The battle of St Mary Bourne — and a history of taking the law into your own hands

It’s tough being a vigilante, as Michael Widen in St Mary Bourne village has discovered to his cost. Mr Widen has been monitoring drivers with his own speed camera, and then reporting them to police. People in the local pub have started calling him a speed Nazi and there are mutterings in the village that he should have taken up bridge like other pensioners, rather than become a grass roots traffic officer.

The Spectator has quite often taken the side of people who take the law into their own hands, especially in the early ‘90s, when the police didn’t seem to be able to do much about crime. Paul Johnson argued in 1992 that the public had had enough.

The media, useless as always, expresses indignation at miscarriages of justice where the innocent — or supposedly innocent — are convicted. But the public cares nothing about that. What arouses its wrath are the infinitely larger number of cases where the criminally guilty go free, or are never prosecuted at all, or, if convicted, get derisory sentences.