Rod Liddle's occasionally brilliant Spectator column strikes exactly the right note this week, commenting on Jacqui Smith's fear of walking the streets of the capital. That the Home Secretary can recognise the problem so clearly and still let her government's responsibility for it escape her attention suggests she is just as out of touch as those who complacently explain how safe we all are. He concludes:
"[W]e shouldn’t mistake the Home Secretary’s remarks for simple candour. It would have been candour if she’d said that she felt unsafe walking the streets of London of an evening, and this was at least partly a consequence of her own party’s policies towards crime and policing; the relentless pressure upon courts to find alternatives to prison, the diversion of police resources into the investigation of fatuous, ectoplasmic ‘hate crimes’, the refusal to accept that a specific criminal justice problem exists among one specific ethnic minority. And had then added, ‘Henceforth, this is something which I will try to put right.’ But she didn’t say that. There was no admission of culpability of any kind, no recognition of what seems — to almost all the rest of us — a simple case of cause and effect. ‘I don’t feel safe walking the streets: now, I wonder why that can be?’ was the gist."
Recent Comments