The First Right: Why Self-Defence is Older Than Law, Older Than the State, and Older Than Any Parliament That Pretends to “Grant” It, By John Steele and Richard Miller (Londonistan)
Before there was law, before there was a king, before there was even a village, there was a man with a rock in his hand and a simple, non-negotiable truth: If someone comes to take my life, my body, or my freedom, I will stop them by any means I possess.
That is not a "British value" added in 1689. That is not a "human right" invented in 1948. That is the pre-political, pre-social, pre-moral bedrock on which every other right is built. Without the right to defend your own life, all other rights are just polite suggestions written on paper that stronger men will ignore the moment it suits them.
Yet in 2025 Britain, a Shadow Home Secretary merely floating the idea of legalising pepper spray triggers a bipartisan moral panic, as if the very notion of a citizen being allowed to fight back is some barbaric American import. Owen Jones, Aaron Bastani, and Telegraph leader writers all rush to the same barricade: "We don't do that here." As though "here" is a civilized island uniquely exempt from the iron logic that has governed every mammal since the first predator eyed the first prey.
They are wrong. Dead wrong. And history is laughing at them.
The Law Did Not Invent Self-Defence; It Only Pretended to Regulate It
For centuries, English law understood this primal truth and bowed to it:
1628 – Semayne's Case: "The house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence."
1689 – Bill of Rights: "Subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law." (Note the order: the right exists; Parliament merely decides the tools.)
1924 – R v Hussey: a man shoots through his own door at a landlady trying to illegally evict him and walks free because "a man's flat is his castle."
1953 – even after the first post-Dunblane restrictions, the Home Office guidance was blunt: "A householder who attacks an intruder with a weapon is not guilty of an offence if he can show he honestly believed his life was in danger."
That was the old consensus: the state does not grant you the right to live; it merely promises not to punish you too harshly for exercising it.
The new consensus — the one that now treats pepper spray like plutonium — is barely thirty years old, born in the aftermath of Hungerford and Dunblane, and fattened on the lazy assumption that the British state would always be strong enough, fast enough, and honest enough to protect every citizen in real time.
That assumption is now in ruins.
The Bargain Has Been Broken
The modern British deal was simple:
"You give up the means of effective self-defence. In exchange, we — the omnipotent, omniscient State — will keep you safe."
That bargain lasted exactly as long as violent crime was falling and the police were still allowed to be police. It started cracking the moment knife crime exploded, response times stretched to hours, and two-tier policing became the official policy: instant SWAT teams for hurt feelings on Twitter, but "take the knife and run" advice for actual stab victims.
When the state fails to uphold its end — when teenage girls are raped in broad daylight in Leeds, when pensioners are kicked to death on their own doorsteps, when shopkeepers are told to just hand over the till because "pursuit is dangerous"— the contract is void. Unilaterally.
At that point, demanding that citizens remain defenceless is not "civilised." It is the state asserting a monopoly on violence while refusing to use it on their behalf.
That is tyranny wearing the mask of kindness.
The Primal Logic That No Parliament Can Repeal
Strip away every statute, every directive, every judge-made rule, and one fact remains:
If someone is trying to kill or maim you right now, and the police are twenty minutes away (or simply unwilling to come), the only person guaranteed to care whether you live or die is you.
In that moment, the right to effective self-defence is not "granted" by Parliament. It is enforced by nature, by physics, by the simple reality that a 5-foot-2 woman with a can of pepper spray is no longer helpless against a 6-foot attacker with a knife.
That right existed before Magna Carta. It will exist after the last MP has finished virtue-signalling on College Green.
Pepper Spray is Not the Slippery Slope to Dodge City
The critics always wheel out the same tired slippery-slope argument: "First pepper spray, then guns, then the Wild West." Nonsense.
Forty-three US states allow concealed carry of handguns with minimal crime increase. The Czech Republic — hardly Texas — allows both concealed carry and pepper spray; Prague is not Mad Max.
Meanwhile, Britain has some of the strictest weapon laws on earth and one of the highest rates of knife crime in Western Europe. The criminals did not get the memo that weapons are banned. Only the victims did.
Legalising pepper spray would not arm criminals — they already carry worse. It would simply stop treating victims like criminals for daring to survive.
The Real Taboo
The unspoken terror of the British elite is not that civilians will become violent. It is that civilians will remember they do not need permission to stay alive.
An armed citizenry — even with something as humble as pepper spray — is a daily, visible reminder that the state's monopoly on force is a privilege, not a birthright. And privileges can be revoked when they are abused.
That is why the mere discussion is treated as heresy.
Final Verdict
Self-defence is not a policy option. It is the first fact of human existence.
Any legal system that punishes the innocent for surviving while failing to punish the guilty for attacking has forfeited its claim to legitimacy.
The British state broke the bargain. It does not get to keep the surrender.
Give the people their pepper spray. Give them batons, tasers, whatever non-lethal tools level the field.
Because the alternative is the quiet acceptance that some citizens are simply expendable — and that their lives belong first to their attackers, and only second to themselves.
No free people should ever agree to that. And no honest government should ever ask them to.
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