Surrender to Lawlessness and Disorder

Peter Hitchens writes:

The parasites and bawling wreckers who invaded London on Thursday did David Cameron a favour. They helped to draw our eyes and minds away from a much more frightening event. This was the Government’s surrender to lawlessness and disorder, bumptiously trumpeted by Kenneth Clarke last week. The Prime Minister was very worried about this announcement, which was delayed several times because of his fretting. He was not concerned because he disagreed with it, for he is wholly in tune with Mr Clarke. He was nervous in case Tory voters finally grasped what sort of Government this is. But the poor dears sleep on, still fooled.

Luckily for Mr Cameron and for Mr Clarke, sympathetic media and a series of other events swiftly buried Mr Clarke’s Green Paper. When its effects are felt over the coming years, few will realise that their intolerable, besieged, vandalised lives, their smashed front doors and violated homes, their drug-ruined children, their distraught and bloodied family members weeping powerlessly for justice and not getting it, are the direct consequences of Mr Cameron and his deliberate decision to stop even trying to protect the public.

This year this country reached a moment of decision. It has been coming for some years. The amount of crime and disorder, caused mainly by the deliberate destruction of the married family and the abolition of fatherhood, is now enormous. Up
till now, it has mainly affected the poor, though I am not sure this will continue to be the case. Past governments have tried to cope with this in many ways. Recently they have sought to pretend it isn’t happening by fiddling the figures. But this cannot conceal the fact that the prisons are getting fuller and fuller of bad people, even in spite of letting as many of them out as quickly as possible.

Mr Clarke’s solution is to stop sending large numbers of bad people to prison at all, and to use so-called community punishments instead, even though their feeble uselessness is proven by a recent report from Policy Exchange. Currently such punishments often go uncompleted, and frequently involve such stern retribution as working in charity shops. The reoffending rate is appalling. Here I’ll try to set out what is really going on, and what it means. I’ve given two answers to each question – the liberal elite view, and the truth.

Q Why do we imprison more people per head than any other Western European country?
A Liberal answer: Because we are too tough.
True answer: Because we have far more crimes per head than our neighbours.

Q Why can’t we simply build more prisons?
A Liberal answer: Because prisons are horrid, crime is caused not by human wickedness but by deprivation, and we don’t like being responsible for such a harsh system.
True answer: We have built more prisons. But we don’t use them properly (see below) and the criminally-inclined are not frightened of them. So the criminally-inclined become actual criminals. And we cannot build them fast enough to house the growing criminal underclass our policies have created.

Q Many claim that ‘prison works’. Does it?
A Liberal answer number one: Yes, but only by keeping criminals off the streets till they offend again, which isn’t much use. Liberal answer number two: No, huge numbers of prisoners reoffend after serving time. So prison makes them worse.
True answer: Prisons are purposeless warehouses, where criminals are corralled for a short while with other people like them. The nastier they are, the more they are left alone by increasingly powerless staff. They are given taxpayer-funded drugs, or a blind eye is turned to illegal drug-taking. They are seldom made to work and – as we saw with the case of the gangster Colin Gunn, who has forced officers to call him ‘Mister’ – they are treated with absurd generosity. With the exception of those who commit a few specially heinous crimes, most criminals do not get sent to prison until they are already habitual law-breakers, with a long line of cautions, unpaid fines and suspended sentences behind them. Then when they arrive in prison they are given drugs, TVs and pool tables. No wonder they reoffend.

Q Why have we failed to reduce the drug-taking which leads to so much crime?
A Liberal answer: We have not tried hard enough to treat this sickness, and must devote more resources to reducing the harm of drugs and to providing treatment for these poor unfortunates.
True answer: If the possession of illegal drugs is not treated as a crime, it will increase. After the Wootton Report of 1969, we began to give up punishing possession of the most serious and common illegal drug, the slickly marketed mental poison cannabis. Its use has increased incessantly since 1973, when the Tory Government gave in to the wealthy, powerful cannabis lobby, largely funded by rock stars. Penalties were sharply reduced and Lord Hailsham told magistrates to stop imprisoning people for possessing it. The lie, that it is a ‘soft’ and harmless drug, is still widely accepted in the establishment. Last year, most people caught in possession of this substance were let off with a meaningless warning, despite its recent restoration to Class ‘B’.

In a disgraceful act of concealment – which amounts in my view to dishonesty – Mr Clarke’s Green Paper hides the fact that cannabis is the criminal’s drug of choice. In paragraph 18, it says: ‘A significant proportion of crime is committed by offenders who have multiple problems. Evidence tells us that: 64 per cent of newly sentenced prisoners report using a drug during the four-week period before custody (30 per cent heroin, 28 per cent crack cocaine).’ I went to the source of these figures. It states that 46 per cent of these newly sentenced prisoners, far more than had used heroin or crack, had used cannabis. When I asked the Ministry of Injustice to explain why they had left this out of the list, they pathetically claimed there was no room for the information.

We get a lot of talk from politicians about how they are against ‘appeasement’. They were against the ‘appeasement’ of Saddam Hussein, and look where that got us. They are against the ‘appeasement’ of the Afghan Taliban, and the coffins keep on coming home to prove how tough they are, and Headley Court is always busy. Lots of them say they are against the ‘appeasement’ of Iran and North Korea, and I tremble to think where this fake toughness will get us. But in the real confrontation on our own streets, where the slouching, blank-eyed, grinning enemy lurks and giggles, his mind scorched by drugs and his moral sense shrivelled to the size of a lentil by our sad and violent culture and our useless schools, appeasement is the path our leaders have chosen – appeasement of drugs, appeasement of the crime they cause, appeasement of criminals themselves. We all know that eventually the appeaser is destroyed by the very menace he seeks to buy off, but many others have to be ruined first.

The point cannot be made too many times that light sentences and lax prison discipline are both expressions of the perfectly well-founded view that large numbers of those convicted, vastly in excess of the numbers that have always existed at any given time, are in fact innocent. We need to return to a free country’s minimum requirements for conviction, above all by reversing the erosion of the right to silence and of trial by jury, and by repealing the monstrous provisions for anonymous evidence and for conviction by majority verdict. And we need to return to proper policing. Then we could and should return to proper sentencing, and to proper regimes in prison. But only then.

Abandonment of the existing erosion of trial by jury and of the right to silence, of the existing reversals of the burden of proof, of conviction by majority verdict (which, by definition, provides for conviction even where there is reasonable doubt), of the admission of anonymous evidence other than from undercover Police Officers, of conviction on anonymous evidence alone, of both pre-trial convictions and pre-trial acquittals by the Crown Prosecution Service, of the secrecy of the family courts, of the anonymity of adult accusers in rape cases, of any thought of identity cards, of control orders, of Police confiscation of assets without a conviction, of stipendiary magistrates, of Thatcher’s Police and Criminal Evidence Act, of the Civil Contingencies Act, of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act, and of the Official Secrets Acts.

Raising of the minimum age for jurors at least to 21. Extension to the rest of the United Kingdom of the successful Scottish extension of the right to serve on a jury without compromising its restriction to those with a tangible stake in society. A return to preventative policing based on foot patrols, with budgetary sanctions against recalcitrant Chief Constables. Police Forces at least no larger than at present, and subject to local democratic accountability though Police Authorities composed predominantly of councillors, not by means of elected sheriffs, which, like directly elected mayors, have no place in a parliamentary rather than a presidential res publica, and are wholly incompatible with the defence, restoration and extension of the powers of jurors, magistrates and parliamentarians. Restoration of the pre-1968 committal powers of the magistracy, along with the pre-1985 prosecution powers of the Police. Each offence to carry a minimum sentence of one third of its maximum sentence, or of 15 years for life. A single category of illegal drug, with a crackdown on the possession of drugs, including a mandatory sentence of three months for a second offence, six months for a third offence, one year for a fourth offence, and so on.

Return to the situation whereby a Bill which ran out of parliamentary time was lost at the end of that session. Restoration of the supremacy of British over EU law. Requirement that EU law apply in the United Kingdom only once it has passed through both Houses of Parliament exactly as if it had originated in one or other of them. Requirement of a resolution of the House of Commons before any ruling of the European Court of Justice, or of the European Court of Human Rights, or of the “Supreme Court”, or pursuant to the Human Rights Act, can have any effect in the United Kingdom. Restoration of British overall control of our defence capability. Removal of all foreign forces and weapons from British territory, territorial waters and airspace.

Extension to Scotland of the historic liberties, largely as set out above, which have never applied in that far more oligarchic country, where middle-class institutions and upper-middle-class power have been defined as the esse of national identity, a situation which has been made even worse by devolution’s weakening of the Labour Movement. While this may be a factor contributing to the retention of more rigorous minimum qualifications for jurors in Scotland, criteria which should be applied nationwide, nevertheless it means that, while there is an automatic right to trial by jury for serious offences in Scotland, the decision on which way to proceed in an ‘each-way’ case lies with the prosecution rather than with the defence. The Police have no power to caution and proceed entirely under the direction of the locally unaccountable Procurator Fiscal, who does not prosecute unless it is in the public interest to do so, which it is for the prosecution alone to decide and for which it does not have to give any explanation. It is extremely difficult to bring a private prosecution, far in excess of the necessary restrictions on that practice which rightly exist elsewhere. These profoundly illiberal arrangements must change.

That would be a start, anyway.