Who’s to blame for crime? Criminals

The thoughts of Jodie Sadler, the sister of Dickens Avenue murder victim Natasha Sadler-ellis, made for agonising reading in the Gazette last week.

Natasha’s killer, Foster Christian, was given life, but one of the two women convicted of assisting him spent just five weeks in prison. The other six months.

For the families of Natasha and Simon Gorecki, who also died by Christian’s knife, this was not enough.

Victims of crimes, unlike the politicians and penpushers who shape policy, demand real punishments. They want the perpetrators to suffer.

So why does Britain fail so spectacularly in this respect? It is that we have – bar the very worst crimes such as rape and murder – erased morality from the criminal justice system.

We instead defer to the social sciences, which assert that people are products of their environment rather than wilful individuals capable of moral decisions.

Sciences seek cause-andeffect explanations: “This happened as a result of some exterior force.” Not: “He chose to do this.”

How can you properly punish someone for a crime if you blame the world around them for their behaviour? You can’t. And therefore we don’t.

So vegans went all menstrual last week because the world failed to accommodate them.

Some militant ranted on the radio that his rights had been ignored because the new plastic £5 note contains traces of animal fat.

Oh no! How awful that the world and everyone else have been unable to contort themselves to the vegans’ demands.

I hope they make all the rest of the UK’S notes with this highly offensive polymer so that vegans will have to get used to waddling about noisily with pockets full of coins. We’ll hear them a mile away – and know to scarper in the opposite direction lest they give us a load of verbal GBH of the earholes about eating seaweed or summat.

Natasha Sadler-ellis