If you are interested in changes in English culture from, say 1956, when there were still quite large pockets of disquiet at the introduction of government-sponsored gambling in the form of Premium Bonds, and still for the Labour Party the redistribution of income by gambling was morally only marginally superior to its redistribution by theft,… [Read More]
Cultures and Crimes, Civitas’s new book on crime and the police, will be published early next week. Cultures and Crimes looks at crime and policing within the context of the cultures of four societies, England, France, Germany and the United States. I am one of the authors, and in the case of this volume I… [Read More]
Due to the recent enforced closure of the Merseyside-based firm that supplied the NHS with flu-vaccine and diamorphine, it is reported in today’s papers that the country’s hospitals face the prospect of running out of supplies of the painkiller in a mere matter of weeks. This is no laughing matter, since diamorphine is used in… [Read More]
Can this really be the season to be jolly, given with each passing day some new nail is driven into the coffin of England’s traditional liberties? Today’s depressing news concerns Sikh playwright, Guperpreet Kaur Bhatti. Her dramatised depiction of rape and murder in a Sikh temple or Gurdawara so offended some of her co-religionists that… [Read More]
Mr Kaye has raised a key issue in pointing out that the number of crimes has increased out of all proportion to the increase in the number of police officers and the “police extended family”. In the early 1990s there were 128,000 police officers year by year in England and Wales. The numbers declined somewhat… [Read More]
I have been asked to add a bit to my last posted article. In it I said that crime had been brought down in the 1990s by people’s own precautions, instituted because they were very reasonably experiencing a growing fear of crime; but that crime on the streets, the control of which depended on the… [Read More]
Perhaps unwisely, David Blunkett , said that Jack Straw left the Home Office in a mess. The Government has placed great emphasis on its Public Service Agreement (PSA) targets. According to the Treasury, they ‘have become increasingly outcome-focused’, and are now supported by ‘rigorous performance information’. (Spending Review 2004.) However, in two cases, performance has… [Read More]
Now that Mr Blunkett is no longer Home Secretary, can we expect some slight remission in the flow of nonsense on crime from the Home Office? In the past few months the Home Office has taken to chanting the mantra that crime is at a historically low level. That’s on the childhood principle, presumably, that… [Read More]
No one could remotely accuse today’s secularists who make up the bulk of the metropolitan ‘liberal’ elite of Europe and the United States of sharing the same political agenda as Adolf Hitler. However, they both share one common objective that should send chills down the spines of true lovers of liberty, given how easily this… [Read More]
‘I am sure WMD will be discovered.’ ‘I am sure David Blunkett will be exonerated.’ If only the Prime Minister would reveal which crew he is sure will win the next Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race!