Innocents paying price for incompetencies

SO, last Thursday evening in Plymouth, a 22 year-old killer called Jake Davison shot dead five individuals and then killed himself.

His victims included his 51-yearold mother Maxine, a young girl called Sophie, her 40-year-old dad Lee Martin, a 59-year-old passerby Stephen Washington and a 66-yearold passerby Kate Shepherd.

We now learn that Davison was deemed by the local police to be unsafe to hold a firearms licence and, a few months ago, took away this licence.

Then, the same police department changed its mind and decided to let him have the licence back.

They did not seem to take into account that this person was suffering from mental illness and that his mother had tried in vain to get expert medical help for him.

This may in part be due to the drastic cut in these facilities that successive Tory governments have forced on us over the past 10 years.

Also, not taken into this police decision is the fact that about eight years before, it was claimed this dangerous Jake Davison carried out a serious physical attack on a man and his pregnant partner.

It has been claimed the man was beaten 15 times and his partner was very concerned about their unborn baby.

Obviously, either through negligence or under-manning, the local police let Davison off with just a warning.

In relative terms, it was a big gaff by the police to give back the firearms licence to Davison.

And the five innocent individuals have paid an unfair price for this incompetency.

In days gone by, the minister concerned, in this case Home Secretary Priti Patel, would have offered her resignation.

But she is not that conscientious. But, what about our Prime Minister, Boris Johnson?

We had these horrendous murders of five innocent individuals on Thursday and on Saturday morning, we saw the long awaited takeover of the Afghanistan government by the Taliban.

By any standards, these were very significant events which we have not experienced for many a years.

So, what does our Boris do? He and his Foreign Secretary, Dominic

Raab, decided to go on their summer holidays at the same time.

Lord Peter Ricketts, the former chair of the Joint Intellenge Committee (JIC), said that Johnson’s holiday was “one more piece of evidence that Whitehall as a whole failed to anticipate either the scale or the speed of the collapse of the Afgan regime and the implications for the British interest’.’

Another officer, Major General Charlie Herbert, who undertook three tours of duty in Afghanistan, said: “It is almost impossible to believe that the Prime Minister departed on holiday on that Saturday; he should hang his head in shame. It is dereliction of duty on an extraordinary scale.”

Suresh Chauhan, Glen Parva