Tim Newark

just yards away from World Heritage sites. Even Bath & North East Somerset council leader Tim Warren has hinted that the decision to sell off the city-centre police station was not a good one and would like to see it reversed.

If this rise is not bad enough, there is a sinister new development in which powerful innercity gangs are spreading their drug-dealing to the quieter, more vulnerable countryside.

Gangsters turn up by train in provincial towns and hand out a mobile number to local addicts – the so-called “county lines” that put them in touch with city-centre dealers.

In order to dominate these perceived soft-targets the gangs are using extreme levels of violence enforced with guns and knives, normally more likely seen on inner-city estates.

Vulnerable locals – including children, addicts and those in social housing – are being enticed by the bigger money they can make from these professional villains but are also facing severe punishment if they fail to deliver on deals, including being murdered. Nineteen-year-old Matthew Cassidy from Liverpool was recently stabbed to death in Shotton, Flintshire, because he was thought to be a threat to a rival dealer.

Welsh provincial towns have seen a four-fold increase in four years as more than 1,000 county lines drug networks have been set up. Some can generate up to £3,000 a day.

In the pretty Devon cathedral city of Exeter a local dealer was recently stabbed and beaten by thugs from a Birmingham gang who also kidnapped and raped a young woman they thought was working for rivals.

Back in Bath, as a result of a successful undercover police operation last year, 12 drug dealers were jailed for a total of 32 years, including a dealer from Wolverhampton who had successful cuckooed his way into the local underworld.

The police are certainly aware of this danger but when it comes to deterring low-level antisocial behaviour that invariably leads vulnerable people on to more serious crime they do not appear to be in control of our country towns.

With the lack of a central police station and not much visible police patrolling the genteel city of Bath appears to be the latest casualty of this assumption that nothing much happens in the countryside. Instead it is Bath residents and traders who are taking the brunt of this rise in crime and no one seems to be doing much to help them.

BATH resident Brian McElney had devoted his life to collecting Chinese arts and crafts and placed many of these exquisite objects in the Museum of East Asian Art he opened in the centre next to the Georgian Assembly Rooms.

Last month four masked men smashed their way into it and looted several of these priceless objects. In the same week burglars used a scaffolding pole to break into an antique silverware shop nearby, while a little time before that a succession of locals and visitors were robbed at knifepoint in an 18th-century shopping street.

It appears now that if Jane Austen and her ribbon-buying characters were strolling along the pavements of Bath, they might be better off carrying a concealed weapon under their bonnets.

‘The police do not seem to be in control’