London is lawless – the police have vanished from our streets
Ilive in quite a nice, middleclass part of north-west London. Yet over the past year or so, I’ve felt increasingly unsafe walking home from the Tube station at night.
There is a fly-blown feel about the place: litter everywhere, dubious-looking men hanging around and a growing number of rough sleepers. Some of these have erected serious encampments by the bus stop and under doorways, with tarps, trolleys and mattresses.
There are no pubs nearby – only a café that shuts at 5pm and a newsagent that was robbed recently, its windows broken – so there’s no sense of safety to be had from nearby businesses.
A few weeks ago, the lawyer of Maria Litvinenko, poisoned spy Alexander Litvinenko’s widow, was knocked over and her phone grabbed by a moped thief at the bus stop opposite my beloved Waitrose. This would be OK if I felt that, if I were attacked, somebody might hear me scream. But I don’t feel that way because it’s plain that nobody would.
This is a lawless land, for there is never any police presence. In the past year, I have not seen one police car cruise the long and dark streets surrounding my flat, nor once seen a uniformed officer in the vicinity of the station.
The lack of police throughout
residential London is a travesty, and thugs, naturally, are taking full advantage. Which is why I am crossing my fingers for the Conservative mayoral hopeful, Shaun Bailey.
Last week, Bailey vowed to cut the bloat of City Hall in order to put more police on the streets to tackle burglaries and violent crime, all of which have risen since Sadiq Khan became mayor in 2016.
He has correctly diagnosed huge overspending by the Labour incumbent on culture, PR, bureaucracy and – ludicrously – 40,000 free Travelcards for friends and families of Transport for London employees, which Bailey estimates are worth £31.9million in fares revenue, and could fund 541 detectives.
It’s all very well arming Central London counter-terror officers to the teeth. But without a police presence on the streets where people actually live, not only does crime flourish, ordinary citizens begin to feel that they’re completely unprotected by the state that they fund so fulsomely in tax.
Without bobbies on the beat, our entire sense of civilised life is threatened – and my perilous walk home through litter and dodgy characters is a case in point.