Crime ISN'T falling, it's just that we've given up trying to combat it
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column
Has anything been happening while much of our media have been obsessed with a foreign contest between two mediocrities for a post that isn’t as important as it looks?
Well, how about this blood-freezing statistic? More than 50 rapists have been let off with cautions, without ever facing a trial.
No doubt you thought that cautions were the sort of thing they gave to teenagers found drunk and flat on their faces in the street. But rape? Isn’t that important?
In fact, isn’t it – thanks to political correctness – one of the few crimes that everyone still takes seriously, even Guardian readers? And more than 50 rapists, who have admitted the offence, have been given cautions for it? Shouldn’t the Government have fallen?
You might expect the Tories to make a fuss about this but – now of course you remember – the Tories are in this Government and, in fact, dominate it.
Actually, this is only a small part of a much bigger problem uncovered by the Magistrates’ Association, whose members had begun to wonder why business in their courts was getting so slack. Had crime stopped?
No, it hadn’t. Something else had happened. Criminals, the Government and the police were co-operating in a vast project which benefits everyone except the British public.
The police benefit because they look as if they’re doing something, when they’re not. The criminals benefit because they get let off so they can go and commit more crimes. And the Government benefits because it does not have to build the hundred or so huge new prisons that would be needed to house malefactors if we still took crime seriously.
Actually, it’s far worse than I can fully state here, a horrible catalogue of unpunished evil, under which severe violence, child cruelty, burglary and even blackmail have been dealt with through the law’s equivalent of a shrug.
I plan to put a much fuller version of this scandal on my blog in the next few days, drawn from the jaw-dropping report by the Magistrates’ Association which should by now have been on every newspaper front page in the country.
When you read – as you often do – that ‘crime is falling’, you must understand what this really means. It means that large numbers of wicked acts are no longer considered as crimes by the authorities. If we had the standards of 60 years ago, half the young people in the country would be locked up.
If the police and courts of that era had judged crime by our standards, their prisons would have been empty.
It is not crime that has fallen, it is partly our own moral standard, our expectation of good, considerate, honest behaviour from our neighbours that has fallen.
But it is also that the police and the Government, seeking a quiet life, have found it easier and cheaper to ignore wrongdoing until it gets out of control.
Like all appeasement of evil, this policy invites a reckoning in the future.
Bowing to a despot? That’s an odd way to promote freedom, Dave
The happiest picture of the week comes from Saudi Arabia, where our Prime Minister was festooned by King Abdullah with the King Abdul Aziz Al Saud Excellence Medal.
I do hope it was the First Class kind, rather than the Standard Class. After all, Mr Slippery has been incredibly busy promoting so-called ‘freedom’ in the Arab world, almost everywhere except in Saudi Arabia itself, one of the most secretive, sectarian and repressive despotisms on the planet.
Please note that this ‘freedom’, often achieved and sustained through terrible violence, has invariably suited the foreign policy objectives of the Saudi Kingdom.
If we are going to sell our souls for oil and arms sales, I’d rather we said so openly than pretended it was a struggle for Arab liberty.
Propping up an army of addicts
If you deliberately and openly injured yourself, for instance by breaking your own fingers, and made yourself unfit for work, would you seriously expect the taxpayer to keep you?
Of course not. In that case, why are millions of pounds of my money and yours being spent on benefit payments to so-called ‘alcoholics’ and ‘drug addicts’?
Roughly 34,000 such people receive Employment Support Allowance, and more than 21,000 receive Disability Living Allowance. I get into terrible trouble with Guardian readers and the Twitter mob for saying that I don’t believe in ‘addiction’.
But why should I, and why should you? The word ‘addiction’ simply assumes that human beings have no will of their own. But they do. Nobody forces anyone to start drinking too much, and it takes quite a lot of effort to become a habitual heroin user.
Even assuming it was true (which it isn’t) that such people cannot stop if they want to, why would they want to stop if they are told by society that their gross appetites are a disease, and they are paid unearned money because of their alleged sickness?
This is an insult to the truly ill, whose problems are not their own fault, and who in many cases deserve more generous treatment than they actually get from the welfare state.
A weird development on the ‘Did Edward Miliband receive private tuition while at his comprehensive school?’ question. I first put this to a so-called ‘source’ a month ago. The ‘source’ stopped answering his telephone for several days. Then he sent me a text message from an airport lounge saying he was ‘going on holiday’.
Even after his return from his politically correct beach, the silence dragged on. Then on Friday the source responded to a text message to say that Mr Miliband ‘didn’t have a private tutor’. I rang him. ‘When did you put the question to Mr Miliband?’ He wouldn’t say.
I asked: ‘Did you actually put the question to Mr Miliband?’ He said: ‘Mmm.’ Under pressure, he converted this ‘mmm’ into a hesitant ‘yes’. He emitted only a reluctant ‘yes’ when I asked if I could write that the Labour leader had personally said he had not been privately tutored. I suggested to the source he would look much less silly if he gave me a straight answer, but he declined.
Thus do we pursue the truth, in an age when politicians have never been so infested with aides and press secretaries. Perhaps I have misunderstood the function of these people.
In the old days, unscrupulous students used to take dangerous, illegal amphetamines to help get them through tough exam revision.
Now they use . . . Ritalin (methylphenidate hydrochloride), the legally prescribed and very potent pill which is increasingly given to children, some of them very young.
Would doctors or parents give amphetamines to small boys and girls? Of course not. Why then do they give them a drug that has such similar effects?
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