A Sad and Defeated Empire

Peter Hitchens has just popped up on my radar.  I wish he had done so earlier.  While he doesn't come close to redeeming his country, he does at least know what the problems are, if not what to do about them.

While it serves them right – or it would if most of them didn’t quite enjoy prison – it is also a fraud. It is precisely because these unlovely people have already been let off so many times that they are now as bad as they are.
It is not prison that is an expensive way of making bad people worse. It is this joke justice, defeatist and defeated, which ensures that almost nobody arrives in prison until he already has a higher degree in crime.

But he doesn't quite lay all the blame on the hooligans.  That would have been saccharine and easy and more importantly wrong.  The habit of coddling a once proud people is what ruined the nation.

Take our Prime Minister, who is once again defrauding far too many people. He uses his expensive voice, his expensive clothes, his well-learned tone of public-school command, to give the impression of being an effective and decisive  person. But it is all false. He has  no real idea of what to do. He  thinks the actual solutions to the problem are ‘fascist’. Deep down,  he still wants to ‘understand’ the hoodies.
Say to him that naughty children should be smacked at home and caned in school, that the police (and responsible adults) should be free to wallop louts and vandals caught in the act, that the police should return to preventive foot patrols, that prisons should be austere places of hard work, plain food and discipline without TV sets or semi-licit drugs, and that wrongdoers should be sent to them when they first take to crime, not when they are already habitual crooks, and he will throw up his well-tailored arms in horror at your barbarity.

While I'm not a fan of allowing cops to "wallop louts caught in the act" (how many seconds would it take for this to be abused? as many as ten?) I tend to agree.