Letter From the UK About Vanishing Acts

A policeman on patrol? 

You're more likely to see a wildebeest

Peter Hitchens
Daily Mail


Have you noticed how politicians, police chiefs and media have all stopped pretending that crime is falling? Even the supercilious academics who have sneered for years at real public concern about crime and disorder, tittering from their safe, secluded homes about ‘moral panic’, may eventually have to change their tune.

This is partly because of the exposure – which I helped to publicise – of the systematic fiddling of crime figures by the police. It is also partly because the police like to pretend that minor cuts in their enormous numbers have made crime more common – though how this can be when the police are almost entirely invisible I cannot tell. In the days of regular foot patrols, we had about half as many officers as we do now.

But there’s another reason. You can hide and fiddle the truth about many types of crime. But you can’t keep stabbing and murder secret in any remotely free society.

The authorities long ago gave up doing anything serious about shoplifting, public drunkenness and disorder, vandalism, bike theft, car theft, robbery and burglary. They just stick up notices telling you that these things are your own fault.



The authorities long ago gave up doing anything serious about shoplifting, public drunkenness and disorder, vandalism, bike theft, car theft, robbery and burglary

They now publicly admit they cannot be bothered to pursue anyone for possessing illegal drugs, even though this offence is at the root of so much other crime. Indeed, they boast about it, as if this laziness and defeatism, a mutinous refusal to do the job we pay them for, were somehow enlightened. They pretend that their inaction will free them to tackle other crimes. It never does.


My own route home, which I often take late and in the dark, was recently the scene of an unprecedented mugging. Parks I have used safely since I was a child have been plagued by various sorts of attacks. How long, I wonder, before the first knifing? Not all that long, I suspect. Round where I live, you are more likely to spot a grazing wildebeest than to see a patrolling police officer. They don’t even pretend that they’re doing it any more.

And now we learn, to my total lack of surprise, that prosecutions have sunk to an all-time low in England and Wales, at a time when even our fishy official figures show that crime is surging upwards.

This is because our 50-year policy of decriminalising crime has finally blown up in our faces. We wait till offenders are hardened criminals before locking them up. When we do lock them up, we let them out as fast as we can. But even then, the prisons can’t hold them. Soft justice, as anyone could have told its supporters, means more crime, for ever.

But whatever you do, don’t dream of trying to defend yourself or your own home. That is almost the only thing that will get you prosecuted and thrown into prison for years. Like all rotten, incompetent monopolies, our criminal justice system can do one thing well – defending itself against competition. When this country eventually goes under, our elite’s infuriating failure to confront or deal with this problem will be one of the main reasons.