Sharp

The events in Kraków are a reminder that 10 years ago, the targets were the Poles. But now, the fallen hero is a boy with the most common surname in Poland, his father’s native land. Shabana Mahmood is many things, but she is not a fool, so she knows exactly how it would be received if the kirpan were to be banned or severely restricted by a Muslim Home Secretary of Pakistani parentage. And from a Right that now wanted to replicate the American Second Amendment, whatever happened to blaming the assailant rather than the weapon?

The exemption of the kirpan from the ban on bladed articles in public places is one of the expressly intended effects of section 139 (5) of the Criminal Justice Act 1988. Who was the Prime Minister in 1988? And the weapon used by Vickrum Digwa to murder Henry Nowak was not a kirpan. Digwa was also wearing a real one at the time. In this country, they are far smaller than that weapon, and usually dull-edged.

Rather, Digwa’s murder weapon was just one of his and his family’s extensive collection of non-ceremonial bladed articles. Families like that are not peculiar to any one community. That said, the family does belong to the Akali-Nihang warrior order within Sikhism, though not at all essential to it. With its obvious attraction to Digwa’s type of weapons-obsessed young man such as might accrue to Active Clubs and the like, many members of that order reject the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee’s 2001 ban on shaheedi degh, their traditional drink to aid meditation and, interestingly, to make them fiercer in battle. Interestingly, because its base is cannabis, the hashish taken by the members of the Order of Assassins when they set out to murder the enemies of the Alamut state.

Proscribe that order under the good old Terrorism Act 2000, while introducing a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. I no longer believe in prison sentences that included the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is. We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. And we need Peter Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought to be taught in schools, as pro-drugs propaganda is routinely.