Our sheltered politicians have forgotten the misery of crime
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Perhaps we should force some of our politicians to live in terraced houses or council flats in the roughest parts of Britain.
They’d discover the terror of seeing lads racing about on stolen mopeds with shotguns and machetes. The misery of trying to live, never mind raise children, amid the stench of cannabis or thumping drum and bass. They’d experience life under siege from drug-dealing gangs and anti-social yobs.
Some shifts at the big out-of-town warehouse would expose them to the impact of the bike they use to get there being stolen, or the local bus route being suspended yet again because of persistent crime and disorder.
Working in a convenience store they would come face-to-face with the abuse, threats and violence that accompanies the shoplifting epidemic.
They could do some shifts in a café to find out what it’s like when beggars and pickpockets descend to target customers. They could learn how to cajole aggressive vagrants off the doorstep, wash away the bodily fluids often left behind, and stop them from shooting up in the loo.
Perhaps then, they might not be so complacent about the prime duty of government that was so well-articulated by the late Baroness Thatcher: “to protect the citizen as he goes about his lawful business”.
Alas, the elites of Britain tend not to have such antecedents. Consider the new memo from a police quango – the National Police Chiefs’ Council – advising police forces to make fewer arrests.
The lunacy of such a statement should be blindingly obvious to everyone. For those senior officers who have never felt comfortable policing, it may be music to their ears: an opportunity to refocus their forces on developing community cookbooks or preparing a new dance routine to celebrate the latest fashionable cause.
But for the growing number of chiefs intent on turning their forces around and for their crime-fighting colleagues, it’s another misguided missive best filed in the shredder.
You don’t make a country safer by arresting fewer people – nor by releasing dangerous prisoners early. As it stands, the 670,000 arrests last year remains barely half what it was in 2010.
The Government’s failure to confront the crisis is testimony to a lack of political will on the part of our political elites and the routine lack of seriousness on the part of officialdom that we have witnessed in other critical areas, such as pandemic preparedness.
Too many politicians and officials are more comfortable presiding over the managed decline of the status quo while awaiting their next promotion or retirement, than they are rolling their sleeves up, owning a problem, and solving it to the satisfaction of the public. If they were serious, they wouldn’t have been covering precious prison real estate with ground-mounted solar panels, they’d have been keeping the space free for new wings.
Too many of our politicians and institutions haven’t just forgotten the first duty of government and what the misery of crime is, they’ve also forgotten who they are supposed to serve.
It shouldn’t be about serving themselves, “the sector” or “vulnerable offenders”. No, they should be serving the law-abiding majority of the public who, entirely reasonably, want to see crimes prevented, criminals detected, and punitive sentences handed out.
And those hoping a Labour administration will be magically different are likely to be disappointed.
Judging by his decision to take the knee in solidarity with the ideology behind Black Lives Matters, we can expect Keir Starmer to favour the politics of social justice over the importance of criminal justice.
If our elites and those in Whitehall were less sheltered and comfortable, or maybe just more principled and courageous, the prison crisis would be an opportunity to force through popular measures and win back public trust.
Just weeks ago the Prime Minister addressed the nation and called on voters to ask the question “who do you trust to keep the country safe?”. Yet Rishi Sunak is planning to release prisoners early and legislating to abolish short prison sentences for most criminals. Voters should ask themselves the question Sunak posed. But without a serious change of direction, he is unlikely to survive the answer.
