When will the state protect the public?
Last Wednesday my colleague James Kirkup wrote in about ministers’ need to stop obsessing about Brexit and to get on with tackling other issues, notably the NHS, that seem on the verge of disaster. Sadly, the state’s current failures go even more widely than James had room to describe.
There is a crisis in what may best be described as public safety. The Armed Forces are undermanned, under-equipped and underfunded, an outrageous dereliction in light of mounting aggression from Vladimir Putin. This was the Cameron administration’s doing, but Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, must have known, when Secretary of State for Defence between 2011 and 2014, just how precarious things were. In the interests of ambition, he kept his mouth shut. There is no excuse now.
It is also clear from my postbag that many people have lost confidence in the police. In my county, Essex, the detection rate for burglary is 4 per cent. In rural areas, gangs of thieves and poachers descend on farms and agricultural businesses, contemptuous of the police. In my own hapless “force” it takes a year to carry out so simple a procedure as renewing a shotgun certificate: no wonder more complex activities, such as stopping criminals, seem beyond them.
The speed with which police arrest people for “hate crimes”, following offensive remarks about minorities, contrasts with the utter failure to bring in thieves. However, the police seem exceptionally swift to tell victims with extensive CCTV footage of crimes that there is insufficient evidence to prosecute. I met a man last week who had lost £120,000 worth of goods during a burglary by a gang armed with baseball bats and tasers, every moment of which was filmed. This is an outrage, and destroys faith in the rule of law.
Finally, our prisons are experiencing riots on a scale not seen for a generation. Drugs and mobile telephones are openly available and used. This, too, shatters public confidence. Thanks to their phones, prisoners can continue managing criminal enterprises while locked up, with a decent supply of illegal substances enabling them to carry on their recreational activities, too.
None of this will be easy to sort out. Money is tight, so existing budgets must be raided. Since it appears the Department for International Development is spending £12.2 billion a year developing mainly the bank balances of “consultants”, or the careers of pop groups in the Third World, and is struggling to find other ways to squander it, that is where to start. The department should be closed, and a small fraction of its cash used to employ a Foreign Office official with a contingency fund at his or her disposal to help with earthquakes, famines and tsunamis. With things so bad in our own country, the farce of wasting public money in this way cannot continue.
The best overseas aid would be to spend much of that £12.2 billion rearming, and quickly. We cannot fulfil our Nato obligations effectively as things stand. What if Putin goes beyond cyber-warfare in the Baltic states or Poland, as well he might? We have a few hundred brave soldiers in Eastern Europe, but in numbers that will make Putin laugh. Only a really substantial force, such as the old British Army on the Rhine, would make any difference to him, and it is time we left our fantasy world and recognised this.
The police probably do need a little more money, but only to put boots on the ground in areas that never see an officer from one decade to the next. Rural police stations should be reopened, and in urban areas beat officers should be increased. But it is the management of the police, influenced by poisonously Left-wing attitudes in the Home Office, that needs to be radicalised. Too many chief constables have spent too much time behind desks and not enough out catching criminals. Promotion in recent years has depended on how far they are soaked in the ideology of political correctness.
A reader wrote to me recently about how, when taking his grandchildren one afternoon to an open public space, they were confronted by men performing sex acts on each other. He complained to the police and found their response to be dismissive.
With brownie points scored most effectively for seeking out and prosecuting “hate crime”, attitudes certainly must change – among the police, that is. Chief constables must be reminded of their duty first and foremost to protect the public and their property. The failure on that front is disastrous, and too few are sacked for their derelictions.
If criminals are caught they need a prison regime that is properly corrective and rehabilitative. That hardly exists. The Prison Officers’ Association is correctly described as the most intransigent union any minister has to deal with; but its members have the most intransigent problems to handle. I have long thought that privatising prisons was a mistake, and conditions have become far worse since it happened. The state must take them over again, and institute a disciplined, high-calibre service with a proper a pride in its work, with officers acting as role models for prisoners – not supplying drugs and mobile phones. Those who have must see life from the other side of the bars. There is a loss of control in the prison service, and only radical reform will restore it.
Brexit is no excuse for not dealing with these and the other problems James identified last week. Nor is the absence of a sane opposition. The public pay their taxes and expect ministers to ensure they live in a safe country. If the Government fails to do that, punishment at the ballot box may be the least of its worries.