Ridding Britain's Streets of Murderous Scum

Now here's a columnist who finally makes sense .....

JOIN THE REVOLUTION THAT WILL RID BRITAIN'S STREETS OF THIS MURDEROUS SCUM

http://www.express.co.uk/ourcomments/view/51122/Leo-McKinstry

Friday July 4,2008
By Leo McKinstry AS the criminal justice system grows ever more enfeebled, so our once gentle nation accelerates its slide towards anarchy.

What would have once been unthinkable in a well- ordered, peaceful Britain is becoming increasingly commonplace.

The savage murder of two brilliant French students in a flat in south London follows a series of fatal crimes in recent days, including the stabbing of teenager Ben Kinsella and an attack on a bus passenger in Hartlepool.

The butchery has prompted the usual hand-wringing from Left-wingers about “addressing issues”, “providing resources” and “giving kids something to do”. They should hang their heads in shame. 

For too long the legal system has been swayed by deluded, politically correct theories that criminal behaviour is caused by deprivation, inequality or racism and that offenders need support rather than punishment. The result of this sub-Marxist drivel is the lethal chaos we see all around us.

Many good citizens are in despair, reduced to believing that nothing can reverse the tide of savagery. Things can change for the better but only if the political class demonstrates an iron will to make it happen.

We need a vigorous counter- revolution against the Left-wing creed of victimhood that has seized the institutions which should be protecting the public. We should make a start with the police, who spend far too much time enmeshed in bureaucracy and not enough time on the streets.

It is absurd that, according to the latest report from the Inspectorate of Constabulary, half the working hours of sergeants are swallowed up by red tape. This culture of hiding in police stations has to end. Police officers should remember that their first duty is to act as a deterrent to crime by providing a visible presence on the streets.   

The police do not need more funding. With 133,000 officers, the force has never been larger. But the personnel are wasted through mismanagement and the soft, employee-led culture of the public sector. 

The concept of the beat, once the bedrock of British policing, has all but disappeared. It must be brought back and police chiefs should concentrate numbers where they are needed most: at known troublespots and at night when street crime is at its worst. It is ludicrous to have the thinnest deployment when police are most required.

The pieties of political correctness must be abandoned. Instead of continuing their obsession with diversity in recruitment, police chiefs should concentrate on hiring large, tough young men, preferably from the services, who might scare the living daylights out of offenders. 

They should also drop the absurd sensitivities over stop-and-search. So-called “community leaders” from ethnic minorities who bleat about discrimination should be ignored. Their creation of bogus griev­ances has only contributed to the climate of fear.

But greater rigour in policing will be useless without far tougher punishments. Sent­ences dished out by courts are a joke, especially the wretched community terms which are barely a slap on the wrist. Across the scale, criminals should be taught to fear the consequences of ending up in court.

That means bringing back the birch for young hooligans who sneer at the law and establishing far tougher sentences for all types of offences, including long mandatory terms for possession of weapons.

Life should really mean life and the death penalty should be re-introduced for the most heinous murders. There is nothing compassionate about leniency towards offenders – in fact, it is a form of institutionalised cruelty towards the
victims of crime.

Harsher sentences will mean the prison population more than doubling to at least 200,000. But given that we spend only £3billion on prisons, compared with £170billion on the benefits system, expenditure on jails will be a bargain.

And they do not need to be the lavish places of Labour Govern­ment thinking. A few ex-Army camps would suffice – the more primitive the conditions, the better. The one certain way to prevent miscreants from committing crime is to put them behind bars.

Other necessary institutional changes include repealing the Human Rights Act, which is nothing more than a charter for the enemies of society. Legal aid, that gravy train for Left-wing lawyers, should be drastically restricted. And to improve the police’s response to the concerns of the public, chief constables should be directly elected. 

The Crown Prosecution Service, which seems to think that its twin purposes are to persecute the ordinary public and to let hardened thugs walk free, also needs fundamental reform. Local elections would produce district prosecutors who would run on their record of putting away criminals, as in the US. 

Another vital step is to establish much tougher immigration controls to stop overseas criminals, such as Jamaican Yardie drug dealers and Eastern European gangsters, entering Britain.

The wilful dismantling of our borders by the Labour Government has caused the mass importation of Third World crime on to our streets.

It has also meant that more than a 10th of the prison population is made up of foreigners. All these should be deported, along with any migrants who are charged with a criminal offence. No one from abroad has an absolute right to live in this country.

Such a counter revolution would inevitably provoke squeals of outrage from the human rights brigade and the Brussels bureaucracy. But they are the ones who got us into this mess and their views must be over-ruled.

Only by regaining our moral self-confidence against crimin­ality can we start to restore our civilisation.

Good on you, Leo.