Leaders must act now to end the bloodshed

ANOTHER day, another young life lost cheaply.

With depressing predictability, Britain awoke yesterday to grim news that a 16-year-old boy had been savagely murdered in front of his devastated mother.

Unbelievably, it was the 119th brutal killing in London this year as a terrifying orgy of knife violence engulfs the UK.

Speaking unwittingly for the nation, one uncomprehending neighbour at the scene of the tragedy asked: ‘What is going on?’

What indeed? One thing seems certain: an unforgivable failure by politicians, the police and judges to grab the deepening crisis by the scruff of the neck.

Vicious young men in drug gangs swagger around the streets with impunity, clutching weapons more suitable to warfare, instilling terror in the public. How on earth has it come to this? The answer, surely, is that today’s breed of violent thugs have little fear of Britain’s ailing criminal justice system.

With fewer police on the streets, and a precipitous decline in police stop-andsearch, gang members have every reason to think they won’t get caught.

And as the Mail reveals today, even if they are, they are unlikely to face the tough sentences they surely deserve. Judges barely enforce a ‘two strikes and you’re out’ law introduced in 2015 to combat knife carriers, with almost half of repeat offenders escaping with a slap on the wrists.

Isn’t this soft-touch justice only likely to embolden them to inflict more carnage?

And what of our politicians? Home Secretary Sajid Javid was quicker to brand idiots who set a Grenfell Tower effigy alight a ‘disgrace’, only later condemning knife violence. Meanwhile, London mayor Sadiq Khan descended into a frenzy of pious indignation, blaming cuts to police budgets – but shouldering no responsibility.

Complacently, he warned violence would not be under control for a ‘generation’. Hardly comforting words for families and communities blighted by the surge in stabbings and shootings.

Britain risks getting the unenviable reputation of knife capital of the First World. Unless the authorities act quickly and firmly, the problem will only get worse.