Reprimand

“We no longer have the bobby on the beat who will give somebody a slapped wrist. So there is a case to be made under which the community elders sit together and reprimand people, trying to get them to change.”

So said an interviewee (a barrister) for a Daily Mail report on Sharia courts in Britain. And he has a point. But the solution is not Sharia courts. It is bobbies on the beat, properly empowered.

This report was rather irresponsibly headlined, implying that what was in fact an offence dealt with was a punishment meted out. And it was largely about Somali gar courts, which are not Sharia courts at all.

There is, if anything, something rather attractive about a non-violent system which simply presupposes the unbreakable ties of the immediate and extended family, and that fear of bringing shame on one’s family is a sufficient deterrent to preclude any question of re-offending, indeed to preclude even most first offences.

The upper classes still operate like that. The white working class still tries to, although the destruction of its stockades of male employment has destroyed the economic basis of its community elders’ authority: where are the Miners’ Lodge Committees now? Likewise Afro-Caribbeans, Africans of many origins, Hindus, Sikhs, Chinese, and so on. Yes, including Muslims.

The only exception is the white middle class, arguably the people with the least excuse, and certainly the people who complain loudest about the burden on the Police and the court system, though also about their alleged bias against – you’ve guessed it – the white middle class.

Does it ever occur to them (all right, to us) to re-learn the art of never needing to involve these forces, and indeed of not doing in the first place the sorts of things that might?