Why I’ve applied to be the boss of Radio 4

DOES any powerful person in this country ever think? It has been quite astonishing watching the alleged debate about knife crime over the past few days. Not a single thought took place. There is a very good reason why people generally don’t stab each other. Normal, sane humans recoil from the very idea of plunging a sharp blade into a fellow creature, let alone driving it so deep that it is bound to kill.

The crime has been rare because nobody wanted to commit it. Yet now we have a significant minority who do not recoil. So what has changed?

It i s not because knives are more easily available. There have always been plenty of knives. You do not need some menacing, wickedly curved weapon to end a life.

Every home in this country contains blades that could kill, in the hands of a person who wanted to use them that way.

Even if they didn’t, the person who wants to kill can fashion a deadly weapon from all kinds of readily available things.

The crucial factor is his willingness to use it.

The problem has, in fact, been growing for years, concealed by the brilliant skills of our paramedics and doctors. Night after night, they have saved the lives of appalling numbers of stab victims.

If we still had the medical facilities and techniques of 50 years ago, this change would have been obvious for some time.

So what is it that has changed? School exclusions? No. Global warming? No. Police numbers? Oh, forgive me while I laugh. The police have been absent from the streets of this country for decades now, reacting to crime after it happens and so losing control of it.

YOU can say this to them over and over again, and they never pay any attention, presumably because they actually don’t fancy the idea of the old-fashioned regular preventive foot patrols, often actually at night, in wind and rain, that used to keep us so safe. Someone else can do that. Just not them.

The modern copper would rather be on a squad, investigating claims that the late Ted Heath, or some other corpse, was a paedophile.

If there were two million of them it wouldn’t make any difference because, like the schools, they are doing the wrong thing, and if you give them more money they will just do the wrong thing more expensively.

Here is the problem. We are told that stabbings are at their worst since 1945. This is itself untrue. The year 1945 is chosen because that was when figures on stabbings began to be collected. In reality, they are the worst figures since this became a civilised country under the Victorians, really the worst figures since an unpoliced London was roamed by armed footpads, and highwaymen haunted the country roads.

In a way, they are even worse than then. This is, by comparison with those times, a rich and settled society. But in an important way, we are worse. We have drugs. These drugs do not just intoxicate, as alcohol does. They make their users mentally ill, irrational, uninhibited, careless of the consequences of what they do.

No, not every marijuana smoker goes out and kills. So what? Not every boozer gets into fights, or commits rape, or kills people with drunken driving. Not every cigarette smoker gets cancer or heart disease. But we act against these things because of the significant minority who do cause or experience these tragic outcomes.

And almost all of those who go out and kill someone with a blade will turn out, once the investigation is over, to be a long-term user of marijuana, no longer wholly sane or wholly civilised. Its widespread use is the only significant social change in this country that correlates with the rise in homicidal violence.

It is a problem which a lot of people don’t want to discuss. Who are they? There is the billionaire lobby, of businessmen and politicians, who want to legalise marijuana, who hate every mention of the increasingly obvious connection between use of that drug and severe violence. It could rob them of big profits and big tax receipts.

It could upset the well- funded lobbies for appeasing drug abuse by so-called ‘harm reduction’, such as the Government’s own increasingly shameful ‘ Talk to Frank’ website, which matily assumes that those who visit it will take drugs anyway. A fat lot of harm that will reduce. There are the lobbies for more money for the police, who have only one simple- minded, thought-free answer to everything. There are the police themselves, who found that it was difficult to enforce the laws against marijuana possession, and so largely gave up doing so. They obviously don’t want to start again now. Diddums, I say.

And there are people who see the trees, but not the wood. Immediately after the knifing horrors of the weekend, a Government Minister, Victoria Atkins, blurted out the truth, namely: ‘Drugs is the main driver as far as we are concerned of this serious violence’, and then added a flat lie, ‘which is why we are very keen to ensure that the laws in relation to illegal drugs remain as tough as they are’.

They are not tough, Minister, because they are not enforced. They just look tough. Everyone in the world knows they are not tough, except for the Government.

Please, please, please try actually thinking.