Charles Clarke the British Home Secretary has recently revealed plans to cut the amount of money available, as compensation to those who have been wrongly jailed, in order to free up more money to be spent on compensating and helping the victims of crime. How absurd! Those who have been wrongly jailed are the victims of a crime! But of course, when the state commits an illegal action it isn’t the same as when a private citizen commits a crime. If I were to go out tomorrow and shoot someone, regardless of my reasoning behind the action, it is taken as a given, that regardless of whether I am found guilty or not guilty, I will at very least be put on trial. However if a police officer shoots someone, while he is working, then you’ll be lucky to get an inquiry out of it and even then you’d have to fight to make it anything but an internal one. [Internal inquiries are in my mind just about the stupidest idea on the planet it amounts to asking the person accused of the crime to investigate themselves]. Likewise if I were to go out tomorrow grab hold of someone put them on trial and lock them up, regardless of what that person has or has not done, it would be considered to be kidnapping because the state does not grant me that power, and yet we have granted that power and indeed immunity from law to the state. Perhaps after all the anarchists have a point.