Our elite have it all – except some backbone.
There is an easy way to reduce crime, which all modern governments have discovered. You just stop bothering to enforce the law against it, or to record that it is happening at all. Abracadabra! No more shoplifting, burglaries or assaults, muggings or vandalism.
The late Jose Harris, a fine historian, explained it beautifully in the Blair years: 'If late 20th Century standards of policing and sentencing had been applied in Edwardian Britain, prisons would have been virtually empty; conversely, if Edwardian standards were applied in the 1990s, most of the youth of Britain would be in jail.'
There are only two problems with this clever method. First, though figures hide it, non-elite people continue to be robbed, vandalised, mugged and burgled, and besieged in or near their homes or on public transport, by drugged youths – and shops continue to be pillaged.
Second, even our limp, overwhelmed courts and absent police have to show signs of life from time to time. In exasperation, they pluck the occasional criminal from the streets. This is generally after 20 or so crimes that weren't recorded and a catalogue of unpaid fines.
So despite the pathetic softness of the system, prisons fill up, sumps of intractable evil, full of men who might once have been deterred by a serious justice system and an active, present police force.
We did it again last week, 'diverting' yet more criminals from prison because cells are full. It will not work on any terms. Those 'spared jail' will end up there in years to come.
It is astonishing how, as our justice system becomes ever more liberal, numbers in prison grow. But it is easy to put right, if anyone wanted to. They just don't – lacking the nerve or moral force.
Words matter and last year's Coronation was the first since at least 1689 to omit the King's pledge to guard his subjects from evil. At the presentation of the Sword of State to the monarch, he has previously promised to use it 'for the terror and punishment of evildoers'. Now somebody has taken those words out of the ceremony.
We have an elite which wants high office and big salaries but lacks the backbone to use its power to defend the people.
You can't cut crime by pretending it's gone away. Peter Hitchens.
