One of Britain’s most malicious criminals is about to be released from prison. But enough about Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare, let’s talk about Tony Martin.

The Norfolk farmer is finally due out next week, on parole from his five-year manslaughter sentence for shooting dead a teenage burglar at his farmhouse. The authorities are begrudgingly releasing Martin only because, having served two thirds of his sentence, he automatically qualifies for parole. They refused to let him out any earlier because they still deem him a mortal danger — not to you or me, but to any burglars who might try to rob his farm.

As the parole board’s lawyers told a judicial review in May: “Even if only those who came on to his property were the group at risk of the use of lethal force at the hands of Mr Martin ... such a group were entitled to protection.” The judge agreed, and Martin remained in jail so that the nation’s burglars might sleep peacefully during their afternoons off. Then another judge granted a second burglar whom Martin wounded the right to sue the farmer for compensation.

These bizarre events have provoked predictable cries of “political correctness gone mad”. In fact they are the result of a government policy — ironically, one demanded by the same tabloid newspapers and Tory MPs now up in arms about Martin’s treatment. The guilty party is the policy of “victim-centred justice”.

The Government aims to put victims “at the centre of the criminal justice system”, by giving more weight to their emotional hurt. People are now to be punished, not just for what they have done, but according to how others feel about it. This risks treating crime less as an offence against society, to be judged by objective standards of law, and more as an offence against the individual, to be judged by subjective sentiments. Anybody who feels wronged has the right to blame and claim. We can all be victims now.

A consequence turns out to be that burglars can claim they are victims of inconsiderate householders, and sue for compensation under the Human Rights Act. And the legal system can keep a man locked up because it is believed that he might victimise a hypothetical robber.

The one person whom the legal system has refused to treat as a victim is Tony Martin. As the parole people put it after denying him the usual pre-release home visit, Martin “does not fit the criteria”. He has refused to follow the therapeutic etiquette of the criminal justice system. He will not express remorse or abandon his unfashionably reactionary views on guns, gypsies, or the rights of property owners. These thought crimes are what define him as “still dangerous”.

It is telling that the one occasion when Martin did receive some official sympathy was at his appeal, when his defence claimed that he was suffering from a psychological disorder caused by (wait, you know what’s coming) sexual abuse that he allegedly suffered 50 years before. His lawyers said that Martin lived in the past, but from somewhere he seemed to acquire a keen understanding of how to play the victim card today.

I might not want Tony Martin for a neighbour. But you need not be an ID card-carrying member of the law and order lobby to see that what his case reveals about the criminal justice system poses a far graver threat to the public than that bewildered sod-buster does.

A good friend of mine in Manchester, now in his seventies, recently chased off a burglar with the help of a garden spade and a hoe. The young policemen were sympathetic, but advised my friend not to mention in his statement that he hit the toe-rag. After all, real victims don’t stand up for themselves, do they?

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