Nobody In Authority Seems To Want To Know

Peter Hitchens writes:

When Raoul Moat was roaming the North East dealing drugs and smashing people's windows, with his wild weapon dogs straining and slobbering on the end of their ropes, do you think his neighbours could have got our criminal justice system to help them against him? You know the answer. The system was too busy, or too feeble.

But once the police had ignored a warning from Durham Prison that a dangerous man was loose, and he had killed and maimed his victims, what do we find? Helicopters chatter in the sky. RAF jets are scrambled. Armoured cars are requisitioned from Ulster. On go the pseudo-military outfits. A miniature Wehrmacht turns out to have been waiting in reserve, ready to fan out across Northumberland in coal­scuttle helmets and draped in enough weaponry to take on the Taliban. So that's why they were busy, I suppose. On manoeuvres.

And they couldn't keep off the TV, being as much in love with celebrity as any contestant on Britain's Got Talent. At Press conference after Press conference, they psycho-babbled like any professor of sociology. They inadvertently used the expression 'nutter' and had to say sorry, lest they had offended the nutter community.

A convicted child-beater and self-proclaimed bloody murderer was addressed obsequiously as 'Mister' Moat, and assumed to care about the offspring he liked to thump so hard that their teachers spotted the bruises. That is the only reason Moat was in prison at all. He could have frightened adults all his life and nothing would have happened. Like all callous societies, we over-compensate by being extra-sentimental about children. But even for this, he received only a pathetic nine-week jail term (fraudulently stated to be 18 weeks).

He was told (inaccurately) that 'You have a future'. When at last the police stumbled across him, he was spoken to nicely by 'negotiators', who tossed him water and sandwiches as gently as possible, in case he thought they were throwing them at him.

There are a lot of reasons for this event. Moat himself made one good point when he mentioned in his last self-pitying hours that – like countless troubled young men in our land – he had no father in his life. Our state continues to encourage this demonstrably bad arrangement with large subsidies. And it is perilous to criticise it, as you will be told you are being horrid to single mothers.

Who knows what violent filth was put into his mind at an early age by TV, Hollywood and computer games? Who knows how early he began to fry his brain with the illegal drugs he sold with impunity? Who taught him to blame everyone but himself for his actions – so that he went to his maker believing that the woman he shot was responsible for her own wounds? We do know, because his acquaintances have told us, that he was taking steroids. We also know that he had recently been taking anti-depressants, which is the case with most rampage killers of this kind, yet is something nobody in authority seems to want to know about.

In fact, nobody in authority seems to want to know about anything that matters. They might have to change their silly minds, if they did.