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Read Hitchens. His latest book systematically takes apart the development of the police service in the 20th century and exposes how the police force, once a representative of the civil population with close contact on the streets, has become sealed off and paramilitary in its operations over the last 40 years - and lost the respect of the law-abiding public in the process. He sets out how, despite there being more police and support staff per capita of population than ever before, more crimes are being committed, reported and remaining unsolved than at any point during our history. He explains how clear-up statistics have replaced crime prevention as the policeman's focus, and how only 5% of any police force's staff are out 'on the beat' at any point.
Other law and order topics include the encroachment of government surveillance on personal liberty. If the reason for having ID cards is to protect us from terrorism, how did the Madrid bombings happen? Spain had ID cards since Franco. And why weren't they introduced during the height of IRA bombings in the UK? It's these sorts of questions which Hitchens asks to great effect - and he produces a few interesting answers.
It's shocking reading in parts. But whether you lean left or right, this book will give everyone pause for thought.
Most EU members lack habeas corpus, the presumption of innocence, single jeopardy, the right to silence and trial by jury. Now the EU wants to impose on us the European legal system (corpus juris), its mode of policing and its own prosecution service. Europol can already operate here, its officers immune from prosecution. Under the European arrest warrant, prosecuting authorities from any EU member country can order the arrest of a citizen of any other EU country. The Crown Prosecution Service is eliding into an EU prosecution service, an unaccountable servant of the state.
Hitchens makes an excellent case against ID cards, which would be compulsory and costly. He notes that the Australians and New Zealanders both defeated the proposal.
He points out that previous British governments wrongly copied US police methods unsuited to 'this wholly different country'. He notes, "the Victorian network of police stations has been lopped as drastically as were the railways by the half-witted Beeching cuts of the sixties." Thatcher closed a thousand police stations, one in three, between 1992 and 2002, and centralised the police force. The public want bobbies on the beat: we want laws enforced, not more laws and rights. Macpherson aimed to institutionalise racism, demanding, "'Colour-blind' policing must be outlawed."
Hitchens urges that we build new mental hospitals, ending the 'shameful Care in the Community programme' and getting the mentally ill out of prisons. He argues persuasively against decriminalising drugs.
This government overrules the rule of law, suspends habeas corpus and defends those who close down theatres. Its acts, particularly the Racism and Xenophobia Directive and a new offence of 'religiously aggravated threatening behaviour' threaten our freedom of thought and speech: behaviour is either threatening or it isn't - the law should deal with actions, not with thoughts.
All these attacks on our freedoms are allowed, if not obligatory, under the EU Constitution.
This book is an excepional insight into exactly what is wrong with Britain today. Read more
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