While our ruling classes enjoy their permanent holiday from reality, Britain continues to swirl down the drain. I am bored and exasperated by political news, as I suspect millions of others are.
But I read with disgust, and a total lack of surprise, of the case of Che Ambe, who hacked off another man’s hand in a suburban street.
He will go to prison for a few years, and then be let out, to make way for all the other people like him.
Che Ambe, 21, carried out the savage attack. Read, if you can bear to, the account of the crime, in an ordinary suburb with the homely, comfortable name of Abbots Langley in Hertfordshire. Not that homely. Not that comfortable
They now exist in such numbers that we must all fear meeting them, sooner or later, in the street or perhaps in our own violated homes.
The judge weirdly blamed Ambe’s parents for the chaos and violence of his life. What a silly thing to say.
Does he have anyone who can really be called a parent – an adult related to him, with some authority and control over him? I shouldn’t think so.
Read, if you can bear to, the account of the crime, in an ordinary suburb with the homely, comfortable name of Abbots Langley in Hertfordshire. Not that homely. Not that comfortable.
Ambe, then 21, sliced Tyler Stevens’s hand off with a single blow of some sort of long, heavy knife. They found his hand later, but couldn’t sew it back on. He now has to have help cutting up his food.
A young Che Ambe, pictured in a shirt and tie, standing behind his grandfather, and next to his grandmother, and his mother, pictured on the far right
It will come as no surprise if it turns out that Ambe has been breaking the unenforced laws against marijuana possession, probably hundreds of times, since he was about 11 years old.
Even the police have managed to prosecute him four times for drug possession, something they are very reluctant to do.
The police don’t want anyone to wonder if their almost total failure to enforce the drug laws makes this sort of brutal crime more likely, which it does.
Ambe, then 21, sliced Tyler Stevens’s hand off with a single blow of some sort of long, heavy knife. They found his hand later, but couldn’t sew it back on. He now has to have help cutting up his food
Note that last Thursday the number of victims of violent crime who have died from their injuries in London alone this year passed 100.
There are lots of things that could be done about this, if anybody cared or was interested. But I’ve been unable to find more than a couple of people in Westminster who are even slightly prepared to think about it.
This is a real problem. The calibre of men and women in full-time politics, and the calibre of most of those who report their doings, is pitiful.
To my direct knowledge, they are bottomlessly ignorant about crime, drugs, education, the EU, the police, prisons, and the disastrous effect of government family policy.
On all these things they mouth self-righteous, cliched slogans picked up from the BBC, the national headquarters of conventional wisdom.
They know almost nothing about the country outside their little gossip factory, and they shut their minds to a lot of what they do know. They don’t want responsibility. They just want to feel important and compassionate. That is why they have welcomed the long holiday of irresponsibility which the EU issue has given them.
From the moment when they first abdicated their duty to decide, and authorised the disastrous referendum, it has grown worse.
When it turned out that leaving the EU involved a compromise, they wouldn’t agree to one because they were scared of the responsibility. Instead, they posed as iron-jawed, brave defenders of a principle they couldn’t actually put into practice.
When they grew tired of a leader who repeatedly urged that compromise on them, they took a mental vacation. They replaced her with an amusing act, Al ‘Boris’ Johnson. He pretended to be a growling, heroic John Bull.
Judge Michael Kay QC, sentencing, slammed Ambe’s parents for the way he was brought up and said the case was ‘a story of our times’
But he turned out instead to be the fall guy in a remake of The Wrong Trousers, marched hither and thither from defeat to catastrophe by a sinister remote controller.
Do I have a solution? Yes. I’ve been urging the necessary reforms for years now. But they won’t even be mentioned or discussed in the wearisome Election that is soon going to be forced on us by these vain, futile people.
The best reaction to that Election will be to stay at home in our millions. It is only our votes that give our political class the power to ignore us. Without them, who would they be?
A mass abstention would force them to step aside for somebody better. And then they could go off and live, unprotected by privilege, in the desolation they have created – where you might find a severed human hand on the roadside verge, and not be as surprised as you ought to be.
But dare you take the responsibility for such a revolution?
In modern China, a true surveillance state is coming into being, with the streets scanned by facial recognition cameras that can pick suspects out of football crowds. Think it can’t happen here?
Well, the High Court last week ruled that the use of such technology by South Wales Police was fine. They said it did not violate the privacy or ‘human rights’ of those being scanned.
The judges said, complacently: ‘The algorithms of the law must keep pace with new and emerging technologies.’
Must they? Even if that means we gradually turn into a 1984-type despotism?
Who looks out for our liberties in these cases? A thrilling new TV series, The Capture, starring Holliday Grainger as an ambitious copper, is now exploring this question.
It hinges on the accuracy and reliability of surveillance cameras. These days CCTV evidence is the gold standard for any prosecution, if not actually essential.
But, just as its absence doesn’t prove that nothing happened, isn’t it very easy for unscrupulous people to meddle with it? Yes, it is. And if the State itself is unscrupulous, what then?
Who looks out for our liberties in these cases? A thrilling new TV series, The Capture, starring Holliday Grainger as an ambitious copper, is now exploring this question. It hinges on the accuracy and reliability of surveillance cameras
Control my criticism? I’ve got an opinion on that…
Plenty of people don’t like what I write. Many of them tell me so, sometimes quite fiercely. That’s as it should be in a free society. But should anyone be able to regulate my opinions?
The think-tank Policy Exchange is warning that some sort of opinion regulator may gradually be taking shape in this once-free country.
The Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) currently makes sure that newspapers tell the truth, which is necessary and right.
But some people want it to go further than that. And IPSO has quietly announced that it has created ‘an informal working group’ to help draft guidance for journalists on how to report on issues connected with Islam and Muslims.
Well, a lot of people do say inaccurate things about Muslims, and jump to conclusions about Islam that are not justified by the facts.
If they do so then their errors and inaccuracies need to be corrected. But that is as far as it should go.
Good factual journalism can sometimes upset people. It has to. So can robust comment.
And those who are criticised will sometimes try to pretend that legitimate criticism or exposure is motivated by bigotry.
Very probably the BBC and the police will join in. And the Twitter mob will hound those involved, sometimes successfully.
There are also plans for the official definition of supposed ‘Islamophobia’ as being ‘rooted in racism… a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness’.
Once they can get the police to accept this, then any criticisms of Islam at all will become risky, quite possibly a ‘hate crime’. This is quite wrong.
Like all religions, Islam is also a set of political opinions, which we should all be free to criticise. IPSO should abandon this initiative.
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