The Slog reached 9 million visits alltime last Thursday, and is just two away after this one from 400 ATEOTD posts. Nice and all that, but I retain my view that blogging is not the future online. The key tasks for the online Resistance to madness are:

1. Mutual associations of joined-up interests (Exaro doing their best, but still too secretive)

2. Using technology to hide from the surveillance technology (big thank you to Tor browser tools)

3. Powerful demonstrations of influence on specific issues (hat tip to 38 degrees for pioneering this)

4. Distancing ourselves from the lunatic fringe.

It would be jolly nice to spend one’s declining years jerking off about a plot to spray Chinese Moon rockets with radioactive dung, but while that has a certain eccentric appeal, it’s not what’s needed. What people need is real and broadly accessible analysis, hard evidence of wrongdoing, and practical advice about how to cope with scorched Earth when the mad buggers have finally given up.

In that vein of thought, I wonder how many of you watched The Great Train Robbery two-parter during this 50th anniversary of the historic British heist from 1963. Jim Broadbent as the dogged copper was wonderful as always, but little-known Luke Evans brought some real colour to Bruce Reynolds, the gang’s ringleader. The real Reynolds died in February this year, and although something of an accomplished self-apologist, after his release from prison in 1978, the self-styled suave and cunning robber made some very valid points in the interviews he gave. For instance, he pointed out that they got 30 years in most cases for stealing money, but even by then a murderer able to have his brief talk a good way out of premeditation could be sentenced to ten years and out in six. “After the train job,” Evans remarks in the movie, “Everyone took guns, ‘cos nobody in the law took any account of the fact that we didn’t have shooters”.

There is something sick in this kind of argument from a career criminal; but equally, the point remains that stealing material possessions and the coin of the Realm has often been as a more serious crime than murder. Kill your wife by all means – but don’t steal from the State.

The Train Robbers came out and were immediately David Frost’s guests on his chat show – en masse. Gordon Goody had all his take stolen while in prison, and told Frost that night that one day he would be “visitin’ peepull”. Buster Edwards sold flowers under the Waterloo Station viaduct for years afterwards: my first wife often bought from him, and said he short-changed her every time.

These were hardened and violent criminals, and not worthy of hero status. But a certain romance nevertheless surrounds them, and I suspect that might be to do with the simplistic idea that “We wuz poor, we stole, the old Bill chased us, we done our porridge, it was all a profession like any uvva”. These days, cops and robbers as an idea has gone forever: for a start, the cops are too often on the take themselves, the criminals are more often driven by middle class “educated” greed than East End poverty, the Big Fish could as easily be Russian as cockneys…and of course, they rarely get caught, because Plod is out of his depth now. And political Parties turn a blind eye to the doings of their donors.

We watch the grainy film in black and white, and hear the voices-over talk in awed tones about “over a million pounds”. But today there is no black and white – only bankers stealing billions, and Troikanauts talking of trillions as if they could be repaid with just a little austerity. There is no ready acceptance from the crook who says “It’s a fair cop guvnor, I’ll come quiet like”. There is only the thick skin of the legislator who stands before a jury of his peers and says “I have done nothing wrong” when every shred of evidence suggests that he’s a liar.

The bare-faced innocence of a Grant Shapps is not that different from the chutzpah displayed by the last two old-fashioned British gangsters, Ronnie and Reggie Kray. They killed enemies as a matter of course, once in a crowded pub in broad daylight. Watch the footage of Eddie Mair interviewing Boris Johnson, and the same supreme confidence in being above the law is there for all to see. But very few do.

We can no longer rely on the cops to catch the robbers. Or the embezzlers, the corrupters, the authority threateners, the ISPs, the spooks, and the paedophiles. The only Rule of Law left says Might is Right. That’s why online protected resistance remains the only hope for our civilisation….and why Leveson & Ptrs have made it their business to bury us with all speed.