The Scottish Mail on Sunday

How the ultra-left silent revolution took over Britain

- Peter Hitchens Read Peter’s blog at hitchensbl­og.mailonsund­ay.co.uk and follow him on Twitter @clarkemica­h

ARE you beginning to work out what has happened? Police do nothing while self-righteous ninnies dig up an ancient lawn in a beautiful city. The same police force close the roads in the name of ‘human rights’, to suit the same arrogant, dogmatic protesters.

Not enough? Think this is just an isolated incident? No. Will you please wake up to the fact that this country has undergone a silent but deadly revolution, and the takeover of the country by people who despise you and your morals is almost complete.

Try this. The victims of quite serious violent crimes are persuaded by police to take part in an insulting farce called ‘restorativ­e justice’. In one recent example, an off-duty prison officer escaped both punishment and richly deserved dismissal after brutally assaulting a young man for no reason.

The local newspaper in Startforth, County Durham, recorded: ‘Ben Matthews, 18, said neighbours had to pull his assailant off him in an unprovoked attack that happened yards from his home.’

Mr Matthews had just got off the bus and was walking home when a man began trying to make conversati­on with him. ‘He’d tried talking to me and claimed he was an undercover off-duty prison officer and he needed to see inside my bag.’

When Mr Matthews refused, the man dragged him off the main road and punched him five or six times. When Mr Matthews went to the police station the next day, covered in cuts and bruises, he found the assailant was there already, free as the air, in reception. Police told Mr Matthews that his attacker would have only been prosecuted for common assault, though I am not quite sure how they can have reached that conclusion.

SO DURHAM police, whose policy on drugs is notoriousl­y so soft it makes a marshmallo­w look hard, turn out (as I rather suspected) to be soft on other things as well. They decided to put the attacker on something called the Community Checkpoint Scheme ‘as it was better for him’. Better in what way?

Apparently rapists, robbers and murderers are not (yet) eligible for this escape from justice. Nor, of course, are those accused of ‘hate crimes’. But be patient. The authoritie­s are working on this. The idea that criminals are bad people who need to be punished and deterred has been abandoned. Crime is now officially a disease to be cured by ‘treatment’. The criminals themselves are not to be blamed.

We’ve all begun to see this in operation – disappeari­ng police and courts, endless feeble cautions and unpaid fines, prisons which spit out their inmates weeks after they enter.

And, of course, more crime. Robbery and murder will in time grow as common as burglary and assault have become since we gave up detecting or punishing them. And then they’ll no doubt be eligible for ‘restorativ­e justice’ too.

The police, like our immoral, greedy ruling class, no longer believe in right and wrong. They are paramilita­ry social workers who do not themselves blame criminals for their crimes. They see it as their job to negotiate neutrally between ‘offenders’ and ‘victims’.

The only thing they’ll really come down hard on is people trying to defend themselves or their property, a challenge to the liberal monopoly.

This is a national problem, as is the takeover of the police by ultraLefti­st dogmas. Individual officers are powerless against this relentless indoctrina­tion.

As I wrote in this newspaper, about lone traditiona­l police officers, back in June 2004: ‘But what can he do, by himself? Inch by inch, piece by piece, the world he grew up in has been dismantled and replaced by another. The same thing is happening to almost everyone he knows. And so, the very people who would once have complained loudly about “political correctnes­s gone mad” find themselves enforcing exactly that.’ Do you think this process is over? Not a bit of it. In the law, in the Civil Service and local government, the major charities, the political parties, the schools, the churches, the TV studios and the social media companies, the Long March Through the Institutio­ns is still going on. How Lenin must look up longingly from his warm place in hell and envy these revolution­aries, who have succeeded where he failed.

The place may look roughly the same. But when the honest citizen now turns to the State for protection or truth or help, he no longer gets it. He receives, from the flapping mouth of some dogmatised jobsworth, a series of excuses. And if he complains, then he will find out that the one thing the new State will protect with all its might is its monopoly of power and thought.

If Extinction Rebellion were not as thick as they are nasty, they would have realised by now that they have already won.

But then they couldn’t dig up lawns and close roads.

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