited by various countries that had ties to England, including the United States. Most of the rest of Europe uses the Napoleonic legal code, or derivations of it. As the name might imply, it is the legal system of a dictatorship: nothing is permissible except where explicitly allowed. Unfortunately, in recent decades England has de facto transitioned by stealth from the common law system to the Napoleonic legal code.
Consider an example whereby somebody entered the grounds of Raby estate in county Durham, killed one of the deer and took it home, all without Lord Barnard’s permission. Most people would call that theft. Or maybe more specifically, most people would call it poaching, though in reality there has never been a single piece of legislation in England specifically for the crime of poaching. In the past a poacher would have been tried for theft. That is, if the gamekeepers didn’t get him first.
Consider another example of a dead wild deer found on a public road. Would most people call it poaching to pick that deer off the road? I would guess not. However, it is a crime in England to do that, and it is a good example of our transition from common law to Napoleonic code. The Deer Act 1991 was specifically created to counter poaching of deer, and criminalises any person who removes a deer carcass (cause of death immaterial) from any land without the consent of the landowner. This includes wild deer, which are automatically considered the property of the landowner once deceased.
I am aware of this obscure law because, for a large chunk of 2026, Durham police were prosecuting me under it. Apparently I am the first person in county Durham prosecuted under the Deer Act in the last 10 years, though I suspect I may well be the first since its creation.
While driving along the A66 one Sunday afternoon in early June, I spotted a deceased deer in the central reservation. I turned the car around, and parked up in a village near where the deer was lying, and walked back along the verge. When there was no traffic in view for about half a mile coming my way, I walked across the road, picked up the deer, slung it on my back, and turned to re-cross the road. As I did so, I was startled to see a police car speeding towards me with its blue lights flashing. Stopping abruptly in the road, they motioned me to cross. I crossed back to the verge. The police pulled in front of me, got out, and asked me what I was doing. I told them I was taking it home to eat. They told me I was stealing from the council. I expressed surprise, given that it was a wild animal dead on a public road, and like most people I was under the (false) belief that if you didn’t hit it, roadkill was free to take. Frankly, even if I had known the law that deceased deer become the property of the landowner, in the case of a larger animal like a deer lying on a public road, it seems a reasonable assumption that any technical owner would have seen it as a liability rather than an asset and have been only too glad for it to be removed, making the road a safer place.
However, clearly unimpressed by my bafflement at the situation, the police proceeded to caution me.
Much was also made of the fact that I was crossing a “dangerous” road. I pointed out that it was an A road, legal to walk across, ride a bicycle on, ride a horse on, etc., and I had been crossing roads without incident for quite a few years. There are also dozens of footpaths and bridleways crossing the A66 (including a couple within a mile of my ‘crime’), and in early June when this took place, the A66 has regular streams of horse-drawn caravans going to and from Appleby Horse Fair, with Travellers walking on the road alongside their horses. However, it seems that in modern Britain some demographics get more attention from the police than others, and the Traveller community have long been given a wide berth by British police. Around the same time as my ‘crime’, residents in Ingleton in the western Yorkshire Dales had pleaded for police assistance when Travellers caused chaos in their village. No police assistance was forthcoming. Police don’t like to tangle with Travellers, and any attitude that effectively tolerates criminality by specific groups is very much a recipe for reaping the whirlwind.
I left the deer where instructed and went home, feeling confused and annoyed at what seemed to me unnecessarily heavy-handed policing of a situation that few people would consider criminal or anti-social behaviour. I was even more shocked and distressed two months later when a notice of prosecution arrived informing me of my “offence” under the Deer Act 1991 for removal of a deer carcass without the landowner’s consent.
From January 1st to August 1st 2026, Durham police had 338 unresolved burglaries and 1,451 unresolved assaults. And it is the same police force that two months prior had failed to take any action when a dog ran out of a yard and bit me while I was walking alone on a public footpath. Not just a nip. It ripped open my jacket sleeve, and it was only because my jacket and jumper were both very thick that I wasn’t injured. When police finally telephoned me about the incident, I was told that they couldn’t do anything at all, because no injury was sustained. However, I was told that if I said that I had suffered emotional harm and distress, then the police could act. I made it clear I thought that was a nonsensical approach, but agreed to play along, as something needed to be done about an obviously dangerous dog. But in my sole follow up from police, I was simply informed that a letter had been sent to the dog owner. Case closed. Funnily enough, I have not walked on that footpath again, and it is fortunate that it is a very little used path, otherwise the dog would already likely have badly mauled a passer-by. But I got a crime reference number, just like all those victims of ‘unresolved’ burglaries and assaults, so I guess it’s all fine and the police have done their job.
The process is the punishment, as the saying goes. Anybody who has interacted in any way with almost any aspect of the British state in recent years will likely agree with that: almost every interaction with the state is a painfully difficult, inefficient and error-prone process. It’s so bad that it feels like every process is now designed with maximum malice, and delivered by people with maximum incompetence. Kafka would be proud. I lived with my own Kafkaesque process for months, hoping that somebody with some shred of common sense in the police or criminal justice system might just think: what are we doing here? Why are we trying to criminalise a decent, responsible, law-abiding man for picking up roadkill? Do we really not have anything better to be doing with our time and taxpayer resources?
The answer to that question was a resounding ‘no’, and I came to realise that in the same way fish have no concept of water, as it is what constantly surrounds them, it seems the British state has no concept of absurdity, as that is the medium in which it swims.
No sense was seen, by anybody, despite interventions from a well-known journalist, Peter Hitchens, and the Deputy Leader of Durham County Council, the very sensible Darren Grimes. Grimes wrote a series of well-written emails to an inspector at Barnard Castle police station, asking why such a prosecution was being pursued, as it did not seem in the public interest. He also stated that if the deer was alleged to be Durham County Council property, Durham County Council would be only too happy for me to have removed it, saving the council a job and taxpayers the £310 it costs a contractor to pick up a deer carcass. The semi-literate and semi-coherent responses from the inspector simply stated that the matter had nothing to do with Durham County Council, and was a Highways Agency matter (despite my being informed by the roadside that I was stealing from the council). He also referred to my “crime”, rather than ‘alleged crime’, an inadvertent admission that guilt is now presumed. Seeing those responses confirmed to me the sad fact that many of Britain’s police – including at the higher levels – are picked largely for their obsequious nature and ability to act as unthinking enforcers for the state. Whether this has anything to do with the fact that all police must now be graduates of the UK’s increasingly conformist university system is a question worth asking. Institutional groupthink is not what we need, but the fact is that every police officer at Barnard Castle police station who looked at my case (including the inspector in charge) decided that it was a sensible use of time and money.
Whenever the police complain of not having enough resources, remember that.
It might now be worth giving this advice to anybody fortunate enough to not have firsthand experience: never question the authority of a police officer or question the effectiveness of the police in general, no matter how justified. The police have the right to use physical and legal force, and will happily use both against a person they dislike. This is obviously not how police should behave in principle, but it is how they often behave in practice, and is to be expected when they are part of a gang with the monopoly on the legal use of force. I will in future be following the advice given by many: do not speak to police. The modern British police are not to be trusted, and it says a lot about the state of our country when mistrust of the police has become a mainstream opinion held by perfectly ordinary, law-abiding people.
So my prosecution under the Deer Act 1991 continued. A misapplication of the law if ever there was one, given that the legislation is explicitly designed to counter poaching (heading of section 1: “Poaching of deer”), and I was picking up a dead wild animal from a public road in broad daylight. Danny the Champion of the World this was not. Quite obviously, I wouldn’t have been doing it if I had thought I was doing anything illegal, and as everybody who drives on Britain’s roads knows, deer carcasses often remain on verges, hard shoulders and central reservations in plain view for so long they become useful navigational aids: ‘Oh look children, there’s Bambi, still rotting away; we must be coming up to the Bishop Auckland junction!’ Given that, it’s hard to argue I was depriving any theoretical owner of a valuable asset.
At my initial hearing I had been planning to plead not guilty and see it through to a trial. Immediately after the hearing began the prosecutor leaned over to whisper to my solicitor, and my solicitor took me from the room and told me I was being offered a caution. I reluctantly agreed to the adjournment, but stated to my solicitor that the situation was unjust and wrong. My solicitor simply replied to me: “The people in that courtroom don’t care about right or wrong.” It seems evident to me that much of our police and judicial system in general do not care about right or wrong.
And so I left to consider whether to accept any offered caution, or take the matter to trial. A retired judge friend had stated from the outset that I had a strong legal defence (section 1.3 of the Deer Act 1991, for those wishing to go and look at it), but it would have cost me thousands of pounds to take to trial and even if I was found not guilty, costs are not awarded in magistrate trials, making it a lose-lose situation for defendants. This seems an obvious incentive for police to bring as many vexatious prosecutions as they want against those they wish to victimise, knowing full well that the person being prosecuted is being punished whatever the outcome.
My legal costs just to get to that point were nearly £400. To put that into a relevant context, that is nearly half my annual food budget. And yes, my annual food budget is low, because I do things like pick up roadkill (and I eat very well, thank you). There is a very dark irony in the fact that it was doing one of the things I do to make my life simple and thrifty that made my life more expensive and immeasurably more complicated. There is a very clear lesson in that from the state: thou shalt not deviate from the very narrow path of approved behaviour that we have ordained for you. Or you will be punished. And make no mistake, I have been punished. The last five months have cost me money, time and sleepless nights, with the British state choosing to persecute me for doing something that no rational person would consider criminal. And like a lot of people paying attention to what is happening in the world today, I foresee food shortages in our near future. That’s the logical outcome from paying farmers to not farm, turning productive farmland into housing estates and solar and wind farms, and the looming diesel and fertiliser shortages. Criminalising somebody for picking up an edible resource (and subsequently throwing that resource away) is going to seem even more foolish when supermarket shelves are bare.
In late October, the police finally dropped the case against me, though it took a superintendent level officer seeing press coverage in order to step in and suggest that the prosecution was not in the public interest. I am grateful for that intervention, whatever the motives behind it. However, it shouldn’t have taken nearly five months to reach that conclusion, with very unpleasant and unnecessary stress for me (and people who care about me), wasted police and court time, and money wasted by myself and the taxpayer. And afterwards, what was I left with? My year was broken by this, and all the police left me with was a cheery goodbye as I got to contemplate the shattered remains. Victims get to read their ‘impact statements’ in court, describing how the ordeal affected them. I suppose you are reading mine now, about how the police’s actions affected me.
In my opinion, the officer who charged me is unfit to wear a uniform or exercise any kind of authority. He may well have been exercising the letter of the (hugely misapplied) law, but he exercised zero judgement. Sadly though, in the modern British police he fits right in, and is an exemplary representative of the thoroughly mediocre modern British state. One of Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men”: perfectly normal and unremarkable men who don’t think through what they are doing, but just want to fit in. They aren’t ‘good’, they aren’t ‘bad’, they just do what they are told. And in my case, trying to boost his conviction statistics for future promotion prospects.
For those of us still with a questioning mind and open eyes, we see a deep rooted dysfunction in this country, and it seems that many of the UK’s current problems stem from a great divergence between the views and wishes of the majority of the population and the views and actions of our ruling elite and their agents. The number of important issues where this is obviously the case could fill a book at this point (and they have done: go and read some Peter Hitchens and Douglas Murray, etc.) But just take my case: every person I spoke to (including retired police, many of whom despair at the current state of the police) expressed complete disbelief, and even though I don’t use any social media myself, friends who do told me that the reaction to my story was near universal outrage at the lack of sense and proportion shown by the British state.
Fundamentally, there is a growing chasm between the British people, and the elite (and their minions) who hold power over us. This would suggest that the ‘democracy’ we practice is nothing more than a pantomime, designed to provide a veneer of political legitimacy to illegitimate, undemocratic rulers. How can it be anything but, when the gulf between the wishes of the majority and the actions of the state has become so great? The ballot box is political theatre with political parties playing their allotted roles. And with no chance to create meaningful change at the ballot box, we have no alternatives, as we have been utterly stripped of all other forms of power. As Mao Tse-Tung correctly pointed out, political power grows from the barrel of a gun, whether that instrument of violence is literal or metaphorical in the sense that it includes the inherent violence of a system designed to control and subdue a population. Resistance is impossible for ordinary people. Our political and legal systems have become a cage to contain us while pretending we still have freedom and choice. We have neither. We have traded away our natural liberties for an illusory sense of safety, and as Benjamin Franklin noted, those who make that trade deserve neither. I do understand it though: I understand why many people are willing to consciously or unconsciously trade away principles and morality so that they can pay their (rapidly rising) bills at the end of each month. Upton Sinclair put it well: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Evil prevails when good men fail to act? Evil prevails when mediocre men have mortgages to pay, and there are an awful lot of very mediocre men out there.
So what can be done about the growing disconnect between the state and the people? Realistically speaking, probably nothing at this point. We are in an irrecoverable tailspin that the country will not survive. But if we’re just speaking in terms of fantasy, then I have heard the idea floated in recent years that the right to vote should not be universal. At first, the idea shocked me. Now it seems like the only feasible peaceful way to rescue Britain (and other so-called democracies) from otherwise certain collapse.
For historical context, just over a hundred years ago the British state spent five per cent of GDP each year. Today it is closer to 50 per cent – and we have an economically, culturally, physically and psychologically collapsing country to show for it. Just walk around any city or large town and call me a liar. Unchecked, the state will continue to increase its size and the amount of resources it consumes. It is a bit like the theoretical grey goo scenario in nanotechnology, where a self-replicating nanomachine ends up consuming the entire world’s physical resources in its quest to self-replicate. The state (in Britain and elsewhere) is behaving like grey goo. When allowed to do so, the state will always increase its power and influence and consume more resources. How can this problem be fixed? Simple: by not giving the vote to people whose personal interests align with the project of an ever-increasing state.
Nobody who receives their livelihood from the state, either directly or indirectly, should be allowed to vote. This would include everybody working for the civil service, police, military, NHS, BBC, local and county councils, as well as teachers and politicians. This isn’t to imply that everybody working for such institutions is doing a bad job or has malign intentions – there are good people in them, obviously – but the institutions themselves are fundamentally dysfunctional and rotten, and the rot starts from the bad apples, of which there are plenty. Our institutions need to be able to recover (or start afresh) with simple core principles restored, and with the innate impulse to increase their own power and influence removed. This can only be achieved by removing political power from those who benefit from that ever increasing power and influence.
The same applies for any person who receives a certain (fairly low) proportion of their income indirectly from the state, including any person who works for a company, charity or religious organisation that receives any significant taxpayer sourced income. And, to be clear, nobody who receives any form of taxpayer funded welfare should be allowed to vote. Yes, that includes the state pension. The state pension should be optional if it exists at all: those who choose to receive it forfeit their right to vote. Even the most cursory economic analysis shows the sense in such an approach, as a much reduced state means much reduced taxes, meaning more money in people’s pockets once they reach retirement. The state pension would no longer be needed by most.
Being able to vote and guide the direction of the nation should be a privilege, not a right.
I am sure anybody reading this may now be thinking: but surely, this would mean most people in the country would lose their vote? Yes. Yes, it probably would have that outcome if applied now. And that right there shows the problem: very simply, the state has become too big, and our political system and parties have coagulated into one meaningless blob that fundamentally only has one aim: enlarge the state, protect the state, and reward those who work for the state. When Thomas Hobbes wrote his Leviathan treatise on why a strong overarching state is required to have a well ordered and managed society, he didn’t foresee the results when an all-powerful state meets corrupt crony capitalism and narrow voter self interest.
The state must shrink, or it will continue its suffocation of everything under it.
On a basic philosophical level, I don’t want the state interfering in my life. I am a rational actor, whether the state agrees with that or not. I do not need or want the British state to tell me whether I can cross a road, or what food I should be eating. Whether I make good or bad decisions on those matters and all others, the consequences should be mine to hold. The state should not be there to help me if I make bad decisions, though I agree that there is a role for the state in punishing people whose actions harm others. However, the state should not try to interfere with my decisions when those decisions cannot reasonably be argued to cause harm to another person. Otherwise, we may as well all be locked in our homes right now, to avoid the possibility of us stubbing a toe, or bumping into somebody. I recall the state trying that tactic in recent years. It did not have a positive result.
The state does not have a duty or a right to wrap us all in bubble wrap in order to pre-emptively protect everybody from everybody (including ourselves). Instead, punish those who actually do wrong, and let the rest of us get on with living our lives, independently and responsibly. As CS Lewis put it, to be treated as if we do not have reason and agency is to be treated as if we are infants or imbeciles. Unfortunately, the more the state decides to treat people as if they are infants or imbeciles, the less people will have any use for reason or agency: we can all outsource our decision making to the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving embrace of the state.
And that’s what it comes down to. The common law system encouraged people to be rational, responsible actors and form a cohesive, cooperative society. When needed, the law could be amended, with care and over time. Now however, with our stealth transition to a Napoleonic legal code, we have created a society that does not allow people to be rational or independent actors: You Will Not Do Anything Unless We Say You Can Do It. Sit Down, Drink Your Beer, Watch Your Netflix, Order Your Deliveroo, Consume Your State-Approved Product And Do Not Think Or Ask Questions.
Thinking, noticing things and asking questions are highly discouraged in our current society. The education system itself seems to have been designed – from primary to tertiary – to produce compliant, unthinking drones, and the skills of critical and independent thought are verboten. People who think and act independently are now seen as dangerous and a threat to the system itself. And again, I understand the appeal to most people: thinking about things is hard. Why bother doing such an arduous task yourself when you can outsource the job to the state, which will provide you with a handy template for life. It’s the life the state wants you to live, of course, but many people, as long as they have their basic material needs met and maybe the odd sunny holiday, seem quite unconcerned about anything else. Panem et circenses, indeed.
Getting back to the original reason for writing this piece: not everybody is going to be willing or able to pick a deer off the road and then skin and butcher it. I’m glad to have such skills. They are useful. Perhaps none of the police officers in Barnard Castle have such skills, so like most people they buy their meat from the supermarket, all shrink wrapped and sanitised for modern ‘civilised’ people to cope with, deskilled and squeamish. This sanitisation and infantilisation is a very modern phenomenon: my perfectly ordinary suburban grandmother fed her family during WW2 with rabbits that she skinned and butchered herself. Like her, I was raised to value a simple, thrifty life, being resourceful and independent. Instead of being seen as virtues, those attributes are now treated by the British state with suspicion and contempt, and in some cases, criminalised and punished. Though I might say that a punishment given by the British state now means very little on a moral level, given that we have seen what it promotes and celebrates.
The counter-revolution against what Britain has become cannot come soon enough and is unlikely to come from the ballot box. The scouring of our once beautiful shire has gone on long enough.
Shortly after being charged with my own villainous ‘crime’, I read Watership Down for the first time. It made an impression on me, and this quote has seemed particularly meaningful in recent months:
Animals don’t behave like men. If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don’t sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures’ lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.
The British state and its agents behave in all too human ways, whereas the rational and responsible individual behaves more like an animal.
Give me dignity and animality any day.
