Your property isn’t really yours

In 1604 Sir Edward Coke defined an Englishman’s home as his castle, a principle that became a common law.

It enshrined the people’s right to deny entry to their residences, adding a new aspect to a cardinal tenet of Western law: the inviolability of private property.

That idea was transplanted to the US, with the word ‘Englishman’ understandably replaced with ‘citizen’. In that case, it was a distinction without a difference.

Now, Sir Edward didn’t extend that principle to people’s cars, showing a lamentable deficit of foresight. The conveyance equivalent of his time was the horse, but I’m not sure whether he mentioned personal transport specifically.

Americans did, at least in Texas where I spent my first 10 years in the West. There the law said that neither a man’s house nor his horse could be repossessed. When automotive transport replaced the equine variety, the law held both house and car to be off-limits for bailiffs (unless the owner defaulted on the loan he used to buy the house or the car).

I don’t know whether the same principle is applied in Britain, but I’m sure it must be. Or rather it must have been before our government, both central and local, began to make serious inroads on private property.

In that regard I like to quote Gordon Brown who, when he was the chancellor, boasted that his government “let people keep more of their money”. You can only let people keep more of something that legitimately belongs to you, which made that braggadocio a clear statement of tyranny.

Since I heard that boastful claim, I’ve been watching for the signs of any state encroachments on property rights, and the state has been rewarding my vigilance with more and more outrages. The latest one came the other day.

A friend of mine who lives in Chelsea (the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, to give it its official name) parked her VW overnight in a legitimate spot, but with the rear wheels sticking out a couple of inches over the line. She was aware of this but thought it would take a particularly bloody-minded traffic warden to issue a parking ticket for such a minute transgression.

A ticket, by the way, is the mildest (and cheapest) punishment for a parking violation. Others are clamping or towing away, and that’s not something one wants to risk knowingly because it would cost £200 to get one’s car back.

Anyway, the next morning my friend found her car gone. Her first thought was that it had been stolen; the second that it had been towed away. What with London being the car theft capital of the world, the first possibility was more likely, but she called the RBKC council just in case.

Sure enough, she found the car had been stolen. But not by any intrepid thief. It had been stolen by the RBKC itself, and I don’t mean towed away.

A helpful clerk explained to my friend that sending a tow truck out every time someone was an inch outside a parking spot was jolly expensive. And sending a clamper only meant that the car would occupy its illegitimate inch for longer.

But not to worry, explained the disembodied voice on the phone. The RBKC had found a way of solving the problem without committing the public purse to unnecessary expense. They could now use our massive advances in electronic technology to unlock the car, start it and repark it somewhere else.

On hearing this I was so enraged I forgot to ask my friend what kind of fee the RBKC charged for telling her where she could find her car. After all, the council had committed the crime of both breaking and entering and car theft. Sir Edward Coke must be spinning like a top in his grave.

One’s car is an extension of one’s home, an observation Penelope and I made when driving from France to London the other day. Since no council official would be allowed into our house unless explicitly invited or bearing a search warrant, surely the same principle should extend to our car?

Now, I don’t know if this foray into car theft is strictly an RBKC initiative. I fear it’s rather a harbinger of things to come, the government’s demonstration that we have only partial sovereignty over our property.

Now, sovereignty is like pregnancy: you either have it or you haven’t, with no incremental stages in existence. Denying it to British subjects means stamping all the centuries of British political history into the dirt. It’s a clear statement that Britain is no longer Britain.

This is a grave matter, so grave that I’ve chosen to write about it today, rather than about the increasing threat of an all-out war in Europe, or about China replacing her dovish generals with hawkish ones in obvious preparation for an invasion of Taiwan.

The outside threat is real enough for me to believe that before long we’ll be asked to come to Britain’s defence. But there has to be a Britain left to defend – not just the “green and pleasant land”, but also the birthplace (fine, a birthplace if you insist) of constitutional politics, just laws and civil liberties. A place where an Englishman’s home is indeed his castle and not a place the government magnanimously allows him to occupy for the time being.

It mustn’t be a place where a council employee can break into a person’s car, start it, drive it anywhere he likes and perhaps rummage through the glove box in the hope of finding something interesting, incriminating or titillating. Such a Britain is no longer fully British, and I do hope the crime committed by the RBKC was a one off.