Put away your pointless troops, PM – only beat bobbies can stop terror

THERESA MAY should get herself a stick-on pencil moustache, some very dark glasses and a white military uniform with lots of medals and a set of fancy epaulettes. If she’s going to behave like a Third World leader, she ought to look like one. Troops on the streets, indeed. What a futile non-answer to the problem of terrorist murder this is, and what a complete departure from centuries of British liberty.

In all my travels, often to less fortunate parts of the world, troops posted on the streets have been an invariable sign of a society on the skids, and a government that prefers force to thought.

How humiliating and embarrassing that such scenes should come to our great free capital.

Actually, I suspect it’s something our dim state machine has wanted to do for ages, and now thinks it has the excuse for. Mrs May’s Cabinet, ignorant and lacking the robust old British loathing of such things, gave in and let it happen.

What is far worse is that the idea was not then mocked and jeered off the stage by the rest of us, as the ridiculous Blair creature’s futile dispatch of tanks and troops to Heathrow was back in 2003.

Year by year our hopeless egalitarian schools and our joke universities turn out more and more citizens who don’t know that you have to defend liberty all the time if you want to keep it.

Can anyone explain to me how militarising the country and dotting it with armed men in camouflage battle dress (designed to help them hide in forests) is a rational response to the atrocity in Manchester? Of course not. The two have no connection.

On the contrary, the sight of a once-great country over-reacting in this pointless way must cause our enemies to snigger in their bushy Islamic beards.

‘Look at the infidels scurrying about at our bidding,’ they must think. Why give them this satisfaction? It seems to me, as it has for some time, that old-fashioned beat coppers with a close, intimate knowledge of the areas they patrol would be much more likely to see these atrocities coming than clanking robocops, soldiers or our vaunted and hyped ‘security’ services, who are always claiming to protect us but have failed so completely in this and several other cases. Such killers almost invariably come from among the swirling underworld of drug-taking petty criminals.

The Manchester murderer, Salman Abedi, was, unsurprisingly, a cannabis abuser. His recent behaviour – yelling prayers in the street – had been strange.

Ought not someone in authority to have noticed when a bearded young religious fanatic with a drug habit started buying large quantities of hair bleach? He plainly wasn’t planning to become a blond. But who was there to listen to such fears? A police car driving by at 30mph? A phone number that nobody answers? A police station that’s shut?

IHAVE noticed that any dissent from the standard view of these events is met, on social media and elsewhere, with attempts to claim that my views show some sort of disrespect to the victims and their grieving families. will not give in to this nasty dictatorship of grief.

I am just as distressed by the horrors of Manchester as anyone else. I refuse to be told I’m not sad enough, because I don’t conform to the Government’s thought-free response to it, which has now been failing for many years. Nor should you be.

Get the soldiers back into their barracks, and bring back proper police foot patrols.