I learnt a hard lesson about nazism today. I did some to somebody.

David Davis

For readers in free nations abroad, in these days in the UK Police State, dogs are not allowed to shit in the street. If they do, their slaves are enjoined to collect the faeces, usually in a Gordon-Brown-non-approved-plastic bag, and carry the stuff with them for disposal (presumably they are not told where) later.

They will, naturally, be fined “unlimited” amounts, for going about this unnecessary task in the wrong way.

I have never approved of dogs shitting in the street. I think it is dusgusting, like smoking. However, since Men keep dogs, and have always done so, this relationship has become natural. I have therefore always regarded public dogshit as one of those things that a conservative society abhors, and ought to abhor, but does little about because there are more pressing concerns, such as war, socialism, governments inimical to freedom, and their love of creeping Nazi-style decrees seemingly based on logic and justice, but actually on sectarian opinion.

As a conservative, you just have - when walking - to keep your eyes peeled to avoid lurking dogshit, just like the way you learn to spot lurking Nazism, while thinking. The two processes are analogous.

Dogshit, being of natural origin - you could say it is organic - does decay to nugatory waste in relatively short order anyway (sadly unlike socialism and other Nazi beliefs) and the worst that can happen is that some fresh stuff adheres to one’s shoes and is brought in the house, causing all of one’s wives to scream, furiously scrub the carpets, and refuse sex for indeterminate periods which depend on the temperament of the wife concerned. An allegory for new Britain, I guess.

But under socialism, there now exist draconian penalties for leaving the stuff (dogshit, not wives) in public places. I suppose it’s down to the same sort of mindset that has already pre-criminalised smokers, and is heading now straight for drinkers and car “drivers”. I never like stepping in it, being just rather clumsy as I am, just as I never liked offices bursting at the seams with cigarette smoke, and I always refused to allow smoking in mine when I chaired meetings, preferring to go to other people’s for same, so the participants could smoke, and I could get stuff agreed that I needed, because they were comfortable. (There’s anothet parable about how sociaism gets past the British, for you!)

This afternoon, while collecting in the nazidumpsters which we are forced to use and pay for, I caught a certain lady with two airedales, who have frequently crapped outside our gate as it is well screened by cypress trees. I recognise the crap, its colour and size. The dogs literally had their pants down this time. My wife had had a polite go at her before, some weeks ago.

I said: “Are you going to take that away, or shall I call the dogwardens?”

I COULD have just said: “Are you going to take that away, or shall I?”

The poor lady was mortified and terrified. She scooped it off our pavement into the road with her bare hands, and I felt sorry for her, but I could not find it in my heart to offer her the help of our sink to clean herself. I only think we’ll see her with her airedales outside us in the night now.

Why did I have to say what I did? Dogshit on the pavement outside my house is my responsibility, or so a conservative would say, surely. Why did I do option 1 instead of option 2?

Nazism (that is to say, the incipient form of British socialism) corrupts us all subliminally, and makes us, whether we will or no, start to invoke socialist forms of interpersonal behaviour. We think that we can get done what we want done, faster and more effectively, if we invoke some “higher” or at least more terrifying, authority. Perhaps it is because we are all disarmed in the face of the law anyway, and we have no guns or anything else: we implicitly accept that the old norms of behaviour have been erased, and that to “get things done”, we have to call on “them”.

 I was angry, gleeful that I had caught the personal perpetrator of a repeated (and therefore deliberate) irritation to us and our property, and  I reacted instinctively - or so I thought. Although the basis of that particular instinct worries me greatly after analysis.

I do not know. Do you? But I was sorry for what I did to her.