Daily Mail, January 6 2003

Placid Britain has been mugged with a sub-machine gun while dozing in front of the TV. Over and over again, we have told ourselves smugly that we are not like America. We don’t have its its violence, its crazy gun culture and its astronomical murder rate.

Now, though, we are realising that our tranquil self-image has been stolen from under our noses.

The terrible killing of two teenage girls and the wounding of two others in Birmingham has shocked us into acknowledging that our cities increasingly resemble the shoot-out at the OK corral. Firearms offences have doubled since Labour took office, up by 20 per cent in the last year alone.

Two men were shot dead last week in Sheffield and Liverpool. A gunman has been firing at police from a siege in Hackney, a London borough where drive-by shootings and other gun crime have become almost routine.

Now the Home Secretary is frantically semaphoring that he is the toughest dude on the street. So he’s bringing in a five-year minimum sentence for possessing an illegal firearm, and he may ban replica guns which can be converted to working weapons.

That loud crack you’ve just heard was not another gunshot; it was the sound of the stable door being bolted after smacking the horses on the rump and watching them disappear over the horizon.

We now have gun law in Britain because our politicians, police and judges have given up on the actual law. The police long ago retreated from the streets, abandoning communities not just to crime but to intimidation so grave that people are too terrified to give evidence in court against the killers.

The government has given up trying to reduce drug taking, the fuel on which the gun culture runs. Instead, its disastrous ‘harm reduction’ drugs policy has resulted in burgeoning drug use and the crack cocaine epidemic engulfing the slums.

The judges, meanwhile, have given up enforcing justice. Instead, they are enforcing their belief that prison doesn’t work and the jails should be less overcrowded. The lamentable guideline judgment from the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, which laid down that burglars who would have got up to 18 months in jail should now be given community sentences instead, has already produced preposterous results.

A drug addict who burgled seven homes was released with a community drug treatment order by a judge who said he would have gone to prison had it not been for Lord Woolf’s guidelines. In similar vein, a judge thoughtfully gave a community sentence to a machete-wielding burglar with 51 previous convictions to enable him to realise his ‘undoubted talent for writing poetry’.

David Blunkett is said to be spitting tacks. But hang on: in November, he joined forces with the Lord Chancellor and the Attorney General to call for greater use of community penalties as an alternative to custody, to reduce prison overcrowding.

Now that Lord Woolf has done precisely as he was asked, though, Mr Blunkett appears intent on using him as the fall guy while posturing as the voice of public outrage.

Well, it just won’t wash. The gun culture has arisen through a comprehensive failure of nerve by an entire governing class, which has become more concerned about being thought to be nice people than doing what is necessary and right.

Criminal gangs from eastern Europe and Jamaica have been allowed into the country because of the failure of will to tackle asylum abuse. Now the Home Office is talking about curbing this traffic. How? It has lost control of the country’s borders because it is not prepared to enforce a tough-minded policy.

And the shameful endorsement by both government and the police top brass of the Macpherson ‘institutional racism’ smear has grossly handicapped the police in dealing with the growth of the gun culture in black communities – with the result that black victims have been abandoned.

But gun crime is the result of a far wider and deeper sickness. For this is a society which has come to distrust or even reject the function of law, social sanctions or stigma in restraining anti-social behaviour.

This is powerfully illustrated by the way in which, for the intelligentsia, illegal drugs are not the problem so much as the law which prohibits them. (Just wait, post-Birmingham, for some dumb trendie to say the way to end drug-related gun crime is to make all drugs legal). Every single person who has promoted drug liberalisation and said the law on drugs is an ass bears some responsibility for the gun law now engulfing our streets.

For it’s not merely idiotic to imagine that -- short of all drugs being given away free – the gangs would ever just pack up their squillion pound businesses and go away. Drugs themselves help create that ‘ice in the heart’ that causes people to kill each other. People are pulling guns not just to protect their criminal turf, but against minor slights -- a parking ticket, or someone treading on their foot or laughing at their haircut.

The rise of gang culture follows directly from other developments willed by our intelligentsia, such as the collapse of family and committed fatherhood. Lacking self-esteem because of their shattered emotional backgrounds, young men turn to the gangs to provide it.

Increasingly unable to distinguish fantasy from reality, they are all too vulnerable to the popular culture of violence and sadism – murderous computer games, or ‘gangsta rap’ with its glamourising of guns, violence and hatred.

But appalling as all this is, it need not be hopeless. We should look to America where, despite its appalling gun culture, several cities have managed to bring down crime.

They’ve done this by giving the utterly consistent signal that no law-breaking and disorder will be tolerated. That certainly means more police on the streets. It also means understanding that -- for crime victims -- prison works. But it also means – crucially -- communities taking responsibility for their own young.

A few years ago, the US city of Boston suffered epidemic gun crime, cocaine turf wars and staggering murder rates. Now its streets are relatively safe. It turned the situation round only when the black community – which disproportionately furnished both criminals and victims -- recognised the desperate need of their fatherless young men for father substitutes and of their whole community for spiritual leadership.

So its preachers came out of the pulpit and onto the streets. They worked closely with the police, going out on patrol together. And former gangsters who had themselves been reformed devoted themselves to teaching the new generations how to read and write, and other employment and social skills.

The crucial ingredient which is missing in Britain is optimism. Americans believe they can improve the human condition. But in Britain, our governing class is sunk in deep pessimism. It believes it can’t beat social problems but can only institutionalise them, whether it’s family breakdown, drug taking, or educational failure.

The gun culture can only be defeated if this country shakes off this decadent defeatism and rediscovers the fighting spirit required to solve our social problems.

Posted by admin at January 6, 2003