A few dozen meters away, crime scene investigators in white boiler suits and blue helmets had broken from their work to drink Fanta. Behind them stood the charred remains of a modest suburban home. Last Wednesday, Natalie McDonald and her seven-year-old niece, Valentina Foster, had been killed as it burned. A 23-year-old man has since been charged.

In a small patch of green beside the property, a memorial has blossomed, with bouquets of flowers bunched on the ground and a balloon floating above them. “Rest in peace,” reads a red note tied to a fence, seemingly handwritten by a child. “I know angels are real but I know Valentina is one.” Looking up from here, one can peer through one of the shattered windows at black beams and black walls, the deep, charcoal black of total destruction.

Down the road and around the corner sits another memorial and more bouquets. Nestled between them is a small plastic police car. It marks a spot near where, four days before the house fire, in an unconnected incident, two constables and five young men were killed when the young men drove their Volkswagen Passat the wrong way up the A66. The youths had amassed 37 convictions, from car theft to racial harassment, between them and, according to Cleveland Police, were linked to serious and organized crime. In the hours leading up to the crash, a Volvo SUV had rammed a home inhabited by the father of Cole Worthy, one of the men in the Volkswagen Passat. The Volkswagen Passat chased the Volvo with the police in pursuit, and when the Volvo veered onto the wrong side of the road to escape it crashed.

At a vigil for some of the young men, masked mourners released balloons. At another, cars were spun around and torched in a field. A man has since been stabbed in a suburb near the site of the house fire, while yet another house has been rammed. In an attempt to reassert command, hundreds of cops were deployed to the area.

In this corner of Middlesbrough, then, violence seems to be spiraling, a series of tit-for-tat attacks escalating beyond anyone’s control. The town already has the highest crime rate in the country outside central London. It is akin to “terrorism”, says Andy McDonald, a local MP. It’s a “feral underclass” gone wild, says Andy Preston, the former mayor. Speak to locals and they will blame feuding drug gangs and their teenage runners, battling for market domination. 

Almost all of the recent crimes have taken place in just one postcode, TS6, a collection of deprived estates and suburban terraces in the town’s southeast. “TS6 has gone mad,” one local is reported to have told the Yorkshire Post. “It’s brutal.” 

The area is remote, out on the edge of Middlesbrough. Turn one corner and you can see hills, turn another and you might spot an industrial estate or a brutalist church. In a field behind one street, I found five horses, as still and as artfully placed as statues. (These, a resident informed me, were the product of a local trend to live as “wannabe gypsies”.)

Dave lives here in a dark brick and PVC terrace, as neat as a doll’s house. When I introduced myself, he had been on his hands and knees gardening, but when I asked him about crime he ushered me inside to show me his bat. Dave’s bat is very big. It was at least half my height and thicker than those used to play baseball with a black tape grip at its base. Dave is a sober professional who asked me not to reveal his job or use his real name. He is concerned he might be sacked if he ever uses the bat. But he is more concerned about the criminals. 

One night recently, while he was cleaning his bathroom, a lad knocked on the front door and asked for money to get home to his mam. Dave shut the door on him and called the police, but they didn’t come. One hour later, the lad was still in his front garden, so Dave stepped outside with the bat and said, “I’ll tell you once, fuck off while you can.” Eventually, the lad fucked off.  

Another time, Dave was out shopping and two young boys began following him, waving and repeating “hello” in an eerie, drugged out key. He wanted to give them a clip round the ear, like adults used to be able to do, but he worried about getting a criminal record. So he told two police officers, and when they searched the boys they found a knife. It was as long as this, Dave told me, holding his hands at least eight inches apart.

If his mates don’t have a bat they’ll have something else by the door: a decorative sword, an axe, a pick-axe handle. “Everyone’s getting the same mentality,” he said. “If someone’s coming in my house they’re getting it. It’s fight or flight.” He is putting up CCTV cameras and has learned the legal boundaries of self-defense. Where the state will not act, he is prepared to. 

By now we were standing in Dave’s kitchen, which was very white and smelled faintly of cleaning products. He had pulled off one gardening glove to vape. Everything seemed to be deteriorating in Middlesbrough, he said. He told me about a local smackhead he knows, only a little over 40 but as taut and pale as a corpse, shot and stabbed several times, his habit funding the violence coursing through the area. 

For poor children growing up in TS6, the easy money offered by selling drugs can be alluring. “I would see kids going past in scruffy clothes,” Dave said. “First they’d get a new bike, then they’d get a new phone. Then they’d have brand new clothes. Then they’d have an e-bike and they’d pull out a £20 note in the corner shop to buy milk and say ‘keep the change’. They’d pull it out of a roll of cash.”

Boys on bikes and electric scooters are constantly zipping around TS6. None of them seemed keen to talk. “What’s it like living here?” I asked a hooded young man with crooked teeth. “Shit,” came the monosyllabic reply.  

Once, this was Ironopolis. There was ore in the hills and a river running to the sea and from the dawn of the 19th century the place boomed, dragging in workers and throwing up industries. In the wake of iron came steel and chemical manufacturing and shipbuilding. A hamlet of two dozen people was transformed into a global industrial center. Visiting in 1862, Gladstone dubbed Middlesbrough “infant Hercules”: the youngest child of England’s enterprise. “We built the world,” wrote the poet Ian Horn many years later. “Every metropolis came from Ironopolis.”

Then came many decades of decline until, in 2015, Teesside steelworks closed. Sahaviriya Steel Industries, the Thai conglomerate by then in control of the business, blamed falling prices. It was, the Northern Echo declared, “The End”. For one local steelmaker, Ken McGlasson, that meant the end of 31 years of employment. “For the North East,” the paper mourned, “it is the end of an industry which was the bedrock of the regional economy for 170 years.”

Middlesbrough is now one of the most deprived places in Britain. In 2022, the local authority had the highest rate of drug and alcohol related mortality and the second highest rate of suicide in the North East. (“They’re not mentally ill,” declared a paper on the phenomenon, “their lives are just shit.”) As of last year, the town had the highest proportion of deprived neighborhoods of any council in Britain. 

Such statistics stack up here like steel girders, but do they explain the lawlessness? “Teaching kids right from wrong doesn’t cost a penny,” said Margaret (not her real name), who was standing in her front garden with her chin resting on a broom. Standards have collapsed within just a few years, she believes. People she knows are frightened to walk out at night while young men speed about the place on quadbikes. 

Close to her home is a green electrical box onto which someone has written “RIP LEW LEW” in white paint and pasted two photos of a young man. In one he is wearing a Gucci cap; in the other he is sitting on what appears to be an electric bike, his middle finger raised to the camera. This is Lewis Ward, killed four years ago when a car crashed into him while he was riding an e-scooter. One of the men in the vehicle had threatened to “ram” Ward, his friend later claimed, but no one was ever charged over his death.

For Margaret, the rocketing crime rate is down to soft parenting rather than economics, the result of a culture in which children are raised by teenage parents ill prepared to enforce discipline. In 2019, Middlesbrough had the highest rate of teen pregnancy in England and Wales. She still has faith in the police, she told me, but believes their hands are tied.

Ironically, given the events of the past fortnight, Cleveland Police had recently seemed to be on the up, to have recovered from a nadir. In the decade from 2009, the number of officers on the force fell from 1,756 to 1,198. Then, in 2019, the force was put into special measures after becoming the first in the nation to be rated inadequate in all areas. Its own staff told inspectors the organization was “directionless, rudderless and clueless”. One inspector had preyed on young women for sex, anti-terror legislation was used to spy on journalists, and the chief constable was found guilty of gross misconduct after he looked at his female colleague’s lap and told her that if she wanted to she could “touch herself”.

But in 2023, the force was taken out of special measures. An inspection last year concluded that it was good in half of all areas and inadequate in none. “We’ve put a lot of effort into making sure criminals see consequences for their actions,” then Chief Constable Mark Webster told the BBC. It is hard to find anyone in TS6 who would agree with that statement. 

Cole Worthy’s father lives in a quiet, blue-collar suburb several miles to the east. When I arrived, almost a week after the crash, the consequences of the ramming attack were plain to see. The front wall of the house was part collapsed, all the windows were shattered, and the front door was hanging open to the world. 

I wanted to understand what would drive a boy from a decent neighborhood to such a mindless death. But when I knocked at the neighbors’ doors they refused to talk. Cole did not stay here often, explained one woman. Another began shaking as we spoke. “I don’t dare,” she told me softly, explaining that she feared what would happen if she was witnessed speaking to a journalist. “You understand. I’m scared they’ll see you on the doorstep.” A third woman repeated the same concern and, apologizing, closed the door in my face. I understood.

When I spoke to Andy Preston, he told me that his constituents had said much the same to him while he served as their mayor between 2019 and 2023. It seemed that a code of omertà was developing across the town, as if post-industrial England had become Naples under the Camorra. Such fears were exaggerated, Preston said, but pervasive across Middlesbrough nonetheless. 

The thugs did, however, pose a threat to local politics, he added. When a councilor he knew tried to put up CCTV cameras to deter antisocial behavior, one of the boys who would later die in the A66 crash had threatened to stab them, Preston claimed. Other councilors were now scared of discussing crime publicly and would only comment anonymously in the media. “What’s happened in Middlesbrough in the last seven days, it isn’t normal in terms of the rapidity and the escalation but the individual issues and the tit-for-tat violence is normal,” he said. For years, a fall out between factions of the drug trade in the town had been fueling attacks. Criminals were brandishing machetes in the street and firing shotguns at houses, Preston said. “I’ve always been astonished that it takes an actual crisis for politicians to give a fuck about it.”

The police, meanwhile, have become desensitized to gang warfare. In Preston’s telling, Middlesbrough was just the most prominent flare-up of a national catastrophe: a limp justice system failing communities in which a culture of dependency and delinquency has festered. 

The idea that this culture was simply down to a lack of jobs was a convenient lie, he argued. For many years, employment had been available in Middlesbrough for those who wished to work instead of selling drugs and claiming benefits. And if the police were to lock up a hard-core of criminal leaders, the scrotes following them would back down. Instead, The Telegraph revealed last week, under a scheme run by Cleveland Police, criminals arrested for possessing knives can dodge prison by accepting mental health support and promising not to reoffend.

TS6, Margaret told me, was simply forgotten. Politicians cared about the city center, not the outskirts. It had taken nine deaths in a week for anyone to pay attention. Now there were police patrolling the streets in pairs, as if we had returned to the Fifties, and journalists with southern accents were walking around taking notes on the decaying urban fabric. No wonder they wanted us to fuck off. 

Middlesbrough may top some unfortunate statistical rankings but it is hardly unique. I have reported from postcodes in south Bristol and inner-city Birmingham which feature just the same blight. Young men, jobless and bored, circling the streets on electric bikes. Knife crime rates rising, pushed by TikTok beefs and escalating bravado. A fractious drug economy sustained by taut, pale users. Through chance, a crisis has exploded into view here first. It is unlikely to be the last.

I thought of Hogan when I first read about Lindsay Clancy, who leapt from a second-floor window of her Massachusetts home in January 2023. Clancy was not holding her three children; they lay dead or dying in the basement, after their mother had strangled them with exercise bands. Although there are clear similarities between the two cases, my current feelings toward Clancy are very different from those I had toward Hogan. Like many feminists at the time, I struggled to sympathize with him. The “earthquake of insanity” line, in the context of a domestic dispute and a wife who wishes to leave, did not seem to indicate sustained mental illness, but a version of the old provocation defense overwhelmingly relied on by abusive men. By contrast, I find myself feeling enormous pity for Clancy, despite the horror she inflicted on five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old baby Callan. Her defense claims she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, left undiagnosed in the months leading up to the killings, during which she repeatedly sought help. While this does not lessen the horror of her actions, it suggests a different loss of control — not anger or hatred, but something far more desperate.

I am not alone in feeling this way. Clancy has attracted outpourings of sympathy from mothers ever since the killings took place. By early February 2023, following the announcement that state prosecutors would be pursuing murder charges, many were sharing their own postpartum struggles, some even suggesting that “it could be any one of us”. One open letter signed by more than 80 women declared that “as mothers, we know Lindsay was not in a healthy space to carry out the acts she is accused of and we will stand by her in her darkest hour as we wish any other mother would do for us if we found ourselves struggling too”. Now that the trial is taking place, supporters have gathered outside the courtroom, wearing pink clothing as a show of solidarity and displaying slogans such as “Believe” and “She Needed Help”. A GoFundMe on behalf of Clancy’s parents, to help with their travel and living costs, has now raised more than one million dollars. It is hard to think of a comparable example in which a father has killed his own children and received so much support. Few men would want to say, “I could have been John Hogan, too”.

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While the trial is nominally about the distinction between madness and badness, Clancy’s identity as a mother has shaped the public debate around it. In a 2024 interview with the New Yorker, her ex-husband Patrick described her as someone who loved her children but whose mental state deteriorated dramatically toward the end of 2022. Clancy consulted multiple therapists over her anxiety and insomnia, was prescribed an increasing number of medications, and had a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital at the beginning of 2023. She disclosed her thoughts of harming her children to her family because they so terrified her. At no point was any severe mental illness diagnosed. For many, this timeline offers a ready-made feminist narrative. It is what happens when mothers are ignored, when maternal health is trivialized, and when research into female psychiatric disorders is neglected. It is “fundamentally a story”, writes The New Yorker‘s Jessica Winter, “of who is listened to, who is believed and taken seriously, and who isn’t”. The case of a woman killing her own children has become an argument for greater compassion toward women — rather than serving as a reminder that women can be just as violent as men.

One does not have to doubt Clancy’s account to feel a little uneasy about this conclusion. Postnatal mental health is indeed neglected, and postpartum psychosis is yet to gain formal classification as a distinct disorder. Yet the fact remains that Clancy committed a horrendous act. Is her trial really the place for pink t-shirts and #BelieveHer sloganeering? And is Clancy really the representative that this cause needs? Female support for Clancy has been a gift to anyone wishing to define feminism as hypocritical or present feminists as willing to defend the most evil acts just because a woman has committed them. I myself worry about my own fixation on Clancy’s suffering over that of her children. Could it be that we are all reluctant to acknowledge the extremity of female violence because it is so politically inconvenient? 

Still, I do not feel my pity is entirely misplaced. Many of the recommendations being made by Clancy’s supporters are uncontroversial: more understanding and better treatment of postnatal mental health crises, less pressure on mothers to hide their struggles, more joined-up prescribing of psychiatric medication. Nonetheless, it is not clear whether any of this would have stopped Clancy from killing her children. Her treatment was flawed but, as Patrick Clancy later pointed out, she seemed to be going through a positive phase immediately before the killings, making it impossible for him and others to know when to intervene. This does not seem to be an instance in which one can simply blame the patriarchy. Indeed, to do so risks sanitizing the maternal experience. I think there are other, darker reasons why many mothers feel sympathy for Clancy.

When mothers claim they “could have been Lindsay Clancy”, it is more than just an expression of solidarity. Clancy has become a vessel for a kind of collective maternal fear. Many of us have tried to imagine what it would be like to end up in her situation. In the midst of all the sleeplessness and isolation of early motherhood, the physical power we have over our children feels horrendous and threatening. We care about Lindsay Clancy because she is our very worst nightmare. We pictured ourselves in her shoes before she even committed her terrible act.

Postpartum psychosis is rare, and postpartum psychosis leading to the murder of one’s own children is rarer still. There are countless mentally ill mothers out there who do not kill their children. However, intrusive thoughts of harming one’s baby are common. More than half of new mothers experience them and they are not related to any greater incidence of actual harm. When my own sons were tiny, I lived in terror of “mad moments” in which I might throw them down the stairs or drop them out of a window. The feeling was akin to the thoughts you might have standing on a high ledge, terrified that you might suddenly decide to step off, even though that is the last thing you want to do. The comforting explanation for these thoughts is that they are linked to a desire not to harm but to protect your child. We run through a film reel of the most terrible things that could happen to our children: harm coming through our own hands being the most terrible of all. When we look at Lindsay Clancy, we see the most horrific malfunction of maternal love and feel immense relief that this never happened to us. That is why we feel sorry for her.

Of course, an intrusive thought is not the same as a “command hallucination” or hearing a voice telling you, as Clancy later put it, that “she had to kill her children and herself”. One of the most chilling elements of Clancy’s account of her actions is the sense of time pressure. She felt that she had to act in that moment or “neither she nor her children would be safe”. It is hard not to ask “what if that moment had never come?” She must, surely, think of this constantly.

Clancy’s act is not excusable, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t worthy of our compassion. In the end, however, there are no slogans that can remedy this tragedy and there is no one else to blame. The mind can do terrible, twisted things out of love as well as hate.

The recent case of Shabir Ahmed, ringleader of a Rochdale grooming gang, illustrates the problem perfectly. His victims were repeatedly told he would be deported upon being released from prison, only to discover that a decades-old legal provision meant this had never actually been possible, with the Government scrambling to find a work-around. And now, we see the same pattern over early release. Grand announcements are made, that serious child sex offenders will not leave prison early — only for the public to discover that the law excludes offenders whose crimes were committed before 2003.

Surely the lawyers and ministers making these high-profile announcements should know the law before standing in front of the cameras? After all, these are hardly obscure technicalities that emerge from nowhere. They are fundamental legal provisions that should already be understood. Though perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that when Whitehall concocts policy on the hoof, reality is quick to catch up.

All this does more than expose incompetence. It also erodes public confidence in the Government and criminal justice system, with the wider public left wondering whether anyone in power actually knows what they are doing. I certainly wonder it too.

In the end, though, this is about more than politics. For survivors of child sexual exploitation, every announcement raises hope, every reversal destroys it, and every correction creates fear and uncertainty. At the Maggie Oliver Foundation, the charity I set up to support victims of sexual abuse, we meet countless survivors struggling to cope with the constant mixed messages. Every press release, every correction, retraumatizes people who have endured more than any human being should ever have to.

None of this is new. For over a decade, I’ve watched politicians, police forces and public institutions react to events instead of planning for them. I’ve seen point-scoring replace careful thought, and comms take precedence over honest accountability. Governments appear desperate to look decisive and capable, yet too often the detail just isn’t there.

And, through it all, it’s impossible not to reflect on our new prime minister. Today, Andy Burnham speaks passionately about stopping serious sexual offenders from leaving prison early. Few would argue with his words. But where was that determination when, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, he had both the opportunity and responsibility to hold Greater Manchester Police (GMP) to account for catastrophic failures — failures that allowed hundreds of children to be abused?

The context is worth repeating here. For years, GMP dismissed victims, closed inquiries and ignored vital intelligence into the grooming-gang scourge. Between 2003 and 2014, for example, one NHS worker warned police and social services about what was happening 100 times — but was told the witnesses weren’t reliable. And when officers did investigate abuse, they often went for easier convictions with lower sentences. In one case, a rapist got a 13-year-old child pregnant, yet was out of prison in less than three years.

In the aftermath of these horrors, the Operation Augusta Review, focused on South Manchester, as well as a separate Rochdale Review, studied what went wrong. Both were set up by Burnham in his role as Greater Manchester’s Police and Crime Commissioner, while I myself was heavily involved too, and overall found them to be thorough pieces of work. Not that Burnham could have done much about that: using my years of experience as a GMP detective, I had already put most of the evidence in the public domain, not least in my book Survivors. Denying what happened simply wasn’t credible.

The report into the abuse in Oldham, however, was very different, and in my opinion represented a genuine cover-up. But because I hadn’t worked in the town, I was unable to really object. Yet when, in 2025, the fourth and final “Assurance Review” was published — suggesting that lessons had been learned and the system was now working — I was appalled.

The report totally failed to include the voices of a single victim or survivor. That should have rung alarm bells from the outset, and at the time I fought fiercely to persuade Burnham that this just wasn’t right. How, I asked, could you meaningfully assure the public that the system is working better today without listening to the survivors actually experiencing it?

When challenged, Burnham personally told me that His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) — the body meant to oversee the police — had greater powers than the original independent review team. But that misses the point: greater powers cannot replace victims’ voices. More than that, some survivors had engaged with the review process since 2017, trusting it with deeply personal experiences and helping expose what had gone so catastrophically wrong. To then exclude them from the Assurance Review was, in my view, indefensible.

Besides, whatever Burnham’s claims about the HMIC, that still meant expecting one public body to mark another’s homework, even as the very people who could tell them what was happening on the ground were excluded.

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Gary Ridgway and Malcolm Newsam — safeguarding experts who worked on the first three reports for six years — understood this completely, and I fought alongside them to keep victims’ voices at the heart of the process. For well over a year, we tried to achieve that. But ultimately we failed. Gary and Malcolm then took the principled decision to resign rather than putting their names to something they couldn’t support. Their departure was a real loss: two highly experienced professionals who’d earned the trust of victims and were ready to stand by their principles.

Whatever the review claims, I know that issues remain. And this, I think, is where the real hypocrisy lies. Every day at the Maggie Oliver Foundation, we continue to support survivors who face poor and incompetent investigations, inconsistent decision-making, inadequate communication, and institutions that still become defensive and secretive when challenged. Yes, problems have in some respects been tackled. But anyone suggesting they’ve actually been solved is either mendacious or delusional.

Yet if Burnham is clearly part of the issue here, what concerns me even more is that he’s just the latest “face” of a faceless establishment. Governments come and go. Prime ministers change. Cabinet ministers are reshuffled. But the machinery behind them often remains remarkably unchanged. In my opinion, we still have a system dominated by powerful officials, “men and women in gray suits” working behind the scenes, people the public rarely see and who are almost never held accountable when things go wrong. Different politicians front the cameras, but many of the same institutional instincts remain.

Of course, some will say things have changed, because we now have a new prime minister. And, to be sure, the style has changed since the days of Keir Starmer, and the language too. But I am far more interested in outcomes and results — and, in Burnham’s administration, I see too much of the same arrogant culture that characterized previous governments, Conservative and Labour alike.

What is new is that fewer people are willing to accept the status quo. Of course, victims have been telling their stories for decades, even if the media discusses their stories as if they’re totally new. The difference now is that those in power are far more exposed. Social media and investigative journalism make it much harder for institutions to control the narrative. Carefully managed public relations can no longer conceal horrific truths in the way they once did.

But what gives me hope are the survivors themselves. For too long, they were ignored or dismissed, while institutions closed ranks and protected their own. Today, however, victims are increasingly finding their voices, refusing to accept half-truths and vocally demanding accountability without fear.

That is a profound change, and it can only be a good thing. If I have played even a small part in moving this conversation forward over the last 13 years, then I’m immensely proud. Not because it’s been easy — it hasn’t. Not because it’s made me popular — it certainly hasn’t. But simply because every step forward has been driven by survivors who refused to stay silent, who trusted me with their stories, and who have shown extraordinary courage in demanding the justice they should have received years ago. And no one, let alone Andy Burnham, can take that away from them.

Few would argue that Britain’s social fabric is in a better condition today than it was in 2011. There have been further large-scale outbreaks of violence, like Belfast and Southport, but the spread of petty criminality is arguably as damaging. Consider, for instance, a recent analysis by Forecourt Eye, a security company, of the effects of the spike in fuel costs caused by the Iran war. The report claims that, in the five months since the conflict began, £200,000 worth of petrol and diesel has been stolen from British pumps every day. That figure is almost 50% higher than before the crisis started. No less striking is the variety of the people engaging in this theft. Forecourt owners say that, besides the hardened chancers and the black-marketers filling up jerry cans for resale, the thieves now include all manner of ordinary people, some claiming they can’t afford to pay. “It could be anyone,” a petrol station owner in Birmingham tells The Guardian. “They come right in front of you, because they have no fear.”

Three weeks into Andy Burnham’s premiership, it’s tempting to think that Britain is again settling into a strange kind of equilibrium. The country’s long-term problems continue to fester, but now that we have a prime minister with at least a basic degree of political skill, it already feels like the forces of inertia are reasserting themselves. Labour’s populist challengers appear increasingly unconvincing, and are duly subsiding in the polls. People have almost stopped noticing the boats. Some things will get a little better, others a little worse. There will be occasional hotspots of violent unrest, but no great conflagration. Burnham will keep releasing videos about pub snacks and football. And the country will move slowly, imperceptibly, down the path of managed decline, like a building which has partly collapsed but somehow remains habitable.

This impression is surely complacent. Like the recent epidemics of shoplifting and mobile phone theft, not to mention fly-tipping and fare-dodging on public transport, the sudden spike in fuel larceny raises the specter of an increasingly low-trust society, where a failure to observe basic norms undermines goodwill and turns everyday life into a kind of gauntlet. It also implicates trust in the state, which people are liable to blame for the unaffordability of basic goods as well as the failure to enforce its laws. Even if such trends do not culminate in a 2011-style blowout, they can turn into more gradual cascades. Why follow rules if others don’t? Why act considerately towards strangers if your generosity is rarely repaid?

But petrol-pump raids illustrate another, equally important, reason that a fragile society is unlikely to remain stable. We live in a volatile world, and exogenous shocks such as the Iran war will continue to pile economic strains on these vulnerable bonds linking individuals, society and state.

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Indeed, fuel theft could be seen as part of a much broader pattern of resource-related criminality — spurred by global disorder. In recent years, gangs have turned their attention to, of all things, the production of fake olive oil, meeting a demand created by crop failures and, ultimately, climate change. In 2024, Italian authorities intercepted almost $1 million worth of oil debased with substances such as chlorophyll, which was already being used in dozens of Roman restaurants. As the price of copper has been driven up by technological shifts, meanwhile, stripping, stealing and scavenging has surged around the world. In the UK last year, more than 100 incidents of copper theft from the railway network led to 130,000 minutes of train delays. Similarly, historic spikes in the gold price, a consequence of investors seeking a safe-haven from financial turmoil, have prompted outbreaks of illegal mining everywhere from Ghana to the Amazon.

These developments might lead one to conclude that the law is a weak barrier to the power of economic incentives. Yet history makes a mockery of the idea that criminal behavior can be straightforwardly tied to material factors. During the first half of the 20th century, the average British person was much worse off than today, yet Britain itself was remarkably law-abiding. The prison population of England and Wales hovered around 10,000 throughout the Thirties and Forties, compared with over 85,000 today. The overall crime rate may have nearly doubled during the hardships of the Seventies, but it had also doubled during the economic boom of the Sixties. On the other hand, anyone arguing that the decline of traditional morality was responsible for these negative trends may struggle to explain why most forms of crime have been falling again since the turn of the 21st century.

A study of 1,620 of those arrested during the London riots suggested that a combination of material and social factors were at work. The rioters’ neighborhoods were correlated with resentment towards police, poverty, and ethnic diversity (the authors posit that diverse areas are “less cohesive, and so adults are less able to prevent youth from rioting”). The rise of fuel theft alongside this year’s price hikes, or for that matter the shoplifting boom in the years since Covid, suggests that a similar cocktail of causes are involved in the recent rise of petty criminality. A useful concept here is that of “social crime”: an illegal act which people don’t in practice regard as criminal, or which is seen as a justified form of protest. As the historian and criminologist Clive Emsley noted, such crimes have a long history in Britain, and many involved illegally taking or supplying goods.

In 19th-century Manchester, before the arrival of domestic plumbing, people commonly helped themselves from outdoor taps without paying the requisite fees to the water company. Smuggling, too, could enjoy widespread consent when it circumvented unpopular taxes, such as the duty on tea in the 18th century. In Norfolk, one man sentenced for shooting livestock in 1839 delivered a memorable courtroom diatribe against the establishment of the day, complaining that “to such a state had they brought the poor of this country… that it was impossible for a poor man to live by honest means, and all this was to support big-gutted relieving officers”. (Some on the Right will be pleased to hear that this man was deported — that is, to a penal colony in Australia.)

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By Wessie du Toit

The morality of social crime is complex: it depends on the circumstances of the act and the nature of the law being broken. The point is that our sense of what is acceptable often diverges from the letter of the law. It seems that, to some degree, various forms of theft are now becoming social crimes: those committing them do not really think they are doing anything wrong, or have perceived that those around them won’t judge them very harshly for it. This is where the issues of trust and economic pressure meet, for it is the stories that people tell themselves about the unfairness of society which allows them to minimize their actions, and the sense of being hard up which makes those stories more compelling. A classic example is the casual shoplifter who, seeing prices rise, feels that stealing is justified given that the money is just lining the pockets of greedy capitalists anyway. Another is the self-employed person who works off the books because they feel they are taxed too much, and, in any case, the corporations don’t pay their fair share.

Rioting is another phenomenon which has often been assigned to the “social crime” category. Many reports of the 2011 riots emphasize the participants’ shared grievances, such as the account of one rioter in Hackney who said they were “angry about the phone-hacking scandal; angry about the MPs’ expenses scandal; angry about the bank bailouts; angry about police corruption and the abuse of stop-and-search powers”. One policeman recalled many looters citing the Duggan shooting, leading him to wonder why they’d rob an electrical store because the police shot a man.

That’s shadowed by more recent examples. In April, The New York Times hosted a discussion titled “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?”, in which the commentators Jia Tolentino and Hasan Piker declared themselves, in Piker’s words, “pro stealing from big corporations”. In case anyone doubted her good intentions, Tolentino added that when she stole from Whole Foods (the term “microlooting” was mooted), she was buying groceries for a mutual-aid group.

One doesn’t need to subscribe to Kant’s categorical imperative to see how such reasoning can go awry. Anti-social behavior justified by the unfairness of the system does little to harm the fat cats. But it does create a depressing atmosphere of cynicism and anomie which undermines the basis of mutual decency in the public realm. In Britain, the Government itself has been guilty of encouraging that cynicism, opportunistically attacking supermarkets and petrol stations for the prices they charge (even though tax makes up a far greater share of fuel costs than forecourt profits do). This is obviously good politics, at least in the short term. At a time when hard-pressed consumers are making the political weather, who wants to stand up for big business? In any case, the populist Right has inconsistencies here too. Reform UK has long made the pacification of “Lawless Britain” one of its central campaign themes, yet the party’s own financial controversies are hardly likely to make the little folk want to play by the rules.

In the end, the problem of petty criminality cannot be fully addressed either by the “broken windows” policing model favored by conservatives — coming down hard on minor infringements that corrode trust — or the liberal alternative of showering love on gangsters and funding youth centers. It is true that paltry legal penalties and nonexistent policing have encouraged the rampant theft of everything from bikes and phones to diesel. But to argue that a harsher state will suffice as a solution is to invite a future where pervasive facial recognition technology merely conceals the evaporation of authority and trust. Conversely, a compassionate approach which treats crime as an expression of victimhood is unlikely to dampen the tendency to think that some law-breaking is morally justified, or indeed politically virtuous.

Economic stress, material scarcity, a loss of cohesion and social trust: these are all part of the problem, and an effective response must account for them. What we are less comfortable acknowledging is that there is also a moral problem here, which requires a moral solution. Perhaps it can begin with a particular idea of pride. We ought to be more willing to find self-worth in a determination that, even if the world around us appears unfair, corrupt or selfish, we will not sink to its level. The source of this pride is not one’s own purity, but commitment to a public realm that depends on trust.

Of course, none of us, least of all me, will ever be flawless in this regard, so there is no use being sanctimonious about it. Yet morality, like social crime, is also a matter of shared attitudes and expectations, and it’s difficult to see how a new civic ethos could be cultivated in the tumultuous Britain of 2026. Robert Tombs writes of the Victorians’ successful campaigns against anti-social behavior that “politicians, churches, charities, trade unions, schools, the police and ordinary people in their neighborhoods co-operated”. These institutions hold even less sway now than they did at the time of the London riots, and social media is hardly famed for its wholesome role models.

In political terms, the pertinent question is how all of this might play out if global events, in combination with our less-than-resilient infrastructure, deliver more shortages and price-increases over the years ahead. There are reasons to think that Britain would handle outright rationing with greater steadfastness than many other countries: consider the acquiescence with authoritarian measures during the pandemic, the popularity of price caps, the ongoing support for egalitarian and welfarist principles. You can already imagine the daily updates from a sober but sensitive Prime Minister Burnham.

Yet the rise of casual crimes like fuel theft makes one wonder if Britain still has the reserves of solidarity that its leaders claim. The more burdensome the sacrifice that people are asked to make, the more widespread free-riding will shred trust in society and the state. Let’s hope we never have to find out how fragile Britain’s equilibrium really is.

Galicia owns a small construction business and is also a minister at a primarily Latino Pentecostal church downtown. He tries not to fume against his misfortunes, but he has a beef with the city, which to this day can’t even identify the owner of the lot. Repeated calls to his city councilman, radical DSA member Hugo Soto Martinez, have proved fruitless.  

“There are millions for the homeless, but nothing for those who work hard,” Galicia notes. “The sidewalks are never fixed and the police are slow to come. It would be easier if the government would not make everything so miserable.” 

LA is currently hosting the World Cup, and two years from now, it will host the Olympics. The city should be ready for its closeup —  but it isn’t.  

This is a painful change for anyone who, like me, came to the City of Angels 50 years ago and embraced its eclectic mix of cultures and businesses. In the 1980s, LA was what the conservative historian Fred Siegel called “the entrepreneurial dynamo.” Unlike New York or the Bay Area, where academic pedigree and family ties were the keys to success, LA was an everyman city, a place where you could afford to start a business and live in a house like Galicia’s, all within the perimeter of a great metropolis.

Aesthetes long preferred New York or San Francisco, but the masses headed to LA. Between 1900 and 1940, the city’s population surged to 1.5 million from barely 100,000. After the war, LA expanded again, enriched by its huge oil and defense sectors, and by 2020, hit its peak population of 3.8 million, with another 6 million living in surrounding Los Angeles County. These areas once domiciled 13 Fortune 500 companies, including Disney, Northrop Grumman, Security Pacific Bank, First Interstate, Union Oil, Getty Oil, and Arco, and a long list of successful growing businesses, as well.

Since then, the Fortune 500 locals have dwindled to seven, with just one, Farmers Insurance, inside city limits, and that just barely, on the furthest fringes of the San Fernando Valley. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times, once a critical part of the city establishment, has abandoned Downtown for El Segundo, amid severe financial strains and a paid circulation that’s a fraction of its once vast readership. 

Most critically, Los Angeles County now suffers the highest poverty rates in the state, and among the worst in the country. As you drive the streets of South Los Angeles and along the historic main street of black LA, Central Avenue, now predominantly Hispanic, the ambiance is increasingly reminiscent of the colonias of Mexico: broken pavements, battered buildings, outdoor swap meets, and fly-by-night food stalls.

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By Joel Kotkin

The county is shrinking too. Once celebrated as “the city that grew,” by 2070 it will suffer a reduction of more than a million people — 14% of its current population. Since 2000, the area has experienced a devastating loss of 750,000 people under 25, and it has the second-lowest birthrate among the 53 US major metropolitan areas, according to the American Community Survey. 

And while it is still home to more than three million immigrants, newcomers are increasingly headed elsewhere, notably to Texas, Florida, and other Southern states. The political class may be proud of creating a “sanctuary city,” but since 2010, the area’s foreign-born population has declined.

One reason is a lack of civic leadership. LA is increasingly a headless city. For many years, an almost exclusively white, male, and Protestant business elite embraced manifest destiny and dominated the surrounding region. These leaders fostered the creation of the kind of infrastructure that makes a great city — roads, universities, observatories, aerospace plants, a massive streetcar grid, as well as car and tire factories.  

This ruling alliance was transformed during the mayoralty of Tom Bradley, who won office in 1973 and served for 20 years. Now the old business establishment shared primacy with unions and rising Jewish and African American communities, an alliance that fostered long-term planning rather than cosmetic and rarely effective “short-term fixes,” according to Nick Patsaouras, an urban planner and public official with a long history in LA development.

Today, groups like the Chamber of Commerce have little influence over the city’s direction. “There are no ‘civic’ leaders left,” Patsaouras told UnHerd. “Just parasites feeding from public trough and crooks.”   

The optimism that once defined the city has withered as well. Once it was widely believed that LA was developing into a true rival of New York, with its own subway system and a downtown filled with sparkling high-rises. By the 1980s, trade at the Long Beach-Los Angeles port surpassed that of the Port of New York. And investment, much of it from Asia, suggested a future “capital of the Pacific Rim.” As the popular slogan had it: LA’s the place.  

Today, the Entertainment Capital of the World can’t even fend off challenges from places like Dallas-Fort Worth, Nashville, and Miami. Michael Kelly, director of the Drucker Institute at the Claremont Colleges, suggests that virtually every basic industry — including manufacturing, finance and business services —  has lost jobs, or at best has stagnated, since 2019. Only government-funded education and health jobs showed significant growth. If LA had grown as quickly as the national average, he calculates, it would have created 300,000 more jobs. 

Instead of focusing on development, the city’s establishment increasingly resembles the rulers of the late Roman Empire, offering the people the distraction of bread and circuses. Even as the signature industry, entertainment —  down 42,000 jobs in the past three years — shrinks, a passion for showiness and glamor remains. Diversions include the Dodgers, the Lakers, the World Cup, a sparkling new George Lucas $1 billion Museum of Narrative Art, due to open this fall — and most particularly, the Olympics. 

The city’s business “leaders,” Drucker’s Kelly suggests, aren’t fixing the weak economy, the dysfunctional schools or the increasingly dilapidated and dangerous LA parks. “All they care about is the Olympics,” he says.  

But the City of Angels today hardly resembles the brash upstart that held a successful Olympics in 1932 or the emerging world capital that, in 1984, under the brilliant leadership of businessman Peter Ueberroth, ran the Olympics with little incident and a profit. The LA 28 organization, the official host committee, claims it has enough sponsorships and TV deals to pay for what is needed, although there are growing doubts whether the city can absorb Olympics-related security costs, given its near-disastrous fiscal shape. Officials should hope that visitors, particularly journalists, will not see eyesores like Juan Galicia’s burnt-out home, and will skip the visit to Skid Row, close to the city’s downtown business district, which has a murder rate 17 times the city average. 

This was once a city that, like Marlon Brando’s broken boxer in the movie On the Waterfront, “could have been a contender” to challenge New York and other more established metropolises. But since the end of Republican Richard Riordan’s mayoralty in 2001, power has shifted to a motley coalition of political operatives, those using the city’s infrastructure to enrich themselves, and increasingly powerful public-sector unions. A focus on “social justice” and green virtues has thoroughly replaced the old growth-oriented vision. 

Homelessness is the most obvious failure. Even as San Francisco, under reform Mayor Dan  Lurie, aided by the local tech community, has turned back the homeless tide, Los Angeles retains roughly 70,000 “unhoused” people. It has spent billions but has refused to take such steps as shutting down the camps. Half of the homeless are known to be from somewhere else, attracted by the salubrious climate, free needles, and lack of police enforcement. 

The problem is no longer confined to the infamous Skid Row, but has spread to once stable neighborhoods, even as those charged with improving conditions have been charged with corruption. In a neighborhood close to where I used to live, homeless people hang out in the supermarket and eat in the aisles. Others harass business owners and illegally draw power from the city grid.

In part due to homelessness and the largely unchecked gangs, many of LA’s once great public places, like MacArthur Park, have become crime-ridden dystopias, filled with the mentally ill, firebugs and gang members. Even the libraries are increasingly unsafe. As long-term LA journalist Sam Quinones suggests: “in Los Angeles, private spaces have become public threats.”

But the homeless are just one element of the growing disorder. Add to this attacks by gangs of kids, vandalism, and theft throughout the city, particularly downtown. Thieves removed the copper pipes from Galicia’s burnt-out home. Criminals are now so bold that they have started stripping copper wire from street lights, leaving some of the city in the dark. 

Not surprisingly, the middle class is heading for the exits. Since 1980, the percentage of city residents who own their own home has fallen from 40% to roughly 33%, compared to rates of roughly 65% home-ownership nationally and 56% in the state. 

The loss of the middle class has transformed the political landscape, largely to the benefit of the Left. When Republican Riordan ran in 2001, Republicans could account for as much as a third of the electorate, notes longtime GOP strategist Arnold Steinberg. Today, amid the expansion of mail-in ballots and lax control over who votes, they barely constitute half that amount. Add to this ultra-permissive voting rules and legal “ballot harvesting,” including from the homeless, and changing the political direction seems almost impossible. 

Spencer Pratt’s mayoral campaign may have thrilled conservatives around the country, but few of his greatest admirers vote in LA. He came in third behind current Mayor Karen Bass, a long-time Leftist who organized help for Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the 1970s, as part of the Venceremos Brigade, and Nithya Raman, a 44-year-old Mamdani clone, who lives in a $1.9 million house in fashionable Silver Lake and has a planning degree from MIT. 

Bass’s disastrous mishandling of the Palisades fires has made her vulnerable to an even further Left challenger. Raman’s handlers hope to sell her as a “change agent” and a competent manager, something Bass is clearly not. Raman is currently, by some polls, in the lead. But whoever wins, nothing much will change, at least not for the better. Political power will continue to remain in the hands of militant public unions, notably the SEIU, which represents generally low-income service workers, and the teachers, who demand ever more taxes to pay their salaries and generous pensions. 

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Homelessness will remain a massive problem whoever wins. Raman has opposed restrictions on public camping and sleeping. “Raman’s record on homelessness is worse than Bass — if that is possible,” notes westside activist Tim Campbell, a longtime Angelino and former government auditor. “She’s incompetent and arrogant, which is a fatal combination.”  

Raman’s managers will paint her as pragmatic, but her political allegiance belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America, whose platform includes seizing private housing, a 100% renewable energy system, making all public transportation free, the decriminalization of drug use, and the decommissioning of the central jail. Her purported moderation only makes sense when compared to her fellow DSA council member Ysabel Jurado, who favors not just defunding the police but abolishing them.  

Whoever wins in November, Los Angeles seems likely to continue its masterclass in urban dysfunction. As in New York, Seattle, Washington, DC, and other cities, the DSA is cementing a coalition of public-employee unions and the welfare-dependent with a crop of young college graduates who predominate in neighborhoods such as Echo Park, Silver Lake and Hollywood,  LA’s version of New York’s “Commie Corridor.”  

If the City of Angels is to come back, don’t look to the business elites but to working and middle-class immigrants from places like Mexico, Central America, China, Taiwan, India, and increasingly, Africa. Many of them now settle in smaller cities in Los Angeles County — Paramount, Bellflower, Downey, and South Gate, among others — that are showing that you can build a successful city amid the big city’s dysfunction. 

These cities pride themselves on the basics like law enforcement, street maintenance, and schools, and demonstrate that such initiatives can work in today’s Southern California. Indeed, in a study I conducted with researcher Bheki Mahlobo, we found that these south Los Angeles County cities, once seen as backwaters, have managed to outperform the city itself, particularly its South Side, in terms of employment, public safety, and school scores.

Los Angeles retains a magnificent collection of neighborhoods, and is home to remarkable institutions like the Getty Center, a striking museum in the Santa Monica Mountains. And there are some tentative signs that the LA electorate is capable of pushing back to defend it. In 2024, voters ousted Soros-financed District Attorney George Gascon; they have also displayed a growing resistance to tax increases. You can still feel the area’s potential in places like El Segundo, where space and aerospace firms are flourishing, and at a charter school in Granada Hills, where largely minority students — Chinese, Korean, Middle Eastern, Latino — routinely win the national academic decathlon. Hollywood still possesses a reservoir of entertainment-industry talent. And, of course, the weather and topography remain daily reminders of why people came here in the first place. 

The key to renewal lies with people like Juan Galicia who, despite everything, is pursuing permits to rebuild in his neighborhood. Sustained by his faith and his commitment to making Los Angeles a better place, Galicia, like many Angelinos, is staking out a claim for a better future. Some, like me, may have fled — in my case, south to Orange County — but I will cheer Galicia and people like him as they try to restore a city to which I owe much, and would be delighted to see ascendant once again.      

“I want my trees back and my home back,” Galicia tells me. “I have to work every day and rebuilding this house is my dream. It will happen, you’ll see. I still feel blessed to be here.” 

On the whole, people seem remarkably tolerant of these hurdles. At least: the tip is always busy. But whenever I’m obliged to wrangle this system, it strikes me that deliberately making it difficult for law-abiding people to clear out the garage may have unintended consequences. 

Out running last week, I met an example of these consequences: two council workers in a lay-by, gloomily loading fly-tipped waste onto a truck. Latterly, this has become an increasingly regular sight. The same phenomenon also appears, writ large, in the growing blight of “unlicensed waste facilities”, such as the 30,000 tons of waste recently found in a protected marshland in Leicestershire. This follows the discovery of another massive illegal tip in Oxfordshire last year, and ongoing wrangles over another such dump near Wigan. 

It’s easy to tell this as a story of civic decline. But what it actually reveals is more sinister: a Britain that’s increasingly two-tier not just in its policing, but also in its social structures. For the law-abiding and conscientious, a thicket of paralyzing, economically ruinous regulation; for the criminal, almost entirely consequence-free liberty. The American polemicist Sam Francis called this “anarcho-tyranny”; we might say on the one hand “Official Britain” and on the other “You Can Just Do Things Britain”. 

The governing character of Official Britain is a perverse and increasingly vindictive opt-in tyranny. The more determined you are to abide by the rules, the more difficult Official Britain will make your life. Its citizens are the people who dutifully fill in the timed registration form for a timed tip slot, before showing up at their allotted time and dropping things into the correct skip, according to the type of waste. 

You Can Just Do Things Britain simply ignores this kind of fussy infrastructure and petty rules, and dumps waste in a hedgerow for someone else, probably from Official Britain, to clean up. The two Britains rarely interact directly so much as compete for space and ownership of public resources. But the increasingly testy and hostile nature of this competition is apparent across a host of now depressingly common public-order issues.

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It’s not just making it as difficult as possible to dispose of garden waste. Up and down the country, small business owners in Official Britain try to follow the rules — only to go bankrupt in the attempt. Employing people with a right to work; paying them minimum wage; offering holidays and other statutory benefits as required; abiding by the plethora of working directives and business obligations; paying business rates, paying corporation tax; et cetera and so on. Each of these is reasonable enough, on its own. But taken together, and set against rising energy, rate, and material costs, and cash-strapped customers, the cumulative burden is often now so onerous that such businesses are unable to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, for those who simply ignore the rules, often the only consequence is that someone will be along later to mitigate the damage you leave behind. The small business owners of Just Do Things Britain occupy high-street premises, but employ illegal migrants; house them on filthy mattresses in back rooms; operate as fronts for drug-running, people smuggling, and other criminal activities. They do just fine, and their persistence attests that more often than not, they operate with impunity. 

This is at least in part because the kind of people who get jobs with Trading Standards are, by definition, themselves part of Official Britain. And until recently, they have been more accustomed to engaging with fellow-citizens of this official national polity, where polite reminders to follow the rules tends to result in compliance. By contrast, confronting the denizens of You Can Just Do Things Britain does not have this effect. Rather, it results in midnight death threats by phone, cars trying to ram you off the road, and threatening strangers turning up at your house. Understandably, this breeds reluctance to rock the boat, reinforcing the dynamic of two-tier enforcement.

The same pattern obtains, too, in the housing market. Successive governments have clamped down, with escalating intensity, on private landlords; the latest such salvo, Labour’s new Renters’ Rights Act, has already triggered a large-scale exodus from the lettings business, as small-time landlords who still live in Official Britain stare in dismay at the mountain of regulations and conclude that landlording is now more trouble than it’s worth.

Across the invisible barrier in Just Do Things Britain, though, the property business has never been better. The most profitable sector is HMOs, which are duly springing up everywhere, including a lively sector without official licences. Occasionally the accommodation itself is so manifestly grim that Official Britain will bestir itself to prosecute, as in the recent £91,000 fine issued to a landlord in Wembley for offences including housing a couple and a baby in an unheated garden prefab. But fewer than 2% of tenant complaints result in prosecution, despite councils receiving thousands of such complaints every year. 

Petty theft is another battlefront in the turf war between the Official and Just Do Things Britains. Effectively decriminalized via lax criminal justice and police response, we find individual action also foreclosed by a thicket of health and safety rules. The result can be almost gleefully perverse: as, for example, when Walker Smith was recently fired by Waitrose, after 17 years’ service, for trying to stop a known repeat shoplifter walking out with a bag full of luxury Easter eggs. 

Why is this happening at all? The reflex response, usually from the internet Right, is to blame immigration. And it’s true that (as with the gangs prevalent in “Turkish Barber” enterprises) Just Do Things Britain is noticeably more multicultural than Official Britain. Indeed immigration itself is also a front in the struggle between Official and Just Do Things Britain. The less conscientious you are about following immigration rules in your manner of arriving, the more likely you are to be plied with housing, pocket money, and (grey economy) employment opportunities. 

But if the blessings of modern Britain do manifestly include a new diversity of criminal cultures and law-breaking styles, as well as of takeaway menus, the backdrop against which this emerges is of our own making. Like taking things to the tip on a Bank Holiday, Official Britain reflects a deep-seated instinct in the modern English soul: a national urge to find out what people are doing, and stop them. Our large and well-organized anti-housing lobby is one notorious example. So, too, is the generalized campaign to prevent infrastructure. 

But perhaps the most florid recent case in point is the effort, by the massed armies of Official Britain, to stop Britain improving its energy security. The interventions made by that most Official of Official Britain quangos, Natural England, at the construction site for Hinkley Point, are already the stuff of legend. EDF have spent millions on a device whose aim is to use sound waves to deter fish from approaching the plant’s water intake pump. Dubbed a “fish disco”, reports of its cost vary from £50 million to £700 million. but Natural England has still decreed it inadequate, and demanded a local farmer’s land be flooded to create new salt marshes as well.  

The more charitable interpretation of this culture of obstruction is a desire, at every point, to make everything as good as it can be. This urge to make the bureaucratic best the enemy of the good must prevail, even where it means pursuing mutually exclusive aims, such as keeping the countryside untouched while also tearing it up to build roads or high-speed rail. In practice, it produces so crippling a state of general stasis that the only remaining people who seem to feel empowered to do anything at all are people who either aren’t part of this culture or generally don’t care about rules: that is, foreigners and criminals. 

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To be clear: I’m not saying Britain’s high streets deserve to become shop-fronts for Kurdish gangs as a punishment for excessive paperwork. It’s more like a condition of learned helplessness. But for all that Official Britain induces a kind of learned helplessness in those who accept its premises, it strikes me that loading all the blame onto outsiders, for exploiting this condition, merely replicates the helplessness  in a different form. 

Criminals are, of course, responsible for their own actions, whatever their culture. But we are also responsible for our inaction. How, then, are we to reclaim the spirit of just doing things, for the decent majority? I don’t think we can just demand a “bonfire of the quangos” or “UK Doge”. In fact every government in the last half-century has promised a bonfire of this kind, only for the opposite to happen. It doesn’t work, as long as the underlying culture remains unchanged: a culture whose natural product is Official Britain, like the natural product of coral polyps is coral reefs. 

There are two ways out of this predicament. It’s possible that, eventually, the coral reef of Official Britain will grow so stiff and hollow it’s demolished for parts by the Just Do Things Britain coalescing under its surface. Indeed, this state of affairs is arguably already under way: a piecemeal dismantling and re-purposing of Britain’s rulebook, analogous to the re-purposing of former family homes in outer London boroughs as slum housing for the ambiguously documented. Or, alternatively, we remember who we were, before Britain was a nation of pettifoggers. King Arthur and Robin Hood just did things. Henry VIII, the most Just Do Things monarch in history, nationalized Christianity then sold off all the church treasure to fund his wars. A private British company sailed to India to make money and ended up taking over the governance of the subcontinent. We know how to just do things. 

When the rules stop serving the people who created them, one way or another they’ll end up abandoned. We now have two choices. We can stand by helplessly while opportunists dismantle the country for parts under our noses. Or we can stop complaining about rule-breakers, and start rewriting the rules to suit ourselves.  

In New York, hopping the barriers to dodge the three-dollar fare is completely unremarkable: every minute, 330 metropolitans do just that. Fare evasion here is impressively egalitarian: silver-haired arty men in natty glasses, glam Zoomettes wending their way to wine bars, shouty tweakers in soiled trousers and bashful grads in Docs and Dickies — they all hurdle through as a matter of course, completely indifferent to the equally indifferent MTA staff and utterly unashamed in front of paying passengers, in whose armpits they are likely to be lodged for a good 10 minutes.

The couldn’t-care-less mentality is endemic in New York, the product of old-school braggadocio enthusiastically taken up by waves of secretly delighted transplants. Shoplifting, spitting, yelling, pissing, littering, and barrier-hopping — these will never abate, and are mostly tolerable failings of the best city in the world. But they are not political statements, acts of protest or a kick in the teeth to “the man”. Nevertheless this is how I’ve repeatedly heard such transgressions justified by friends whose parents pay their rent and still leap over barriers, by those who post about “climate revolt” and hock gum on sidewalks to choke pigeons, and of course by the hopelessly misguided trio who appeared on a New York Times podcast last week to brag about filching from Whole Foods.

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By Poppy Sowerby

The New Yorker columnist Jia Tolentino, the NYT’s Nadja Spiegelman, and Hasan Piker — the midwit Marxist streamer accused of electrocuting his dog and who admitted having solicited a prostitute (not so against the free market now, ey?) —  gabbed about “microlooting” — small thefts justified by the fact that, as Spiegelman puts it, “It’s so hard to live ethically in an unethical society.” Quick-fire scenarios are floated; stealing from the Louvre, Piker says, is “cool”. Stealing from supermarket chains is “not a big deal” in a “utilitarian sense”, says Tolentino. And Spiegelman wonders why she should “have to pay for organic avocados” when Jeff Bezos “has too much money” (Amazon, which he founded, acquired Whole Foods in 2017). Antisocial behavior is justified here — explicitly or tacitly — under the lazy logic of “protest”.

Unlike microlooting, however, Tolentino finds “getting iced coffee in a plastic cup… profoundly selfish, immoral [and] collectively destructive” — presumably the bimbo-coding of that drink is unrelated. The lines of moral permissibility seem to be drawn, in other words, along the exact same lines of what these rich, educated progressives consider “cool”.

And that’s the real problem. Progressives have always found extravagant ways to reframe the ills which they personally enjoy — prostitution, pornography, choking women. Now shoplifting gets the same treatment. Tolentino is not really stealing lemons because it’s a way of flipping the bird at Bezos; she’s stealing them because she wants them. Nor are the barrier-bumpers actually trying to signal their dissatisfaction with the frequency or cleanliness of public transport — reasoning I have actually heard with my own ears, despite the fact these things can only be improved by the very funding the free riders are withholding; they are bumping barriers because they just don’t want to pay. Nicking groceries and dodging fares are age-old problems. What’s new is the towering cowardice of those who can’t admit that they, like most people, act mainly out of self-interested desire.

The appealing but deceptive idea that low-level criminality is a laudable demonstration against “the system” in fact conceals envy towards those in that “system” who, like Bezos, have known success. This resentment is particularly native to the media class, whose peers tend to out-earn them in higher-salaried fields like law and finance — conferring on writers like Spiegelman and Tolentino the faintly plausible whiff of bookish martyrdom. Nevertheless, and particularly in New York, mag luminaries can still live in $2.2 million brownstones in Clinton Hill; sticking it to the man by pilfering in the produce aisle might pass in grim artists’ squats, but five-finger discounts are harder to justify on six-figure salaries.

The thrill that these comfortably middle-class crims surely feel when larping “direct action” by pocketing expensive pesto is doubly insulting when you consider the fact that those from different racial or class strata are far likelier to be punished for the same behavior — or else to feel the consequences of price hikes when corporations adjust for lost profits. Among types so fixated on questions of privilege and identity, the asymmetry of the consequences of shoplifting seems a convenient omission.

Yet if it is cringingly tone-deaf for multimillionaire socialists like Piker to advocate for petty crime, the problem exceeds hypocrisy: it furnishes the craven justification of greater and darker acts. Tolentino steals lemons; Luigi Mangione allegedly executes the UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson in broad daylight. The NYT podcast vaulted from discussing one crime to discussing the other, framing them not as unrelated acts of greed or brutality but as twin expressions of discontent within an unfair system. Nobody condoned Thompson’s slaughter, but neither was there particular concern. According to Piker, a pub bore-level parroter of bastardized theory, Thompson was “engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder” (cribbing Engels).

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By Timandra Harkness

Sometimes the coherence of an argument can be determined by its level of abstraction from bald facts; if you have to dig up a 19th-century corpse to explain why it’s OK to shoot a father of two in the back, you’ve probably already lost. Nevertheless, the bullshit theory of microlooting as 1,000 righteous cuts to an evil system can only lead the way of vigilantism and mobocracy: both nicking and killing are really about desire — for goods, for blood. Seen for what they are, these urges look rather less noble.

When public intellectuals corral theory to justify flagrant acts of laziness, selfishness and greed, it collapses serious social questions into wishy-washy pools of moral relativism. The Left’s power of advocacy is being eroded as a result: these movements once claimed to hold the monopoly on moral authority, but it’s difficult to take young metropolitan socialists seriously when they make adoring memes about an accused killer. Piker’s musings on Mangione read very differently in the days after an attempted shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner, in a room full of journalists not unlike the circles in which the NYT’s podcast trio undoubtedly mingle.

Again, Cole Tomas Allen appears to have been motivated by Mangione-like grievances. Would Piker, Tolentino and Spiegelman be inclined to more strongly condemn vigilantism if they were in the room where it was carried out, as many of their colleagues were? It is important that liberal chin-strokers are not allowed to dissolve the borders of acceptability: the consequence is the vertiginous slip into political violence and anti-social apathy that increasingly flavors both the news cycle and everyday life. Notions of “social violence” of the kind supposedly perpetrated by the slain CEO rely on cynical academic fudging; answering it with actual, bloodied, writhing violence of the kind Allen planned on Saturday can lead only to chaos. The Left has forgotten what harm means, bogged down in fashionable nostrums while forgetting the difference between words and wounds. The two are apples and oranges — both of which Tolentino would probably slip into her deep, deep pockets anyway.

So there the tough guys went, jamming Borgerhout’s narrow lanes in their sports cars, showing off their watches and their jewelry and going viral on social media. Stuffy Flanders was appalled. After all, Belgian authorities had watched the Turtle Clan rise from small-time dealers to apex traffickers practically overnight. “Our little asshole drug dealers had made the big time,” one prosecutor wryly tells UnHerd. Belatedly, politicians demanded investigations into money laundering and cocaine smuggling. Journalists, reveling in the drama, dubbed Borgerhout “Borgerokko” — the “capital of cocaine”. 

A decade on from the Borgerhout wedding and Europe has overtaken the US as the world’s largest cocaine market. An internationally diverse blend of traffickers — old-school Dutch thugs and the Moroccan clans from Borgerhout rub shoulders with Italian mobsters and well-oiled Balkan gangs — have been drawn like moths to the bright lights of Antwerp and its port. Belgium and the Netherlands, home to Europe’s other giant harbor at Rotterdam, have faced the brunt of the gangsterism that followed. 

Last October, after spending four months in a safe house due to a threat to her life, an anonymous federal judge from Antwerp shocked Belgium with an open letter. In it she claimed that “extensive mafia structures have taken hold, becoming a parallel force that challenges not only the police, but also the judiciary”, arguing that “bribery is permeating our institutions from the ground up”. She even suggested that Belgium was on the path to becoming a “narco-state” — a warning repeated by another judge only last month. 

These claims are clearly worth exploring, as is the way drug trafficking gangs have been able to burrow so deep into Belgian society. And even if Belgium ultimately isn’t a narco-state, this criminal explosion is now seeping far beyond its borders. In the last decade, after all, countries from Sweden to Britain have been outmaneuvered by the rapid rise of the cocaine mafias, already plump from successes in Albania, Spain and Italy. The real question now is: can they ever be stopped?

***

Borgerhout today doesn’t look like a hotspot for cocaine trafficking. Last year, Time Out dubbed it the coolest neighborhood in Europe, praising its “DIY spirit”, leafy terraces and lively streets, where Moroccan grocery stores squat alongside vegan coffee shops. But before the hipsters started arriving a decade ago, Borgerhout was better known for its Moroccan clans, mostly hailing from the rugged Rif Mountains, first arriving as guest workers in the Sixties. Experts in smuggling Moroccan hashish by boat into Spain, some of their number were well-positioned to enter Europe’s already-vibrant cocaine trade. 

The criminal clans could hardly have chosen a better base. Alongside Rotterdam, Antwerp is one of Europe’s undisputed shipping centers, receiving over half the continent’s maritime goods. But even figures like that don’t do the port’s scale justice. With containers as far as the eye can see, across 160 kilometers of quays, its size is hard to grasp without a drone. Amid this deluge of cargo, and with port officials in Antwerp only checking around 2% of arrivals, it was easy to smuggle in literally tons of cocaine. For three straight years, Antwerp, confiscating so much blow that police incinerators couldn’t destroy it fast enough, set annual records for drug seizures. Rotterdam, for its part, was close behind. 

The Borgerhout smugglers, alongside Moroccan relatives in the Netherlands, swiftly became among the most prolific coke traffickers in Europe. Within a few generations, these family groups rose from rural hash farming to being among the most powerful players in Europe’s billion-dollar cocaine trade, operating transnational drug-trafficking operations stretching from South America across Europe to Dubai.

All this has turned Belgium into a magnet for violence and corruption. An hour south of Antwerp in Brussels, the infamously boring capital of the European Union, there have been several murders linked to the cocaine trade. Since the 2012 shooting of Dutch trafficker Najib Bouhbouh in Antwerp, meanwhile, killings related to the port’s drug trade have rocketed across the country, as well as in Netherlands and Spain. Last September, Brussels residents woke up to find an alleged Albanian drug trafficker hanging from a street sign. 

Civilians have sometimes been dragged into the mayhem too, including a port worker shot and wounded after speaking about cocaine smuggling in a TV report. In 2022, a botched hit on Othman el-Ballouti, a member of the Turtle Clan, led to the death of his 11-year-old cousin. A wave of bombings followed. 

And on the cocaine comes. From the port, some cocaine-laden containers are waved through by corrupt port staff, while others are sent in the hope they’re not subject to random searches. Then the drugs, sometimes sent in batches of multiple tons, are surreptitiously removed from containers by specialized “extractor crews”: often teenagers who’ll only face juvenile charges if caught. They then either load up a legitimate vehicle or jump a fence to get the drugs past the physical border of the Schengen Zone a few hundred meters away. 

Once the cocaine does cross the Schengen line, the possibilities are basically endless — and almost entirely risk-free. Broken down into smaller packages and distributed to wholesalers, a metric ton of cocaine can end up supplying nightlife in 10 cities across five countries, from Berlin and Milan to Manchester and Athens. These drugs are sometimes shipped directly to the UK or other European ports, though foreign distributors also come to Belgium to buy cocaine from local high-level traffickers. 

As for the smugglers themselves, that complex journey from Antwerp to nightclub bathroom offers plenty of scope for promotion. One excellent example is al-Ballouti, who alongside his fellow Turtle Clan associate Nordin “Dikke” (“Fat”) al-Hajjoui got into the game after earning money as lookouts for extractor gangs. Within a decade, they were moving cocaine by the ton, and ended up commanding their operations from the safety of Dubai — until a new treaty between Belgium and the UAE allowed their extradition. 

Though both men now face decades in prison, leaders are quickly replaced, something equally true further down the command chain. Typical here is Dani. Speaking to UnHerd using a pseudonym, he’s one of many young Albanians who treat working in the Northern European coke trade like a gap year. We meet in Tirana, where he now bartends and waits at a café. Before that, though, he spent some of his twenties in a Belgian prison: after being caught “trying to work” at a port near Antwerp. 

Albanians have long migrated to the EU and Britain for legal work, but like Dani some instead head to the Low Countries and its coke trade. “The big players live in Dubai and need people to work the ports for them,” Dani says, “so lots of boys take that chance, instead of going to Germany to work in a warehouse or drive a truck.” In the end, Dani came unstuck. But the point, again, is that with so much money to be made — every tonne of cocaine arriving in Europe has a potential street value of €100 million — there’ll always be young men willing to try their luck.

***

In 2016, the same year as the Borgerout wedding, Colombia’s peace deal with the FARC transformed the global cocaine trade. The far-Left paramilitaries, alongside other armed groups in Colombia, relinquished their control over the world’s biggest coca crop, and a new generation of traffickers decided to open the floodgates to Europe. European gangs started sourcing and shipping their own coke direct from South and Central America — and profits duly skyrocketed. 

That’s been shadowed by other changes. Traditionally, gangs from different countries played different roles: the Moroccans specialized in getting drugs out of the port; the Albanians in transport and logistics inside the EU; the ‘Ndrangheta from Calabria in brokering and insuring shipments, and providing the connections to growers in South America. Soon enough, though, gangs began working together, sharing routes and huge multi-ton shipments. This is why you frequently see stamps on kilos of cocaine: it’s not marketing, but rather signals which cartel gets what.

The authorities, for their part, are struggling to contain the chaos. “Antwerp is the epicenter of a cocaine flood,” says one former police detective in Antwerp, “and it’s up to what’s basically the size of a local police force to manage it. The cartels feeding cocaine to the EU that are backed by billions of euros in revenue aren’t facing the coordinated police resources of all the nations of the European Union: they’re facing the customs and police of a single city.”

Belgium’s dysfunctional politics hardly helps. The country’s French and Flemish halves are often reluctant to cooperate. Each has a powerful regional government, as does Brussels itself, overlapping with a federal bureaucracy often paralyzed by political and economic rivalries. Ironically, this fecklessness is reflected in the fact that the cocaine mafia has rarely been caught corrupting senior Belgian officials: they’re too incompetent to be useful. Rather, explains the detective, the cartels focus on lower-level workers, the dockers, clerks and police officers they need to smooth the coke’s passage. This conveyor belt of graft is quickly killing trust in society, especially when the trade’s epic profits are sometimes so visible on the streets of Borgerhout, and by gangs flaunting their wealth on social media. 

That leads to another question: whatever the judges might claim, is Belgium really a narco-state? Anna Sergi, an expert in organized crime, isn’t convinced. Yes, there are genuine and rising fears. But actual narco-states — Guinea Bissau and Belize, or parts of Mexico and Bolivia — are places where the government has lost its monopoly on violence to the drug gangs. And as Sergi stresses: “We don’t have that in Belgium.”

Joris van der Aa, who has covered the crime beat in Antwerp for a decade, makes a similar point. Clearly, threats against judges and politicians must be taken seriously. Yet as the journalist continues, many such plots are little more than bravado. “In Belgium,” he says, “we see much less violence, threats and brutality compared to South America or even other parts of Europe.” For their part, Belgian clans are reluctant to kill each other, let alone top officials or cops, because “nobody is trying to physically control territory — they just want to make lots of money”. 

That’s a stark contrast to Europe’s premier drug supermarket: Amsterdam. A short train ride from Antwerp, the city faces a far more powerful and entrenched version of organized thuggery. It may not yet be a narco-state in the Mexican style, yet the city’s streets and canals have witnessed the murder of journalists, lawyers and witnesses. In 2021, to give one example, a high-profile reporter was shot and killed after leaving an Amsterdam TV studio. His killers? Associates of Ridouan Taghi, a Dutch-Moroccan kingpin. 

***

The authorities aren’t blind to these challenges. Since 2022, the Dutch have devoted €524 million to anti-smuggling security at their ports. There have been other clampdowns, too, notably when European police forces gained access to the encrypted phone networks used by criminals. Yet the drugs keep coming — with European coke reaching record purity levels even as prices stay low. 

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That’s unsurprising. As soon as police clamp down, drug gangs simply tweak their tactics. One example is dissolving drugs in plastic, making them harder to spot. All the while, traffickers are on the lookout for new ports to conquer. Norway and Greece are two popular options, with police in Thessaloniki seizing 270 kilograms of cocaine in a major bust last summer. 

Whether you use the term “narco-state” or not, then, Europe’s drug problem isn’t going away — even as more countries are being infected by cocaine gangsterism. So it’s a pity that a genuinely pan-European response remains absent. That’s arguably by design. Yes, the EU has a single market and free travel. Yet it also has 27 different police forces reporting to 27 different governments, all with their own distinct politics. As for the traffickers, all they have to do is get their coke beyond a port’s boundary fence. From there, 450 million consumers await. 

For Sergi, the solution is for European nations to band together, and focus more on the gangs than the drugs they’re pushing. “We need to have a coordinated effort and make a choice,” she says. “Either we interdict drugs wherever they arrive — which is a waste of time and resources, and you can never win — or you create a task force and you follow the criminal groups.” 

For the moment, though, the expansion of the global cocaine trade will continue. And how could it be otherwise when it’s so wrapped up, literally, in globalization? Hidden amid a tsunami of commerce, the magnified profits of prohibition have made cocaine too lucrative for the gangs to ignore. As they continue to gnaw away at democracy, both in Belgium and across Europe, the rise of cocaine gangsterism has created yet another existential threat for the continent — one it can no longer afford to ignore.

The worry today among Englishmen is less that the King of England will break down their castle’s door, than that he will look on passively when others do. The 21st-century Englishman doesn’t just fear that the state cannot defend his property; he fears that the state will punish him if he has the temerity to defend his property. Here is the essence of one of those celebrated mots du jour, “anarcho-tyranny”: the state is idle, even indulging, when violent criminals commit violent crimes; yet somehow it whirs into action when those crimes are resisted by upstanding, law-abiding citizens.

This is the diagnosis made by Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain: the country nowadays, we learn from their recent policy paper, is “more coddling to the wicked than it is safe for the virtuous”. The “castle doctrine” used to be as dear to the heart of every freeborn Englishman as those other palladia of liberty, Magna Carta and the jury trial, and the “anarcho-tyranny” which reigns today is proof that it has been chipped away. The paper makes five concrete policy proposals for reversing this catastrophe, all, presumably, oven-ready in the unlikely event of a Restore Britain government. It is more likely that bits of it will be poached by Reform or the Tories in the run-up to the next election. Both parties are probably already sympathetic to the paper’s arguments, and the cause of beefing up the “castle doctrine” had already been taken up by Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party of Canada, which even after its defeat remains for them a source of inspiration. Therein lies the paper’s claim to our attention.

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Its proposals are as follows. Pepper spray should be made legal, as it is in several other European nations, in order to give ordinary people a fighting chance against their assailants. The jury trial should be preserved for all criminal cases, as is already being urged by the legal establishment, because jurors tend to look more favorably than judges on violence committed in self-defense. The attorney general should be personally required to greenlight prosecutions brought for excessive force in self-defense (presumably it is envisaged here that future attorneys general will be of a higher caliber than Lord Hermer). Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act, which makes possible the prosecution for speech crimes even if the speech is uttered in the privacy of one’s home, ought to be repealed by Westminster forthwith. All these sound like good ideas. The last, especially, is essential for securing the boundary between public and private life that is at risk of breaking down completely.

The Restore Britain paper also calls, however, for “retaking the English castle” by establishing that householders have no duty of care to trespassers if the trespasser has criminal intent. No duty of care? Any criminal intent? Would it be fine, if some ruffian tries to make off with a £10 Amazon parcel from your front porch, for him to be killed? Some response, even a violent response, might of course be appropriate under such circumstances. But surely we owe people — even trespassers, and even trespassers with criminal intent — some basic duty of common humanity, and some principle of proportionality.

The report purports to set out, much in line with the new party‘s name, a grand project of restoration. It presents the theory that Britain has undergone a “silent regime change”: Blair and his band of Jacobins, an “unrooted ruling elite” of “card-carrying members of the Fabian Society”, razed the English castle to the ground; they “abolish[ed] our inherited folkways and common law traditions through a campaign of stealth”. There is, of course, a knee-jerk tendency on the Right — usually not without reason — to blame New Labour for any perceived deviation from Britain’s constitutional traditions. Here, however, matters are complicated by the fact that one of the report’s examples of an injustice produced by the legal status quo — Ted Newbery, who wounded a burglar with a shotgun, getting sued successfully for civil damages — occurred in 1988. Indeed, the law which Restore Britain wishes to amend was put on the statute books in 1984. If a precious English birthright has been sold for a mess of pottage, it was sold by Margaret Thatcher, not a stealth cadre of Fabians and Blairites.

Has a precious birthright been sold, though, and do we need wholesale legal reform to return us to the days of Entick and the Elder Pitt? The status quo, unusually in this instance, doesn’t seem all that bad. For one thing, home burglary, and other types of crime targeted by this proposal, are in decline. For another, there are already substantial protections for law-abiding individuals who are unlucky enough to end up in these predicaments. In 2018, Richard Osborn-Brooks, a pensioner, was attacked at his home in London by a pair of armed burglars; he stabbed one of them, Henry Vincent, with a kitchen knife. Osborn-Brooks was arrested on suspicion of murder. But he was, in the end, released without charge: the law is clear already that killing in self-defense is not murder.

The cause célèbre, mentioned in the Restore Britain report, is Tony Martin, who in 1999 killed a 16-year-old burglar with an unlicensed shotgun. He became a sort of martyr among the country gentry, around the time the fox hunting debate and foot-and-mouth were already radicalizing them against New Labour. He was convicted of murder, later reduced to manslaughter. Ironically — given the claims made in the report as to the natural sympathy of jurors, endowed with their earthy English common sense, towards Englishmen who defend their castle — it was a jury that convicted Martin of murder, even when the option of a manslaughter conviction was on the table. The reduction in his sentence was made, meanwhile, by three high court judges.

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In any event, Martin shot the burglar while he was already fleeing, and there are good reasons why such action should not be legally permissible. In 2008 Munir Hussain was attacked at home by three masked intruders, in what was possibly an “honor” crime avenging some alleged infidelity; he and his family were beaten and tied up. After Hussain freed himself, he and his brother chased one of the intruders, Walid Salem, down the road, and attacked him with a cricket bat. Hussain was found guilty of GBH and given a 30-month prison sentence, which was later reduced on appeal.

Anybody can understand what motivated Hussain in those moments, and anybody can feel some of the concomitant revulsion that he was charged and convicted at all. But on closer inspection one realizes that this has nothing to do with the castle doctrine, or with self-defense, after all; and, indeed, that the whole drama serves as a good advertisement for the law being the way it is. As the judge said, in sentencing Hussain: “The prosecution rightly made it plain that there was no allegation… in respect of the force you used against Salem in defending your own home and family or of the force used by either of you in apprehending Salem.” In other words, the judge was as deferential to the principle that the Englishman’s home is his castle as the people at Restore Britain would want him to be.

So, too, as it happens, was the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time, noted card-carrying Fabian Keir Starmer QC. “There are many cases,” he said, “some involving death, where no prosecutions are brought… We would only ever bring a prosecution where we thought that the degree of force was unreasonable in such a way that the jury would realistically convict.” Everybody is agreed, it appears, that, if Hussein had killed Salem while breaking free, or while otherwise embodying the principle that the Englishman’s home is his castle, no legal action would have been forthcoming. In fact, though, Hussein, when he bashed Salem’s head in with a cricket bat, was embodying a very different principle of justice.

What happened to Salem was, said the judge, a “very violent revenge attack on a defenseless man”: and we do not want to live in a society where revenge attacks can go unpunished, and where the family feud supersedes criminal law. We want to live in a society where all justice is the King’s justice — what could be a more ancient and venerable principle of English law than that? — and for such a society to exist, we recognize that the state must have a monopoly on violence. We need restrictions on the principle of self-defense, because we know that the line between self-defense and vengeance is easily blurred. We need also to drag people — often, indeed, people who acted nobly under horrifying circumstances — over the coals of legal investigation in order to establish, to the satisfaction of the state and of the jury, that they acted out of one set of motivations and not the other.

The Restore Britain proposal, seen in this light, has the air of defeat. It takes the view that the state has already surrendered its monopoly on violence, and that, this being so, the best thing to do is to empower ordinary people to take their security into their own hands. It cannot be extricated from the burgeoning idea that the country is on the precipice of civil war (it is interesting that David Betz, the KCL academic who has gained prominence for propagating this view, appears in the acknowledgements to Restore Britain’s last policy paper). As Joe Gargery says in Great Expectations: “Still a Englishman’s ouse is his Castle, and castles must not be busted, ‘cept when done in war time.” Home burglaries may be down; the status quo may be fine; proportionate self-defense, even to the point of killing an intruder, may already be permitted. But, when war time comes — and perhaps it’s already here — an Englishman’s castle may be busted at any moment, and he must prepare himself accordingly. As such chatter grows louder on the Right, it’s not hard to imagine Reform or the Tories arriving at similar conclusions.

Such a view rests on the idea that the future promises more anarchy than tyranny. In reality, though, we should more fear tyranny than anarchy. The castle is under threat: by overbearing bureaucrats and petty police officers who feel empowered to arrest you for the things you say and do in private. Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act is, as the authors of the Restore Britain paper recognize, a case in point. So too might we think of the encroachments on privacy that accompanied the lockdown: the ban on visiting second homes, restrictions on whom you were allowed to invite into your house, Matt Hancock’s dictate that only those in an “established relationship” are allowed to have sex. We ought to recover the original meaning of the castle doctrine, in the sense that Pitt the Elder understood it and Entick and Carrington experienced firsthand. Intruders and burglars should know already the risks to which they are exposed if they cross your moat and drawbridge. It’s the King of England, now as ever, who has to be kept at bay.

But then all hell broke loose. The first car suddenly reversed hard, slamming into the car behind; then two men in masks leapt out, opened the boot of the second car, and grabbed a pink suitcase out of it. Then, as the second car did a rapid three-pointer and zoomed off, the larger of the two men said to the smaller, in a northern accent that distinctly reminded me of Sean Bean — although there is no indication that he was involved — “you’ve done your job there, son”. Then they, too, hopped back in and sped toward the A406.

I bravely hid behind a van. Police told me later that it was probably a drugs heist of some kind. No one, as far as I know, has been arrested. It’s not exactly The Sopranos, but look, it happened.

The point is that I don’t want to sugarcoat London. Even in our pleasant and barely affordable Zone 3 suburb, lots of cars have been stolen from our street; there’s also a particularly odd mini-crime wave in which thieves smash car windows and steal the parcel shelves — those boards you put across your car boot — to flog for a few quid. And we’ve all had phones (and wallets, back when we used to carry them) lifted at some point.

But you might have heard worse. In particular, the US Right has decided that the UK in general, and London in particular, are completely screwed. This is not new: back in 2015, Donald Trump said there are “places in London and other places that are so radicalised the police are afraid for their own lives”. But it does seem to have picked up lately.

Trump, again, said in November that London had “no-go” zones. “Look at the crime you have in London,” he told GB News. “Today you have people being stabbed in the ass or worse.” The man certainly has a turn of phrase. His on-again, off-again buddy Elon Musk is similarly concerned about London: Police “allow” it to be “extremely dangerous”, he said in September, while they concentrate on “arresting comedians for social media posts”.

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(To be clear, I do think it is bad that they arrest comedians for social media posts.)

There was, therefore, a certain amount of glee from the British Left when the latest London crime data came out, showing that in 2025, just 97 people were murdered in London — a rate of 1.1 per 100,000, the lowest since comparable records began in 1997.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley took the opportunity to say that London is “an extraordinarily safe global city”, safer than “every US state, or thereabouts, let alone the big cities”. So who’s right: Elon Musk and Donald Trump, or Sir Mark? Is London a hotbed of crime and violence — or not?

The short answer: Sir Mark. There is a longer answer, but let’s start with the shorter one.  If you want to not get stabbed to death, you’re better off in London than in almost any other big city in the West. There was huge excitement among the sort of person who finds this stuff exciting when London’s murder rate briefly spiked above that of New York City’s in 2018. But that excitement lasted for less than two months.

In general, the story is very much the opposite: over the period 2020-2023, there were 486 people murdered in London; there were 1,785 murders in New York. Even if you specifically don’t want to get “stabbed in the ass”, as Trump worried, you’re safer here. There were 378 stabbing/cutting murders in NYC to London’s 314, though the number involving the ass is less clear.

New York, of course, is itself far safer than it used to be. Its homicide rate peaked at something like 33 per 100,000 in the Nineties, and is now at a far more manageable 2.6. Among US cities, that’s very low; FBI data says Jackson, Mississippi, has a homicide rate of 77.8 per 100,000, and Detroit, St Louis, and other places also have high double digits. A randomly selected citizen of London is roughly 1/70th as likely as a randomly selected citizen of Jackson to be murdered.

Comparing with US cities is, of course, playing on easy mode — Americans love shooting each other almost as much as they love growing their GDP — but I don’t think London compares badly with Europe either. Brussels had a murder rate of 3.2 per 100,000 in 2023 (apparently there’s a problem with drug gangs there), while Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam all bounce around between one and two. I won’t look at Tokyo because I suspect the answer would make me sad, but as far as the Western Hemisphere goes, London seems to be a pretty good place to not get murdered. This may always have been at least sort of true: one academic study reckons 14th-century London probably saw about 20 murders per 100,000 people, which would put it on a par with modern-day Indianapolis, although it’s all a bit of a guess.

So that’s the short answer. If you want to avoid being murdered, London is pretty great, and while obviously there are more and less murder-y bits, you’re almost certainly better off here than in, say, a randomly chosen US city. More than that, you’re also safer now than you were at any other point this century.

But how about other forms of crime? That’s much harder, even just to know whether crime is going up or down at the city level. Murders are nice and easy: a dead body is a dead body; you don’t get much quibbling about it. But with other crimes, it’s more complicated. Between 2002 and 2019, for instance, sexual assaults recorded by police in the UK tripled. But in that time, police started paying attention to women much more, and women became much more willing to report sexual assaults because society became rightly less accepting of it. How do we tease those things out?

The usual way is using the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which literally just asks people if they’ve been a victim of crime in the last year. It found that over that period, the actual number of sexual assaults fell about 12%; the increase in reporting was entirely due to changing societal attitudes and police response. It was a good news story, not a bad one.

The trouble is, the CSEW isn’t fine-grained enough to tell us about London specifically, so we can’t be entirely sure. Still, police-recorded violent crime in London is dropping and has been for years, and that matches the CSEW’s findings across the country. Overall, then, I think that even if you’re worried about getting beaten up, London is getting safer. If we take the police’s numbers completely at face value, which we probably shouldn’t, it’s safer here than in the rest of the UK.

I don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish, though. Some things definitely have got worse. A friend of mine works for a US company in London, and he finds it mortifying that all his American colleagues come over here and immediately get their phones stolen out of their hands by masked men on electric scooters. The number of recorded phone thefts in London has shot up — in 2019, there were 91,481; last year, 117,211. Three quarters of all phones reported stolen in Britain were in London. Met Police data also shows shoplifting up since 2022, and I’m sure a lot of us have seen our local supermarkets placing the expensive stuff behind glass to stop it being lifted.

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There’s a sort of stock response to people’s concerns about crime, of saying that, well, actually, we live in a historically safe time, and if people don’t realise it then that’s just the media or politicians fear-mongering. It is true, as I wrote in these pages many years ago, that there is an unfortunate disconnect between actual levels of risk and perceived levels of risk; it is difficult to improve people’s sense of safety by actually making things safer, though it is of course a start. And it is noteworthy that actually Londoners themselves broadly feel safe in their city, according to YouGov, while it’s outsiders — often behind a computer in San Francisco or troll farm in St Petersburg — who think of the city as dangerous.

But there are things that are undeniably going wrong. The tech and policy writer Martin Robbins noted recently that while crime numbers are down, the experience of crime, and especially of the police response to it, has changed, and not always for the better.

“In the year 2000,” he wrote, “if a thief stole my wallet and legged it, I’d understand the police struggling to do much about it and chalk it up to the idiot tax.” But nowadays, if someone nicks your phone, “I can track it via GPS and literally follow it from address to address, yet if I provide this gift of omniscience to the police they do absolutely nothing with it”. (The Times’ Tom Whipple noted in 2023 that the police refused to watch the CCTV that would have shown who stole one man’s bike, despite the fact that it would only have taken a few minutes.)

Sir Mark, the Met Office commissioner, agreed in a recent interview with The Telegraph that the police have failed to respond to modern challenges, such as the growth of shoplifting and phone-snatching, low-grade crimes which add a sort of patina of unpleasantness to the city — and limit its economic potential — even if they don’t cause physical injury. He says that it’s a priority to change that, and I hope it is, because, as Robbins says, it’s not of much interest to someone who’s been robbed that crime is at a historic low. “Should I also be grateful that I can travel from London to Watford without having my stagecoach routed by highwaymen?”

There are lots of things Americans can reasonably criticise Britain for: we can’t build anything, the weather is boring, our GDP growth is anaemic (although you really can’t blame London for that last one). And London has lots of problems itself, not least that you’ll struggle to buy a pint for less than £7 or a house for less than a million. But it’s not “extremely dangerous” and there aren’t really no-go zones. It’s expensive, annoying, and busy, but you almost certainly won’t get stabbed in the ass, unless you pay extra. To be honest, they’ve really cleaned Soho up these days.

A festive hit in 1972, The Poseidon Adventure was among a clutch of disaster movies that thrilled and chilled Seventies audiences. The optimism of the Sixties had dissipated; Vietnam was going down the toilet; New York was broke, with random crime and visible decline terrorizing the residents of Fear City and their horrified compatriots. Airport in 1970, Earthquake and The Towering Inferno in 1974: all mirrored the secret fears of moviegoers whose faith in authority had waned, who braced for catastrophe in a world gone dark with only their pluck to buoy them.

Two decades later, at the end of history, CGI inflamed the disaster-movie genre: Independence Day (1996), Armageddon (1998) and Deep Impact (1998) offered sweeping apocalyptic visuals — crumbling landmarks, waves dwarfing Midtown skyscrapers, cows mooing in the carousel of a hurricane. These were fantasies of Western annihilation, fantasies which peered into the White House situation room and caught the bead of sweat on the president’s forehead. At a time of relative prosperity and security — and before 9/11 — the focus was on the spectacle of destruction, how far directors could push newly available special effects. The usual bungling authorities still made an appearance: stock hawkish commanders, dumbfounded local cops — but unlike in many Seventies equivalents the threat was external, rather than a crumbling moral core.

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Is Mamdani's idealism already fading?

By Lee Siegel

These days the disaster blockbuster has fallen out of fashion. Covid killed the zombie apocalypse by bringing the weary realities of contagion to our doorsteps; climate anxiety shattered the comet careening through space with its promise of slow and sweaty demise. But visions of urban destruction have not disappeared; they’ve simply migrated to the news. The 2020s, so far the decade of disease, decline and demographic transformation, have taught us that the most psychically terrible threat is no longer immediate apocalypse — it’s the insidious, years-long erosion of protections and values taken for granted, whose loss is written on the sidewalks of London, and written on the wall for a New York City preparing to welcome an untested Millennial mayor.

In the real world, social contracts are not blown up but forgotten in the back of some dusty drawer. Personal safety is not, for the most part, violated by a lone attacker — it disappears when we acclimatize to the petty transgressions of normal people, those who press their bodies against us to shuffle in on our subway fares, who strut out of Tesco with bottles clinking in their pockets, who hock spit at minor officials when their toddler antics are reprimanded. Disaster happens, yes, when planes crash; but it also happens when they don’t — when dismal passengers rub their bare feet, puff clouds of sickly vape smoke into the cabin, rage at the stewardesses for no reason at all. Politeness, consideration, conformity: these are the casualties of a real-life disaster movie, a world forever changed by a lost expectation of a sensible and cohesive public. Citywide breakdowns recall riots, looting, mass catastrophe — but social orders can buckle under the weight of less spectacular tragedies, and barrier-bumpers, gum-spitters and participants in the pavement pissoir are all doing their bit to lower trust and heighten quotidian horror.

New York landmarks have been nuked, flooded and blown up countless times on screen. Lady Liberty has been decapitated (Cloverfield), buried in sand (Planet of the Apes) and entombed in ice (The Day After Tomorrow). She embodies a shining city, a way of life worth saving — but today that image reads differently, a dismal cliché, probably because the gleaming metropolis she represents has given way to a grimier reality. In the disaster movie, New York and London are depicted quaintly, sentimentally, flattened into tableaux of cheerful hot-dog vendors and chintzy tearooms, overcoats on Madison Avenue and urchins in the East End. The fantasy of the disaster movie is that, apart from the approaching asteroid or the mile-high tidal wave, nothing of note has ever changed in the endangered city. The person-sized disasters of managerial neglect, low-level lawlessness and economic hardship don’t exist.

Yet in 2026, disaster looks different. As New York prepares to inaugurate a 34-year-old, untested and catastrophically naive mayor on New Year’s Day, its merrymaking residents, much like the Champagne-popping revelers of the fictional Poseidon, don’t know what’s coming their way. Melodramatic, you might say — but consider how fragile is the order of the day-to-day. Even without a total naif in Gracie Mansion, life here rests on a knife edge: street-corner encounters turn violent without provocation, sly parcel-swipers continually invade hallways, and looking askance at the wrong commuter can earn you a slashed cheek or lit match. Mamdani has threatened to make the city’s buses, already mobile circus wagons full of antisocial sideshows, free — they could well go the way of the Central Park pool this summer, which became de facto baths for the “unhoused” and handy toilets for the disturbed. Men who pay for sex, ravaging the city’s desperates and driving women and girls into the hands of pimps, may no longer even be rapped on the knuckles: decriminalized “sex work” and scot-free soliciting could rob prostitutes of already scant protections under the guise of well-meaning toleration and sex positivity. And those beaten by partners might, if Mayor Mamdani’s campaign pitch comes off, be referred to swamped and bureaucratic social workers instead of police officers — shoved through a consequence-lite muddle of paperwork instead of their abusive partners being shoved into a cell.

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How posers conquered politics

By Poppy Sowerby

These are the real disasters headed for the American city: a peek across the Atlantic is all New Yorkers need to envision the immediate possibilities of progressive mismanagement. Sadiq Khan’s London, a city swamped in antisocial miasma, shows us what happens when incompetent policing collides with vanishing public values, when going easy on the violent and depraved becomes cruelty to the innocent. Sexual offenses on the Tube up 10% in a year; violent crime up 40% in a decade; security tags on bottles of Persil. Of course, New York has its own charms — subway cars becoming sleeper trains for fent addicts with hands down their pants; guns. With Mamdani installed, the complaints of the law-abider look soon, as in London, to be drowned out by the appeals of our betters to see bad behavior as evidence of victimhood. As Fraser Nelson has pointed out, Khan has overseen a TfL whose staff are told not to intervene when riders vault or shove through barriers, creating a stark division — also visible in New York — between those who gleefully bump and those who sourly tap their way in. The Met have a similar institutional limpness when it comes to shoplifting; as Nelson puts it: “You can walk into a shop, steal anything you like, walk away — and the chances are you won’t be caught.”

Why do we love disaster movies? The blockbusters of the Nineties impart a strange comfort: they impress on us the value of what is under attack, how lucky we are to live unmolested by comets and quakes, how charming and functional regular life is. But how true is that today, when urban life is the way it is? While violent crime in New York is down since the Nineties, petty offenses — just like in London — have jumped since Covid owing to lax enforcement, creating the perception of depressing lawlessness. Maybe that’s why the big-budget disaster film has fallen out of fashion; the city no longer feels like the symbol of national or Western order, and the stakes of mass destruction seem lower when the target is itself a crucible of chaos. It is telling that the only recent cinematic success in this genre, Twisters (2024), jeopardized not a noble metropolis but a ramshackle rodeo town and the main character’s humble homestead. Today the atmosphere of the city more closely recalls the Seventies, when moral decline and distrust in authorities created the first true classics of the disaster genre. If the on-screen apocalypse has a third wind, it will be in this mold. As for reality, will 2026 be a disaster? Very possibly; the real question is whether those in London or New York, so accustomed to demoralizing, ubiquitous delinquency, will even notice.

The presumption is that the kind of people who carry out hits are a bit like Eddie Redmayne’s assassin in The Day of the Jackal reboot: mysterious, smooth, deadly professionals, whose employers are criminal masterminds who know how to organize a clean liquidation. But in Britain at least, nothing could be further from the truth.

Here is an exchange of real-life text messages intercepted by police as part of an investigation into a planned triple homicide in 2019. The boss of an influential Turkish organized crime group in North London is hiring a criminal broker to arrange the killing of three men. “I’ll pay 150 bro then give u like 5 bricks new year January or something”, he writes. (That means £150,000 up front, plus five kilos of cocaine or heroin on completion.)

The man taking on the contract, formerly a senior member of a local street gang, feels the need to reassure his Turkish paymaster of his credentials, despite their longstanding criminal relationship: “U know I’ve killed about 9 people and made about 4 die bro its fucked up init,” he replies. Then: “First person was in 1st year in school bro kmt bro, after I do the ones on the list I think I’m gonna go into retirement.” Kmt is urban slang for “kiss my teeth”, an expression of contempt or nonchalance.

In this case, the planned murders were prevented before any shots were fired — thanks to the police monitoring these communications as part of a surveillance operation. But in May last year, an assassination attempt linked to the same long-running feud — which is linked to at least 20 murders in two decades — did play out on the streets of North London. A gunman hired by the Tottenham Turks pulled up on a stolen Ducati Monster motorbike outside a busy restaurant in Dalston and fired six shots, injuring three members of the Hackney Turks, who were sitting outside. He also accidentally shot a nine-year-old girl who was eating ice cream, leaving her with severe injuries. The bullet remains lodged in her brain.

Last month, a North London criminal named Javon Riley was jailed for life for his role as a spotter and getaway driver in the hit. But Riley refused to name the individual who paid him £40,000 to help the gunman, telling the court he feared for his life. Meanwhile, the hitman himself remains on the run.

“We’re a million miles away from [the high death count] portrayed on TV shows like Mobland and Gangs of London, but these executions do happen,” says Ian Broughton, a former Met detective who advises on court cases involving drugs and firearms. “If it can’t be solved by diplomacy, when all else has failed, murder is the last course of action.”

Still, in the real world, gangsters are actually pretty bad at murder, and organizing an execution can hit the same problems as organizing a legitimate business project: service delivery can be unreliable; outsourcing means no one takes responsibility when something goes wrong; and too often efforts are more performative than results-based. High-level gang hits on Britain’s streets are, mercifully, less frequent than you might think, but when they do happen, they are often brutal, shambolic, and orchestrated from thousands of miles away.

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By Dominic Adler

We know this thanks, in part, to a fascinating study into subcontracted violence among London drug gangs recently carried out by Jack Warburton, a researcher at Oxford University who specializes in organized crime. Warburton analyzed 17 contract hit cases, gaining access to closed-case police files relating to a large and detailed surveillance operation into the activities of a North London crime network as it planned three assassinations in 2019. The intercepted phone chats, beginning with the text exchange detailed above, show how the job was offered around the London criminal underworld like a gig on the chore-outsourcing app, TaskRabbit — with one of the three killings ultimately taken on by a low-level drug user who was seemingly incapable of finding his target, let alone killing him.

The job begins with the Turkish gang boss ordering the triple hit. A big figure in London’s drug trade, the Gang Boss is now living in Turkey, where he moved to evade the attention of the police. One of the three men he wanted dead was a member of a rival Turkish crime group, whom he held responsible for the murder of his cousin. Surprisingly, however, the other two were members of his own organization. He targeted one for going to the police, and the other for acting without the approval of senior group members.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the case, however, is that despite his organization’s nationwide reputation for violence, the Gang Boss opts to subcontract out the killings — using a senior member of a local street gang as a criminal broker. The pair trust each other, because the Turkish Gang Boss has been supplying the Broker with wholesale amounts of Class A drugs to sell on London’s streets for several years. Like last year’s attempted murders at the Dalston cafe, the use of predominantly black street gangs to carry out hits has been a regular feature of ethnically Turkish and Kurdish crime groups, enriched by decades operating as the chief gatekeepers of London’s heroin supply. Police have recovered numerous pistols and machine guns that have been passed from Turkish crime groups to black street gangs — who rely on their supply of drugs to make their own money.

The text exchanges reveal the Gang Boss and the Broker identifying the targets and agreeing the fee. However, even though he boasts about his own credentials as a killer, the Broker himself opts to subcontract the hits, asking an Accomplice to help him. The Accomplice is similarly reluctant to become directly involved himself, and so he in turn tries to find someone else to do the actual killing. And as the job moves down the chain, the plot starts to get a bit haphazard.

The Accomplice picks out a Journeyman — low-level drug user and dealer with little experience in carrying out contracted violence — to kill the rival gang member. However, he has no luck finding anyone to kill the other two victims. Frustrated, the Broker casts the net wider, bringing in a trusted relative with underworld connections. It is this Relative (now the fifth person involved in the conspiracy) who recruits the other two hitmen (the sixth and seventh people) from a prominent violent gang from another city.

Meanwhile, the Journeyman sources a gun, and alongside the Accomplice, steals an Audi 4×4 and fixes it with a number plate pinched from a similar car. They hide the weapon inside the Audi before parking it near the home of one of the targets. Little do they know that all of this time, the police have been intercepting their phone messages. The police are aware that one of the targets is in imminent danger — but they also want to continue monitoring the criminal conspiracy. So they decide to steal the Audi containing the gun, making it look like a regular car theft.

The criminals fall for it. Assuming the theft to be an unfortunate coincidence, they resolve to start again. But they find it challenging to source a new gun for the right price, and the plot descends into the kind of cluelessness familiar from Guy Ritchie films.

The Broker is meanwhile telling the Accomplice that one of the other three victims is an easy target. He’s recently been released from prison so must wear an electronic tag, meaning he’ll be at a certain address after a certain time every day. “…we should be cashing in tomorrow, this really is light work,” says the Broker.

But it doesn’t turn out to be light work. The Accomplice struggles to find the target or the property he’s tagged to. So the Broker pays £10,000 to a member of a local street gang from the target’s neighborhood — now the eighth conspirator in the plot — to carry out surveillance. When the two assassins recruited from outside London finally arrive to carry out the hit, they find the property is teeming with armed men providing protection. They abort the mission agreeing that they need more guns.

Meanwhile, the Journeyman is back to surveilling his target, who lives in a remote area on the outskirts of London. He carries out four separate surveillance sessions, each lasting between 10 minutes and a couple of hours — and the police know this as his mobile phone connected to the local cell tower. Bringing your mobile with you to a hit counts as a schoolboy error, and shows just how far out of his depth the Journeyman is. And so, with the plot nearing its violent conclusion, police swoop on the gang, arresting and convicting several of the UK-based conspirators.

It’s a case worth dwelling on, because it encompasses several traits that have become common in modern gangland assassination attempts. You would think violence and murder would be an essential in-house capability for an organized crime gang. But subcontracting out murder “makes strategic sense,” notes Warburton. It distances the criminal act from the person ordering it, and allows bosses to get on with the important business of making money. Note how the Gang Boss remained safely in Turkey, where he is less likely to be found by police or by rivals seeking revenge.

The safe haven du jour for European gangsters, however, is Dubai. For years, criminals have flocked to the Emirate to take advantage of its luxurious living, lack of gang violence, and crucially, its lax rules on money laundering and extraditing criminals. In June, British cocaine baron James Harding was jailed for 32 years after plotting to pay a hitman £100,000 to put a rival “permanently out of business” while lounging by a pool in a five-star hotel in Dubai.

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By Andrea Valentino

Nevertheless, by operating remotely and subcontracting out hits, British gangsters have surrendered some control over the actual operations — which often come with a distinct air of amateurism. Part of this is down to Britain’s tight gun laws, which mean there are simply not many people around who are proficient in wielding a gun. When gangs are able to source firearms, their lack of expertise means they tend to “spray and pray”. In the space of 24 hours, innocent bystanders Ashley Dale, 28, and Olivia Pratt-Korbel, 9, were killed in totally separate incidents in Liverpool in 2022, with both killed by gunmen hired to murder rival gangsters.

But even hiring trained gunmen is no guarantee of success. In 2021, a serving British soldier was jailed after he was paid to kill a man in Cheshire by a regional crime boss living in Spain. The soldier turned up at the man’s home with a Glock hidden in a pizza delivery box. Despite having a photo of his target, he managed to shoot the wrong man, blasting the intended victim’s stepfather in the legs.

Then there was the case of Anis Hemissi, the killer hired to execute the Swedish-Albanian drug trafficker Flamur Beqiri in 2019. Bequiri was shot dead in front of his wife and children on the doorstep of their £1.7 million home in Battersea. It’s a story that made national news, in part because Bequiri’s sister Misse starred in The Real Housewives of Cheshire. But despite being able to carry out the killing, Hemissi’s methods had a distinct flavor of Inspector Clouseau.

“The media presented [Hemissi] as this kickboxer, this professional killer, but he was the complete opposite,” Warburton tells me. Hemissi, who had flown in from Sweden under his own name to carry out the hit, was identified as the culprit within days because his attempts at subterfuge were so useless. “When he did the surveillance he rode a distinctive women’s bike and was litter-picking wearing a latex mask and a Swedish bin-collector’s uniform, so a local resident, thinking he was crazy, asked him what he was doing, and reported it to the police.” Hemissi was jailed for life in 2022.

Still, criminals are capable of learning from their mistakes. One of the main concerns crime experts now have is their increasingly sophisticated use of technology, with tracking devices increasingly preferred to human spotters to monitor targets’ movements. In 2022, Koray Alpergin, a Turkish radio DJ, was tortured to death in a disused bar in Tottenham while his girlfriend Gozde Dalbudak was forced to listen to his screams. The Tottenham Turks wanted him dead over a drugs-related feud — and the thugs they hired captured him after attaching a tracking device to his car.

Nevertheless, such killings remain extremely rare. There are no detailed statistics on how many attempted and successful hits are carried out in Britain each year, but a College of Policing study estimated that 5% of annual homicides in England and Wales are linked to organized crime groups. That would equate to 28 of 570 killings last year. More general gang-related killings, including teenagers attacking each other with knives and machetes over petty beefs, were roughly twice as frequent.

But that stands to reason. Killing is bad for business in the criminal world, as it attracts reprisals, extra heat from the police, and impacts revenue. And despite their fearsome reputation, British organized crime groups are much more money-making machines than killing machines.

The underworld is, after all, a distorted mirror of the world we live in. As in the legitimate business world, crime organizations are now run by remote and unaccountable leadership, often based offshore, hoovering up the proceeds; there is a chain of harassed middle management giving everyone plausible deniability; and then there are the undertrained, underpaid workers actually doing the jobs. On the rare occasions they succeed, it’s almost always these hapless individuals who get caught — and almost never the person who bankrolled them. As in the business world, the reputation of the people at the top must be preserved at all costs.

But just because urban crime is a real problem doesn’t mean that Trump can fix it by decree. Trump is exceeding his constitutional authority in attempting to circumvent the frustratingly iterative process of federalist democracy, which rarely offers political or practical shortcuts.

As with many things Trump, we are here because of abject Democratic failures. During the pandemic, much of America endured a rupture in personal safety and order. Reported homicides rose by a third between 2019 and 2022. Cities that seemed to have vanquished the bad old decades disintegrated in full national view: New York City’s murder level spiked 53 percent from near-record lows between 2019 and 2021, the sharpest increase in recorded history.

The summer 2020 riots, too, heightened voter fears. People who remember plywood Manhattan (stores boarded up against another night of window smashing), or who saw Minneapolis burn, can hold two perfectly compatible thoughts in their heads: just because there were peaceful protests in 2020 doesn’t mean there weren’t violent disturbances.

In much of the country, if not New York, rising violence in 2020 and 2021 was a sharp acceleration of existing trends; killings had been rising for a half decade. Moreover, even people who didn’t acutely fear being murdered had already noticed the gradual increase in pettier transgressions, with stores locking the toothpaste behind Plexiglass and drivers with fake plates blowing more red lights.

Crime and disorder, not coincidentally, exploded as high-profile cities, including San Francisco and New York, embraced new state and local policies to soften or altogether eliminate the consequences of committing many crimes — including, yes, reducing the use of cash bail to incarcerate suspects.

Democrats and their media allies and social-media surrogates for years ignored or minimized these failures and gaslighted the growing public anxiety. “Crime is much lower than it was in 1990,” we heard repeatedly, as if a 30-year-old, out-of-context benchmark could be a substitute for continued steady progress (never mind that no Democrat would ever argue that 1990 should serve as the singular barometer to track other ills).

“Crime is higher in red states,” we heard (and still hear). Democrats ignored a big reason for this disparity. People living in areas with higher population density have long demanded, and gotten, a lower crime rate, partly because they are more aware of crime’s impact. A person screaming threats on the subway can unnerve dozens of witnesses; scream on a rural road, and nobody will hear you.

 “Crime happens for a lot of reasons,” we heard, “you can’t just blame bail reform.” Sure, but those other factors were unwitting arguments for far more careful reform of criminal-justice laws, not for throwing out decades of practice and hoping for the best. For example, serious mental illness is proliferating, perhaps because of growing pot use. So it isn’t a good idea to discard one imperfect tool of incapacitating the violently mentally ill — keeping them in jail before a trial — without creating another, better tool: boosting the capacity for long-term, in-patient mental-health treatment. Likewise, organized retail theft, abetted by Facebook, has spread, which means that it isn’t a good idea to diminish the consequences for stealing stuff from stores to feed this new market. 

 The latest Democratic argument is that crime is now falling, not rising. Good news, yes, but this line of reasoning ignores the impact of years of preventable trauma. This “mission-accomplished” take also ignores the fact that crime isn’t falling uniformly. Overall felonies in New York City, for example, as of mid-August, remain 29 percent higher than in 2019. 

Into this void of Democratic leadership slides Trump. As on immigration, tariffs, and federal budget efficiencies, the president wants quick results. One of his twin executive orders on Monday decreed that “federal policies and resources should not be used to support jurisdictions with cashless bail policies,” and directed the attorney general to compile a list of states and cities with such policies governing crimes that “pose a clear threat to public safety and order,” so that federal agencies can “suspend or terminate” their grants. The other order directed the Pentagon to “designate an appropriate number of each state’s trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization” for “quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order.”  

 But there’s a major difference between the president’s actions on immigration and trade and his actions on state and local disorder. Whether you agree or disagree with Trump’s tariffs and immigration measures, there’s no question that the federal government has substantial authority, under both the Constitution and statutory law, to govern these areas.

 By contrast, state and local governments, not Washington, govern most crime and disorder. (The main exceptions are crimes that cross state or international borders.) The constitutional basis is clear. Article IV requires that states respect the “judicial proceedings of every other state,” thus implying that such proceedings will differ from state to state. A person who flees one state to escape prosecution for a serious crime is to be extradited “to the state having jurisdiction of the crime,” further solidifying state, not national, control. Moreover, Trump has no authority to revoke existing federal grants or restrict future federal funding based on a state’s criminal-justice laws. Congress, not the White House, sets conditions on federal grants. 

 The Founding Fathers had a practical basis for reserving most criminal-justice powers at the state and local level. States differ from one another, in everything from culture to geography to population density. The circumstances in which a person charged with homicide can make a self-defense claim, for example, can and should differ between a predominantly rural state, in which citizens know they are largely on their own, and an urban state, in which citizens know the police are stationed on the next block. Voters in a state with a well-funded public-health system may feel more comfortable releasing a chronic thief provided he attend rehab, and voters in a state with a sophisticated mental-health system may think someone arrested for punching a stranger may be better rehabilitated in a hospital rather than in a jail.  

 Enforcement, too, is better left to state and local officials. National Guard troops have a role in protecting people and property during real emergencies — after a hurricane, say, when a neighborhood is entirely depopulated and needs protection from looting. But Guardsmen and women can’t make the subtle daily distinctions that police officers must make.

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How crime shattered DC

By Emily Jashinsky

A police officer regularly stationed at a Bronx subway stop may develop a knack for knowing which fare-beater to let off with a warning — a day laborer he knows, who has just forgotten his wallet — and which fare-beater to serve with a fine. A police officer patrolling a gang-plagued Brooklyn street may arrest one person for swigging from an open bottle of vodka, because he knows that that person was just released from prison for a violent crime. He may walk by another individual engaged in the same behavior, because he knows that that person is walking home from his father’s funeral.  

 That’s not to say that governors and state legislators always, or usually, get it right on creating and maintaining criminal-justice systems, or that city police get it right on enforcement. But the past few years have shown that state and local democracy is working, albeit slowly and imperfectly. In New York, for example, Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature have tightened the criminal-justice laws several times, in part because the governor was threatened by a close Republican challenger in 2022 and will likely face a similarly close opponent next year. San Francisco voters threw out their progressive district attorney. 

 The democratic process at the state and local level is annoying, difficult, takes too long, and isn’t guaranteed to have a perfect or even a good result, but this doesn’t mean that the process is irrevocably broken. As with all issues of democratic governance, the question is: compared to what? 

Trump isn’t powerless in nudging states in the right direction. The president could ask Congress to enact a bill similar to the Clinton-era “Cops on the Beat” program, which offered $8.8 billion in grants ($19.4 billion in today’s inflated dollars) to hire police officers. Congress could attach certain conditions to these grants, including requirements to report better data. The federal government could require state and local jurisdictions, for example, to report on what percentage of suspects arrested for nonviolent crimes and released on no or low bail go on to face re-arrest for similar and more serious crimes. New funding for in-patient and intensive outpatient mental-health treatment could require states and cities to report on the share of patients who are arrested for criminal behavior after release.

Trump has tapped into a problem, which is more than national Democrats have done. But acknowledging a problem, though critical, isn’t the same as fixing it.

My question seemed to be answered the following day. On Truth Social, the president posted pictures likely taken from the motorcade that morning or the next, as he returned for another round of golf. Alongside images of roadside tents and trash, Trump wrote, “We’re having a News Conference tomorrow in the White House. I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before.” Sure enough, at a marathon briefing on Monday morning, Trump announced that he was placing the DC police force under federal control and deploying the National Guard to secure streets long blighted by disorder — and bloodied by the fourth highest homicide rate in the nation. 

At first, I hardly noticed the encampment. My parents dropped me off for college at Foggy Bottom 14 years ago this month, and as far as I can remember, tents have dotted that part of the city ever since. But rumours were swirling that a federal takeover of DC was imminent, so I spent the ride thinking back on the last decade.

Washington, DC, is like most other major American cities: dirty and crime-ridden in some pockets, idyllic in others. But it isn’t just another city. It’s the centre of American power and the seat of American democracy. It’s the gateway to America. Trump himself illustrated this well by reflecting on something his father, Fred, had told him when he was young. “Son, when you walk into a restaurant, and you see a dirty front door, don’t go in, because if the front door is dirty, the kitchen’s dirty also.” The president added: “Same thing with the capital. If our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty, and they don’t respect us. It’s a very strong reflection of our country.”

This is the deepest tragedy of the capital city. It really does reflect the country. It reflects our class dynamics, our inability to end cycles of poverty and crime, our aborted ambitions.

Trump’s critics are correct that Washington is lovely and, like many cities, much improved since a nadir in the Nineties  and early Aughts. True, Covid ravaged the city, to the point where downtown streets sometimes resembled surreal scenes from dystopian fiction. That is no longer the case, though there are more empty storefronts than there should be; fentanyl visibly haunts the homeless community; and heinous violence still visits multiple corners of the city every week. 

The place feels better than it did amid the riots and lockdowns of 2020, but that’s a low bar. While city statistics show the population is growing again and crime is falling, the police union accuses leadership of manipulating data on the latter. “To evade public scrutiny, MPD leadership is deliberately falsifying crime data, creating a false narrative of reduced crime while communities suffer,” the union’s chairman said in a May news release. Allegations of data tampering are under investigation in the police force.

Perhaps most important, the school system is crumbling. A sweeping Washington Post investigation this summer found that the number of students in the public school system “who missed at least two weeks of class in a school year increased 110 percent over the past decade”; and that “more than 18,000 reports of truancy went uninvestigated in the last three full school years.” 

Just this spring, local media reported that “the number of juveniles arrested in DC has gone up each year since 2020. More than 2,000 were arrested in 2023 and 2024.” The report, from NBC Washington, continued: “Juveniles also accounted for 51.8% of all robbery arrests in 2024, according to the police department. About 60% of all carjacking arrests made to date in 2025 are juveniles,” and “nearly 200 juveniles arrested in 2024 for violent crimes had prior violent crime arrests.”

In April, Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith warned: “We have seen an increase in fights in our schools and more serious criminal offences outside of our schools. And we have seen an increase in juvenile suspects involved in criminal offences district-wide.”

Just days later, the Navy Yard neighbourhood experienced the first of several violent teen takeovers that have rattled the city. “In just a matter of weeks, our neighbourhood has witnessed yet another teen crime… terrorisation — for lack of a better word — of our neighbourhood,” a commissioner recounted to residents assembled at a May community meeting. He described the event as “a planned attack on our community orchestrated by youth from across the region.”

Hillrag reported, “Hundreds of teenagers have converged on Navy Yard twice over the past month, first on April 18 and again May 17,” during which the commissioner said (and much video evidence confirmed) the kids “entered communal spaces of private residential buildings, fought in public spaces, robbed adults exiting local bars, and yelled at police officers positioned at metro stations.” 

This crisis has persisted through the summer months. As in many other cities, each week brings more horrifying anecdotes of murder and assault. Of course, apologists for the existing state of affairs remain unbending. An Associated Press report in January asserted that, overall, “experts say most cities are seeing a drop in crime levels that spiked during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. But they say misleading campaign rhetoric in the run-up to the November elections and changes in how people interpret news about crime have led to a perception gap.” 

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In DC, at least, the police union seems to believe perceptions of a steady crime rate are more accurate than the city’s figures. Regardless, the low bar set during the apocalyptic days of the pandemic explains why Trump’s bluster is being met with scorn and mockery in the press corps. He’s obviously not right about everything. DC has been worse. Many American cities have been, too. But perhaps the most important message Trump sent on Monday isn’t about the data, it’s about refusing to tolerate what every single American knows is a vicious cycle of crime and poverty in the nation’s greatest cities. The public reaction of DC journalists will be much cooler than the public’s, inside DC and out.

To be sure, the success of Trump’s intervention isn’t guaranteed. The roots of the problem are clearly planted deep in the city’s failing schools and shattered families. Conservatives will point to dependence on government programs, and liberals will argue those programs are underfunded. But the National Guard won’t fix these underlying problems, though a posture of intolerance for crime and enforcement of the law will surely help. If the plan succeeds, hundreds of kids in DC will be spared from the trauma of being victimised by crime and also the trauma of participating in it. 

The problem is worse than it should be in this historic centre of global wealth and power. Quibbling over the data isn’t unimportant, but it risks obscuring the bigger picture. Washingtonians, and Americans, can do much better. That isn’t really up for debate.

Bedford, they had all been told by the police and local authorities, had been getting better, despite its post-pandemic troubles with crime and civic drift. But no one believed them. And now they were willing to listen to a man with a successful YouTube channel. For the next eight weeks, McCormack plans to self-fund a private security scheme in Bedford to guard the high street. The private security firm would act as “scarecrows” to deter vagrants and sex pests that had come to plague the town.

“Is there a danger,” asked one elderly woman in the crowd, “that we are bringing more shame on people who are already vilified? Do we have a long-term plan to help them?” Eyes rolled. “This is what I like to call suicidal empathy,” answered McCormack. “I care more about the working people of this town than criminals and drug addicts.” The crowd nodded in agreement.

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This was the start of Project Bedford, a model of civic renewal and regeneration for Britain’s provincial malaise that McCormack has described to one American podcaster as a potential “political coup.” To put it differently, it’s the ethos of “you can just do things” brought to a small English town, where a broader national schism of mistrust and cynicism has manifested itself in angry shopkeepers and radicalised dads in Ralph Lauren shirts.

But this wasn’t just about men in high-viz jackets guarding the Lidl carpark. The stories shared at this beleaguered caucus pointed to some deeper cosmic disturbance in the natural order of a boring English market town. Shoplifters chased away with shovels, pedophiles using their business’s wifi to download unspeakable things, a lady who had locked herself in a cupboard, because the police wouldn’t come to deal with a man pursuing her. This was a moral degradation for which the hollow and mimsy hallmarks of modern English civil society — with its neighborhood policing plans and community outreach initiatives — seemed unable to resolve.

On first impressions, rumors of civic collapse seem hard to believe in Bedford. “Somewhere in England,” was how evacuated BBC broadcasters referred to their new home during the Second World War. In trying to remain anonymous from the Luftwaffe, they had inadvertently stumbled on the perfect description of that parochial yet reassuring dullness you can still find by the banks of the River Ouse. This is an atmosphere that, over its 1,000-year history, has nurtured everything from Pilgrim’s Progress, the deepest work of devotional introspection in the English language, to what will soon be Europe’s largest theme park.

Bedford is the spiritual middle of middle England. A town of 100,000 people, equidistant from both Luton and Milton Keynes, it now finds itself in some unwilling struggle between those two archetypes of modern England. At some point in the Sixties, its post-war architects lost interest in the idea of Bedford as a quaint county town, burrowing a concrete shopping center right through its central hearth. Today, it’s home to a closed Marks and Spencers, haggard South Asian Deliveroo drivers, and delirious alcoholics. The town and its surrounds, Victorian suburbs, new build estates and genteel hamlets, tend to avoid the place altogether. Visitor numbers to the town center have fallen by half a million a month.

Walking through the old center, you can still feel the spirit of the curtain twitcher, the bossy parochial council, that stifling and sinister provincial mystery that promises to hold the place together for eternity. Now it’s been put to the test, with disorder so hallucinatory and surreal it appears like a paranoid apparition for a town that once dreamt of being in The Sunday Times property supplement. The morning of McCormack’s meeting, I watched a topless crack addict barrelling through a shopping arcade filled with families and their toddlers licking ice cream. A mid-morning frenzy of lolling eyes and semen-stained trousers.

Further up the high street, there was more disorder. “Someone causing trouble with a knuckleduster,” said one bystander with morbid glee. Two police cars had pulled up outside the Natwest, and in the ruckus a suspect was bungled away. In the brief return to normality, the topless man took out his pipe, rubbed it on his wobbling belly, then lit up in relief.

McCormack’s plan is popular. Nearly everyone I spoke to welcomed the scheme, with many noting that Milton Keynes already has its own private security run by My Local Bobby. The firm is increasingly operating across the country, after its success guarding central London and its affluent suburbs. But McCormack’s vision is less the preserve of a flashy neighborhood watch, and more of a market town populist driving a wedge in the ongoing war over perceptions of reality in Bedford — between the people who live here and those tasked with running the place. Between those who say things are getting better and those who believe it is not.

In the aftermath of his event, John Tizzard, the local police and crime commissioner, accused McCormack of “exaggerating and spreading misinformation about the town’s decline,” arguing that official statistics showed that crime was improving. During McCormack’s meeting, a patrol car made a point of crawling past, promptly dismissed by attendees as a pathetic sop. McCormack is now in a public spat with Tizzard, who he has called a “weak man”, who must resign.

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Speak to locals and it’s clear whose side they’re on. One shop owner, who runs one of the town’s longest-running stores and didn’t want to be named, said he had “stopped engaging” with officers — “if I tell them how it is,” he said, “then I’m scared I’ll get arrested.” Mark, a construction surveyor who has lived in the town for 35 years, shared a similar loss of faith. When I ask him to explain how the town has declined, he thinks long and hard before bringing up the former England rugby player and policeman Martin Bayfield, who used to work for the local force. “The problem is we don’t have people like him anymore,” says Mark of the six-foot-10-inch former officer. “Everyone knew Martin, and no one wanted to mess with him.”

This war over reality when it comes to civic decay is now playing out on the national stage, with Nigel Farage recently launching Reform’s latest “Britain is Lawless” campaign. Among other things, Farage points to erroneous statistics that exclude shoplifting, or else that fail to weight for high crime areas. In Bedford, one excellent example of revealed preference is the local mayor, now more than happy to lean on the philanthropy of a YouTuber.

“What does the mayor think of all of this?” a young man sneered during the meeting at Real Coffee. A large, jolly Dickensian man, the Conservative Tom Wootton, stood up and bellowed across the room. “In a few years time, less than three miles there’s going to be eight million visitors. We’ve got a short window and a short time and we’ve got to make it work.” He’s referring to Universal Studios Great Britain, a planned 700-acre theme park and resort complex just outside of town, one supporter claims could bring 28,000 jobs to the local economy.

It’s this looming deadline, to restore Bedford into a gentle site for tourists, that adds an unsettling urgency to McCormack’s campaign. Given his bleak outlook, five years seems a long time for a government he sees as pushing us towards state collapse a la Venezuela. And with Reform’s newfound councils discovering the legal and professional limits of their promise to overturn Britain’s provincial decline, it’s one McCormack believes could come to a head in Bedford.

“The grievances of the colonies against the King were the same as we have now,” he had previously told an American podcast. When I ask him in the more sobering setting of Bedford high street if he’s serious, he doesn’t back down. “If enough people are angry enough we could look at the playbook of the Velvet Revolution,” McCormack says. “An entirely peaceful revolution no shots were fired and it brought down the Czechoslovakian government.” And could that start in Bedford? “Maybe, maybe so. I think we have enough reason to say that the Government is now illegitimate; they have no mandate. I’m going to walk up to that line and hover around it.”

All the while, the people of Bedford remain elusively discontent. Before I left, Mark took me on a tour. The night was drawing in, and wandering through the town center like lost shoppers are scores of vagrants who line the boarded-up shops. “No one really knows where they’re coming from,” Mark says. And then we see a scene that sums up the war over reality taking place here in Bedford. There, outside what was once Clinton’s cards, is one of the council’s “Rapid Response” vehicles. Inside are two security contractors from South Asia, one with his feet on the dashboard, slowly herding a merry huddle of drunks through the derelict shopping center in a bemused, ineffectual daze. “We love them,” says one of the drunks.

The last place Mark showed me was a lamppost outside a Greggs. It’s the spot where Thomas Taylor, just 17, was stabbed and stamped on by four youths and “left for dead” at the start of the year. That day, the front page of the local paper had the latest details of the trial. One of the 18-year-old killers had habitually carried a ten-inch knife, even into the Job Center across the road. On the lamppost were no flowers, just a black piece of tape to mark the spot.

For the past four weeks, I’ve spoken with the 54-year-old prisoner every week. We talk for 10 minutes before the pips go — all calls cut out at that point — and then he has to ring back. Sometimes I am available, sometimes not. It is a frustrating process.

Justin Plummer has no one left on the outside. His mother, father and sister have all died since he was sent down; he is estranged from what remains of his family. He lost touch with his teenage friends years ago.

But in one respect, he is a lucky man. Despite a 20-year-plus freeze on legal aid rates and the extreme odds against successfully challenging a criminal conviction, his legal team continue to fight his corner. They are convinced his conviction is unsafe and they argue nothing remains of the original prosecution case. His solicitor acts pro bono.

The first time Justin Plummer rang me was after a successful appeal in July 2021, which he hoped would be his first step to freedom. To the surprise of his lawyers, the CPS pushed for a re-trial. To their even greater surprise, he was reconvicted in June 2023 after 33 days in court and sentenced to life with a minimum term of 16 years.

In October last year, three judges gave him leave permission to bring an appeal — again. Lord Justice Edis said that this was “an extraordinary case” and called his challenge “arguable”. “All we have decided is that your appeal is arguable,” Edis said. “That does not mean it will succeed. You need to have appropriate expectations about what might happen.”

Next week, Plummer has a final chance to persuade the court that he was wrongly convicted. He has few expectations. “The justice system is just a complete mess,” he says. “It’s just not doing what it’s supposed to be doing.”

***

The attack on Janice Cartwright-Gilbert on 27 February 1997 was deranged. The 38-year-old woman had been living in a mobile home with her partner while their house was being built. They lived on a remote country lane outside Wilden, a small village close to Bedford. Her body was found in a burning caravan with multiple stab wounds, a knife and scissors sticking out of her neck, having been throttled by an electric flex.

Justin Plummer is the first to admit that he was a complete menace around the small Bedfordshire village where he lived. He was on a robbing spree at the time of the killing, clocking up 24 convictions for theft and burglary in the four months up to the murder. He broke into a house just five miles away, two days before the murder.

But is there anything in a long list of previous convictions to suggest he was capable of such a psychotic attack? His criminal record has one conviction for violence — poking a police officer in the eye as he was trying to do a runner. There is another incident: an attack on his ex-girlfriend, two years before the murder. The prosecution, telling the jury at his 2023 retrial that it was “very similar”, alleged that Plummer “punched her in the face, twice” and kicked her as she lay on the floor “at least two or three times”. Eight days after the fight, she went to her GP, who noted: “No bruising, a tender area just above the left ear” and sore ribs. She left with a prescription for painkillers and was sent off for an X-ray. It is not known whether she went. Justin Plummer says that his ex-girlfriend was a heroin addict who went to the GP to get medication and exaggerated her symptoms.

He admits that he hit his ex, but claims it was “a minor domestic” which has been deliberately distorted by the prosecution. On his account, he reacted badly under extreme provocation. His ex, who is also the mother of his child, at the time was in a relationship with his brother. I attempt to speak to her via her son — he does not respond.

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Nearly all of Plummer’s previous convictions related to his activities as a prolific burglar. He had a clear modus operandi — “nick stuff and leg it”. He was, as his barrister put it at his recent appeal, “like one of those seagulls on the beach” who would “swoop in and steal anything”.

It was not obvious that Janice Cartwright-Gilbert was murdered in the course of a burglary; at the original trial, there was no evidence presented to the jury that anything had been stolen. Nor was there any forensic evidence linking Justin Plummer to the killing. Except a stamp-print on the woman’s head which, the original jury was told, matched his size 6 Nike Air Screech trainers.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission referred his conviction to the Court of Appeal in February 2021 on the basis that the sole forensic evidence linking Plummer to the murder was “fundamentally flawed”. In July that year, the Appeal judges agreed. Lord Justice Fulford ruled that there was “no evidence” to suggest that it had to be Plummer’s trainer.

Five months after the murder, the Bedfordshire on Sunday ran an article headlined “Footprint of a murderer” claiming to show “the mark left by a Nike trainer at the murder scene”. It reported how “pioneering forensic techniques” demonstrated that the print could only have come from a particular pair of Nikes. Bedford police sent two detectives to Portland, Oregon to find out how many pairs had been imported into the UK. “We have over 400 different types of trainers and I guess it would be possible to find out how many of each type would be sold in each area,” a Nike spokesman told the paper.

At the original trial, the CPS relied upon an expert witness by the name of David Lewin, a dentist who swapped fillings for “forensic odontology” and a career in the courts giving evidence on bitemarks. The trial judge summed up his evidence: “It was one of the clearest marks he had ever seen. No other shoe could have caused it.”

Lewin had assured the court that there was no difference between matching bitemarks and shoe prints. Despite having no experience in the latter, he claimed to have developed a new technique using imaging software to scan prints and transfer the results onto transparent film.

Lewin’s wife, Persephone, recorded her husband’s eureka moment in the book she wrote about his career, Bite to Byte: The story of injury analysis. “Computer-generated overlays were central to the trial,” she explained. “The case hinged on damaged flaws in the sole of a trainer shoe matched to imprints of those same flaws on the victim’s face, which bore the pattern of multiple stamping. This new mode of presenting evidence was written up in the national press as ‘groundbreaking forensic work’ and commended by the judge.”

Lord Justice Fulford did not agree. Instead, he ruled that Lewin’s technique was “neither validated nor suitable… either in the late 1990s or today”. The Court of Appeal quashed the conviction, but Fulford insisted on a retrial — despite more than a quarter of a century passing since his first conviction and (as his lawyers argued) the loss of key evidence by Bedford Police, including the victim’s clothing. “Justin was left having to try and recall events and conversations he wasn’t asked about at the time,” says solicitor Annalisa Moscardini. “How can the outcome of a murder trial hang on evidence of this nature? We were hamstrung from the start?”

In the April 2023 retrial, the strength of the forensic evidence was significantly downgraded. Far from it being the slam dunk Lewin claimed, it was agreed that there was a “moderately strong support” that it might have been Plummer’s trainer.

However, his lawyers argued that far more persuasive was the evidence of two new experts who had cut deep into the trainer fabric and demonstrated that there was no blood on the trainer or in its fabric.

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The prosecution stated that Plummer had repeatedly stamped on the woman’s head and then trailed through the bloodied surroundings. It was argued that even if the trainers had been put through a washing machine cycle, there would be blood in the cotton stitching of the shoes. The lawyers pointed out that there was no evidence that Justin Plummer made any attempt to clean his Nikes.

Instead of the discredited forensic evidence, the prosecution in the retrial leaned heavily on a “cell confession”. A now-dead prisoner, Christopher Dunne, claimed shortly after the murder that Justin Plummer admitted to killing the woman. Dunne’s hearsay evidence was identified by Lord Justice Fulford in 2021 as sufficiently “credible” to help justify the controversial retrial.

But if Dunne’s evidence was so compelling, why hadn’t it been used in the original trial (when he was alive)? Presumably, it was because he was a police informant and a schizophrenic. He contacted the police to report Plummer’s confession on the day the Bedfordshire on Sunday ran its “Footprint of a murderer” story. Could Dunne have read the article and decided to contact the police? It so happened that one of the two police officers who flew off to the US, named in the article as DC Sue Brannigan, was his handler.

Dunne claimed in his statement to have concocted a story about a drugs raid with the deliberate intention of mentioning “Brannigan” so as to prompt Plummer’s memory. On Dunne’s account, when he mentioned the name, Plummer’s face “went white” and became “very agitated” before confessing.

Plummer’s lawyers say this was a self-evident lie. Dunne could not have known “Brannigan” was involved when these conversations with Plummer were supposed to have happened — the officer had little involvement with the Plummer case beyond her Portland jolly. Two days prior to making his statement, Brannigan paid money into Dunne’s account — the police insist that the payment had nothing to do with Plummer.

The Court of Appeal will now reexamine the strength of a dead man’s testimony. “This is a classic example of the dangers of cell confession evidence,” says his solicitor Annalisa Moscardini. “Justin has been so badly served by the justice system for 26 years — he was convicted in 1998 on the basis of really bogus science. The prosecution accepted that it was so bogus that when we got the case back to the Court of Appeal they threw their hand in. Now he’s been convicted on the statement of a convicted criminal in the pay of the police. He died in 1999. The evidence we have is his written statement and we couldn’t question or challenge him — yet that written evidence has now been resurrected and used to convict him. It compounds the injustice that Justin Plummer originally suffered.”

“When I speak to Justin, I see a man greatly damaged by the system,” Moscardini adds. “This is a system he has been in, in the highest of security categories, for 26 years. Resolutely refusing to apply for parole because he wanted to be released as an innocent man, acting to his own detriment. Sleeping on the floor.”

Plummer tells me he has done everything he can to fight a system predicated on offenders coming to terms with their crimes. His first opportunity for parole came up in 2013 — he refused, as he has done on each subsequent opportunity.

Why? “I have not entertained any of that shit,” he tells me. “I have done no courses, nothing. I am not interested in anything other than getting out of jail. I have had so many arguments with screws, governors lecturing me: ‘You’ll never get out alive if you don’t go along with the system.’ I say: ‘I don’t care about your stupid parole courses. I am only interested in one thing, proving my innocence.’”

“I have gone from being 26 years old when I was first convicted to being 50 years old in, like, a click of the fingers. My life has just gone. I mean it has just completely gone.” Tonight, Plummer sleeps on the floor of his cell in protest of a justice system that seems hell bent on keeping him behind bars. Next week he takes his fight back to the courts.

The unavoidable truth, though, and one that will be central to the inquiry, is that the majority of these rapists were of Pakistani Muslim heritage. This was laid out in an academic study of the topic in 2020, as well Alexis Jay’s 2014 report into the Rotherham component of the abuse. But to attempt to dig deeper into this tendency has hitherto been fraught — as Kemi Badenoch found out earlier this year when she clumsily referred to a certain element of this diaspora as “peasants”.

Inevitably, Badenoch’s comments were met with outrage — mainly because of the terminology she used. But there was an element of truth to her observations. Badenoch was referring to a subsection of the Pakistani community who, over the past decades have made their way to Britain from Mirpur, which is a rural district of Azad Kashmir, the Pakistan-controlled portion of Kashmir. This is a significant diaspora: 70% of Britain’s already numerous Pakistanis can trace their heritage to this poverty-stricken region in their motherland’s north. And to examine it further might be useful.

Mirpuris began to come to the UK, at first in small numbers, more than a century ago. After the Second World War, though, the British government started encouraging young, single men from Mirpur and the surrounding areas to move to the UK’s northern industrial areas to make up for labor shortages in factory towns.

This suited the Mirpuris. Their region sits on the periphery of Kashmir, which was on the Pakistani side of Partition, whose function was essentially to split the subcontinent’s Hindus from its Muslims. One result of the new border was that Mirpuris were now less able to take up jobs in Mumbai. This meant that British jobs became more attractive to villagers.

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Those who remained did not experience much largesse from the new Pakistani state. Mirpur was given little in the way of roads, schools, and other public services. Those who had settled in Britain sent back word to their kinsmen of the new opportunities that were opening up.

The migration was still not large-scale, but that changed in the Sixties. Pakistan’s construction of the Mangla Dam, which began in 1961, had submerged hundreds of villages in the Mirpur District, displacing more than 100,000 people — many of whom moved to Britain. This was the labor migration phase of the chain, which was followed by family migration and reunification in the Seventies and Eighties. The new arrivals were mostly conservative villagers adhering to a rigid set of social and cultural hierarchies. These Mirpuris, like those they were joining in Britain, were not highly educated, and they had little or no experience of urban living in Pakistan. From the Nineties onwards, Mirpuris flowed into the UK through “marriage migration”, with rural and low-skilled men from Kashmir marrying British-born Mirpuris in the UK and moving to towns such as Bradford, Birmingham, Luton and the surrounding areas.

Tony Capstick, an associate professor of language and migration at the University of Reading, has been studying the UK’s Pakistani Mirpuri population for almost 17 years, working closely with families in both Lancashire and Mirpur. “What’s happened, in a nutshell,” says Capstick, “is migrants from a very poor part of the other side of the planet, with completely different religious and cultural practices, have come to live and work in a very disadvantaged part of the UK where already there’s huge social problems”. As a result, these post-industrial towns are now embroiled in “this situation where it’s been difficult for both communities to live together”. Of course, not all British Mirpuris are conservative, and not all of them are reluctant to integrate. But a certain element has preferred to stay in insular communities, choosing to import spouses from villages and small towns in Azad Kashmir. Integration isn’t happening. 

“It’s a reflection of attitudes that one sees not just in Pakistanis in the UK, but that are commonly held by many people in Pakistan as well,” says Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani scientist who is an outspoken critic of religious fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism in Pakistani society. “From what I saw in Birmingham and in Bradford,” says Hoodbhoy, “these communities essentially do not interact with others and look at them with a degree of hostility, particularly when it comes to their women and girls being in contact with the rest of the British population.” 

It is important to note, as Hoodbhoy does, that there is a growing movement within the population and its diaspora to embrace liberal values. Increasingly, the later generations are university educated and increasingly detached from the culture and traditions of their forebears. “But those at the lower end of the social stratum keep an insular existence, and the strong influence of the imams at their local mosques makes it even more difficult for them to break out into mainstream society.”

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Meanwhile, the number of these mosques and madrassas (Islamic schools) have been growing, from 338 mosques in 1985 to over 2,000 today. These institutions sometimes perpetuate an Islamist worldview that prevents the newcomers from seeing themselves as British — as with the hardline Muslims who tried to impose an “intolerant and aggressive” Islamic agenda on some schools in Birmingham. The more radical among them include preachers who encourage their followers to dismiss any notion of their identity being tied to Britain.

As Hoodbhoy suggests, “Britain’s experiment in multiculturalism did not take into account the regressive values that Islam can preach.” And some of those values are at odds with life in liberal Britain, as many are now pointing out. Furthermore, it’s a dynamic, suggests Hoodbhoy, that has allowed a sub-section of the community to utterly avoid integration. Indeed, rather than marrying out, many families choose to bringing over to be “imported husbands” — young men who have come to Britain via the spousal visa scheme.

In 2000, more than ten thousand Pakistani nationals were cleared to join spouses in the UK, around half of whom were male. These “unhappy husbands”, as they have been called by academics, face unenviable challenges on first arriving in the UK. They often don’t have good English, and are expected to conform to their in-laws’ expectations of what a ghar damad (house son-in-law) is supposed to do when it comes to his professional and personal lifestyle choices. Many of these men have to accept low-status employment and contend with being dependent on their spouses for their immigration status.

Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that this insular community has closed ranks against what it sees as persecution regarding the grooming gang scandal. The loyalties of the men involved, and of the women to whom they are married, are predominantly to their clan. Outsiders are less worthy of moral regard and protection. Might anything change this?

Hoodbhoy thinks change needs to come from the local mosques which hold such influence over the traditions and beliefs of the population. “Proselytisers crossing borders should be banned,” he says. “Madrassas deprive young children of fundamental skills which are needed for surviving in British society, and unless they are reformed in a manner that is clear and transparent to all, they should not be allowed to function.”

Capstick, though, has a more pessimistic view of the future. “I don’t see them assimilating,” he says of the Mirpuris. “I’ve been doing this now for twenty years and I haven’t seen Mirpuri men and women marrying non-Mirpuris, which, after four generations of being here, is quite unusual for a community.” The cultural dysfunction, it seems, will not be easily abated. Indeed, Casey says that grooming gangs are still operating. And as the inquiry gets underway, officials are bound to obfuscate the true extent of the cover-up — because the truth will be too damaging to contemplate.

I spent years talking to people like Darren. Over a beer. In interview rooms. In the back of police cars. I’ve listened to criminals having hair-raisingly candid conversations, courtesy of the listening devices we planted in their houses. I also remember doing the occasional “gate arrest” at Wormwood Scrubs. These occur when an inmate’s wanted by another force and arrested immediately upon release — sometimes without the prisoner’s prior knowledge. Our man, having just finished a six-stretch, gazed longingly at the pub at the end of Du Cane Road. It was a traditional stop for newly-released cons to enjoy a pint. Then he clocked us getting out of our unmarked car. You’ve never seen true misery etched on a man’s face until you’ve done a gate arrest. So, yes, Darren the informant was being honest: I know how much criminals hate prison.

Which is why I chuckled when I read David Gauke’s entirely predictable prison Sentencing Review. Gauke, a Mayite Tory of the wettest kind, proposes a package of reforms aimed at creating prison spaces through — you guessed it — a brace of early release schemes. He also suggests sentences of less than a year be scrapped entirely. Gauke proposes to reform community punishment via vague promises of “technological progress” (despite Serco being fined for failing to tag prisoners) and investment in the probation service. It’s the usual bromides from the militant wing of the penal reform establishment. This lobby has informed prison policy for decades, and only ever fails upwards.

There’s one shiny policy in the report, clearly added to distract journalists and commentators: the voluntary chemical castration of sex offenders. This is a good idea, but it doesn’t mitigate releasing every other flavor of criminal too. This is, Darren told me, because they don’t care about non-custodial sentences. They really, genuinely don’t. Probation? Please. The probation service refuses to accept that any criminal is beyond rehabilitation. For them, the word “recidivist” simply doesn’t exist. This isn’t an ex-policeman’s bias; I’ve had the policy explained to me by a senior probation officer. “What about serial rapists?” I asked her. She gritted her teeth and repeated the party line. “Nobody is beyond rehabilitation.” It was like talking to a cultist.

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Surrey cokeheads are lining up chaos

By Dominic Adler

Criminals are acutely aware of this orthodoxy and, if they can be bothered to make appointments (online, of course), they’ll tell their well-meaning probation officer exactly what they need to hear. Then it’s off to the pub to sell drugs, or indulge in a spot of consequence-free shoplifting. This is part of the wider problem with prison reform, which Gauke’s recommendations typify: the Government wants to save money while displaying a socially liberal distaste for incarceration. It’s not that the lanyard classes don’t accept the necessity of prison, but only consider it an extreme sanction. For them, it’s something reserved for the worst types of criminals (or people who post idiotic but politically forbidden posts on social media).

Yet on sentencing, Gauke is catastrophically wrong. Whatever he claims, short sentences really do have a role to play. Offenders given, say, a six-month term will already have a lengthy criminal record. It’s a circuit breaker. But if short sentences have limited efficacy in terms of reoffending, but what about the victims of crime, the communities blighted by recidivist offenders?

I once worked on a west London council estate. One of our regulars was a 19 year old given to criminal damage, robbery and stealing cars. He was violent, clever and sly, often targeting elderly women for their pension money. You won’t be even remotely surprised to learn he later became a prominent gang member, dealing in drugs and firearms. Even the “dogs on the street”, as they say in Belfast, knew this was his career trajectory, and no earnest probation officer was going to stop him from fulfilling his potential. As police officers, we made it our mission to put the teenager in prison. He was gone for six months, during which time the estate felt palpably different. The crime rate also dropped significantly. This was due to a single kid, who required a lengthy criminal record (and hundreds of hours of police time) before a court was prepared to send him to Feltham.

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The case for the death penalty

By Peter Hitchens

So no, my concern wasn’t for the offender — it was for his victims. I’ve seen how locking up vicious, antisocial offenders offers respite. What about them, Mr Gauke? Not that we should really be surprised. The British criminal justice system is like a crumbling house with the world’s worst plumbing. The police, inexperienced and badly led, are meant to see their role as protecting the law abiding from criminals. They’re pumped, via leaky pipes, into the courts. The courts, run by lawyers paid by the hour, tend to endlessly re-route the u-bend. The courts feed into the prison service, who view their role as keeping a lid on the madhouse until their charges are released on license. This feeds, via a septic tank, into the probation service, charged with the Herculean task of reintegration and mentoring.

Punishment, in this context, is conspicuous by its absence. Again, criminals know this, even if David Gauke doesn’t. Unlike criminal justice, the criminal mindset is about results not process. It’s clever. It views rules merely as weaknesses to be gamed. Any half-decent criminal would run rings around the millionaires on Dragon’s Den. They understand how drug markets work, how to safely fence a stolen Land Rover. They can run multi-platform retail fraud schemes. They’re fully equipped to exploit a criminal justice system designed by David Gauke.

As for the prisons themselves? As an anticorruption investigator, I saw how the prison service was unremittingly hostile from an intelligence perspective. More than a few of our cases involved prison officers assisting offenders. The prison service, like the police, was hollowed out by austerity. Experienced officers left, replaced by a younger and more impressionable cohort. The recent case of Keri Pegg is instructive. Pegg, who joined the Prison Service as a graduate entrant, was made governor in only six years. She’s now a prisoner herself, after being caught having an affair with a major drug dealer. As part of her defense, she stated how her “progressive approach” upset senior prison service figures. Quite. My team once ran a surveillance operation on a prison to track a target visiting an inmate. We ran our plan via a police prison liaison officer to explore opportunities for assistance. “No way,” came the reply. “The screws control heroin distribution inside, so they monitor the carparks for potential police activity. I’d stay well clear.” As I said, the criminal justice system is a badly plumbed house, and the septic tank leaks everywhere.

Then there’s rehabilitation. Yes, it can rebuild their lives, but it’s still a roll of the dice, in more ways than one given the expense required. Criminal lifestyles are exactly that: lifestyles. Counseling or learning a new skill are unlikely to persuade career criminals to work a nine-to-five like everyone else. It may be uncomfortable to say: but there are too many criminals for whom “rehabilitation” as currently constituted is unlikely to work. Yet, as we have seen, that’s taboo across Whitehall and beyond.

Are there alternatives? Possibly. It would require intrusive intervention and lifestyle management around work, accommodation and healthcare. But even if that worked, and that’s by no means guaranteed, you’re still left with a massive bill at the end — to the point where you risk rewarding those who break the law, to the millions detriment of taxpayers who don’t. The report mentions one possible sanction with teeth: fines and restrictions on travel and driving. Yet sanctions must also come with the means to enforce them, and be in no doubt: this work will fall to over-stretched police officers.

And anyway, not even the good ideas really deal with what I call the “spectrum” of criminality. After all, the very term “criminal” is pejorative. The British criminal justice establishment tends to fixate on socially troubled people as opposed to career criminals. These are people who habitually find themselves in court for minor offenses and are, eventually, jailed. They might be homeless and often suffer from mental health or dependency issues. Or they might just be listless and foolish. There’s excellent work being done with these kinds of offenders by charities, who I don’t see mentioned in this review, who offer common-sense solutions like skills and training mentoring, as well as treatment for dependency issues. Prison isn’t the most suitable place for many “accidental” criminals with chaotic lifestyles to put their lives back on track — though sometimes establishment sympathy bleeds into excuse-making. Where is the line between personal and societal failure? And where does protecting the public fit in?

To me, the Government appears to have conflated two problems — “accidental” and career criminals — yet proscribed a single solution. This is a mistake. Sometimes, the only tool available to police to take a criminal out of circulation is a provable offense carrying a short sentence. These, under Gauke’s proposals, will no longer exist. The career criminal I mentioned earlier, that granny-robbing future gangster? He’d be at home, playing his Xbox and waiting to slip off his tag.

And so the Government will shave money off of the prison budget, no doubt to ameliorate Labour’s backbench insurgency over benefits. Carefully gamed, the inevitable spike in crime figures caused by releasing thousands of criminals early, aided and abetted by ineffective police performance, will hopefully be forgotten by the next election. In fact, I suspect the next prison review, written by a “Blue Labour” figure with more traditional views, will duly arrive by about 2028. It’s just a shame that our political class only ever seems to listen to people like David Gauke.

Hanging people by the neck until dead, or whatever method you use, is a genuinely interesting subject and raises more profound issues than most of the controversies of our time. Yet it is usually embraced or dismissed amid a blaze of rage. Your view of it defines you, though not necessarily in the way you hope. My reluctant sympathy for the ultimate deterrent, forced on me by experience, facts and reason, has made me personally unacceptable in civilized society for decades. That has given me plenty of extra time to read, or admire the sunset, when I might otherwise have been eating agreeable soufflés and quaffing fine clarets with the liberal elite.

It is a topic of extraordinary power, but you will not win the debate by being right. I once checkmated the then Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, in an argument about broadcasting impartiality. I said that the BBC did not employ a single journalist who could have given a hostile interview to the noted anti-death-penalty campaigner Clive Stafford-Smith. He could not contradict me, and I can think of no better illustration of the Corporation’s profound, unalterable bias. This itself is evidence of the unreasoning nature of the abolitionist position. If it were just a debate, then the BBC would hire people on both sides of it. But my logical, factual victory made no difference at all, either to Mr Thompson or the BBC. They continued to think that I was a cruel, unjust yahoo and that Mr Stafford-Smith (who is indeed a lovely man) is a noble humanitarian.

On the other hand, I probably have more supporters among the non-BBC classes — though they are not all that much use to me. They are as emotional and irrational as the BBC liberals. Many of these are the young, assumed for so long to be hopelessly soppy. They are uninterested in old-fashioned Christian thought, and have become practical and tough. A recent opinion poll by More in Common showed that support for capital punishment is now stronger among 25 to 34-year-olds than among 65 to 74-year-olds, and more common among supposedly liberal women than among men. But are these people actually my allies? One in three of them also want the police to be armed, something I view with horror. They do not want the sort of England that I do. They just want eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. They have entirely missed the point. Properly-conducted capital punishment makes a country less vengeful and more gentle.

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So. Farewell then conservatism

By Peter Hitchens

I can just remember this country when it was an actual matter of national pride that our police were unarmed, in contrast with both the French and the Americans, the only countries which seriously sought to challenge us as “top nation”. I can also remember it as a place of gentleness and safety which would astonish the modern young. There is little doubt in my mind that it was the threat of the noose that allowed our police to remain weaponless for so long. Parliament has never actually decided to give the police guns. It lacks the nerve to take responsibility for such decisions. Instead, ministers, civil servants and police chiefs have quietly created a semi-armed constabulary, and if tasers had not been invented, I suspect most officers would now carry pistols. This has quite predictably created a new informal death penalty — but one without charge, trial, appeal or the possibility of reprieve, carried out by frightened men and women in a microsecond of fear and doubt.

Probably the single worst instance of this was the 2005 shooting of the totally innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, now painfully dramatised in the TV series Suspect. To this day, the British state has totally avoided taking responsibility for this horror. It was exactly that responsibility MPs were trying to escape when they abolished a proper lawful death penalty, by sneakily voting for a purportedly Private Member’s Bill to abolish hanging. The Bill in fact received vital support from Harold Wilson’s government whips. But the pretence meant that it was never put before the voters, either before or since.

The state’s view of the death penalty shows more clearly than almost any other policy what kind of civilization we live in. By the way, I am not here discussing the death penalty in the United States, an empire haunted by its history of slavery and violence, where capital punishment is mainly a political fiction, espoused by candidates in the hope of appearing effective and resolute in the face of crime and disorder. Yes, people are occasionally executed there. I have seen this happen, twice, and it is a profound and disturbing experience.

But in both cases, the crime was many years in the past, and the killer might well, in slightly different circumstances, have lived on for many years. I can’t see how these events, so totally separated from the murders that led to them, could be expected to deter anything. Texas, one of the few states which genuinely applies the death penalty, suffered 1,322 homicides in 2018. It executed 13 killers that year, mostly years after their crimes. Other US states which formally have the penalty on their books seldom or never impose it. Your chances of actually being put to death for a horrible murder in the USA are only slightly higher than your chances of being carried off to another galaxy by aliens in the middle of the night. Most of those executed in the USA have been waiting to die for so long that they have forgotten what they did.

No, I am interested in Britain before the mid-Fifties, when the death penalty was eviscerated by Parliament.

It carried on half-heartedly for another few years, but Britain’s governing class had lost the will to punish, and by the time hanging was actually abolished, in 1965, it was an ineffectual remnant. People think they know that murder hasn’t really increased all that much since abolition 60 years ago. They are wrong. The number of homicides went up from around 300 per year in the early Sixties to around 700 a year in the first years of the 21st century. But it isn’t quite that simple, and in any case it was never just murder that the noose was supposed to deter. It was certain types of murder, generally the murder of strangers by thieves or rapists seeking to ensure there were no witnesses to their crimes, and certain actions, especially the carrying of firearms or knives, which might lead to murder. There are several different ways of classifying homicide, and the courts have shown a growing willingness to accept guilty pleas for manslaughter rather than to go through a long and expensive trial on a full murder charge.

There will always be murder, though it will sometimes be called by other names. In the modern era of hanging, we had remarkably few executions, an average of 13 a year from 1900 to 1964. We also had few homicides, an unarmed police force and very little armed crime or knife violence. No longer. Importantly, it is not necessarily murder which the death penalty prevents. Some murders are so utterly irrational that no deterrent could affect them. But the extent of the increase in violence has been concealed by the huge improvement in trauma treatment in our hospitals. Thanks to greater skills, better equipment and techniques, hundreds each year who would have died, especially of stab wounds, now survive.

One survey of the crimes of attempted murder and wounding to endanger life concluded that Britain’s murder rate would be at least treble what it is now but for improvements in medicine and the growing skills of surgeons and paramedics. This was some years ago, but is still in my view valid — almost all crime statistics in this country are now dubious and affected by various and ever-changing political targets, and by the increasing unwillingness of the police and courts to get involved in crime if they can possibly help it. Many people who are now charged with attempted murder or wounding would, within living memory, have been facing capital murder charges, as their victims’ lives would not have been saved. So if we still had the NHS of 1955, I suspect we would have a homicide rate comparable to that in the US.

The firearms control expert Colin Greenwood has noted another interesting fact. In 1948, and in 1955-57, hangings were suspended because Parliament was debating the abolition of the rope. Greenwood found a leap in armed and violent offenses in 1948, followed by a return to previous levels when the suspension ended. The 1957 suspension (which ended with a much more restricted death penalty) was followed by a similar leap, a much smaller fall when the law came back into force, and a generally higher level of such crimes thereafter. There was then a sharp increase after abolition in the mid-Sixties, which has not abated since.

All of this is utilitarian, and there is nothing wrong with that as far as it goes. Utilitarians really have to support capital punishment, unless they close their minds to the facts. Many modern liberals will be shocked to discover that a man they much admire, John Stuart Mill, made a forceful speech, in April 1868, in favor of the death penalty for aggravated murder (what I should call heinous murder). Part of his reasoning was the appalling cruelty of long imprisonment, the only realistic alternative. I particularly share his horror of the living death of life imprisonment, still offered by reformers as a “humane” choice. As he put it: “I defend this penalty, when confined to atrocious cases, on the very ground on which it is commonly attacked — on that of humanity to the criminal; as beyond comparison the least cruel mode in which it is possible adequately to deter from the crime.”

There is a deeper reasoning which Mill would not have troubled with. But, as a Christian believer, I have to. And it is neatly wrapped in the 37th of the Church of England’s 39 Articles, “Of the Civil Magistrates”. It notes that “The Laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences”, adding “It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons, and serve in the wars.” This seems to me to accept (as I do) that the arguments for the death penalty are more or less the same as those for just war: it is a horrible thing, but sometimes necessary.

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The death penalty degrades America

By Freddie deBoer

If you seek office and the power that goes with it, your most pressing task is to stand between your fellow countrymen and evil. To do that, you must maintain armed forces capable of lethal violence and ready to inflict it. If you lack the courage and resolve to do this, then do not seek office in the first place. You are not qualified for it. The apparatus of the death penalty has exactly the same purpose, to defend the weak and good against the strong and evil, by placing a sharp sword in the hands of justice. This point also disposes of the most popular argument against the death penalty, the fear of executing the wrong person. This is indeed a strong point. It is why, now that our courts have been turned into a shameful politicized and emotionalized travesty of justice, I could not possibly support the return of the gallows until major reforms have taken place.

The most important would be to end majority verdicts, a grave weakening of jury independence. Jurors should also be subject to stricter qualifications, perhaps educational, perhaps based on experience of life — 18 is certainly too young. Judges need to be more willing and more free to halt trials where they believe the prosecution is employing emotion rather than evidence. The appalling evidence-free condemnation of the nurse Lucy Letby to a slow living death demands a sweeping upheaval of police and courts which would take years to achieve.

But that is a particular point, not a general rule. In general, a well-ordered justice system, watched over by a free independent press, would rarely execute an innocent person, especially with the safeguards provided by modern science. But do those who claim that the fear of killing one innocent person is enough to disarm the state really mean what they say? This is a pacifist argument, and I would respect it if those who made it admitted that its logic means leaving the country defenseless against any enemy, and accepting the consequences — subjugation, impoverishment, extinction of liberty — which would follow.

But few are so principled. Worse, many modern liberals, while denouncing capital punishment, are all too keen on idealistic foreign adventures in which innocents die. I think of the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, the lawless 2003 invasion of Iraq, and David Cameron’s allegedly benevolent bombing of Libya in 2011, though the pretext for that has long been exploded. You might not like to read this brief and terrible description of a scene in Libya, after a Nato bombing raid, written by that very fine reporter Martin Fletcher. “In a hospital at Sabratha, 50 miles west of Tripoli, lay 11 corpses, perhaps more,” Fletcher wrote. “Their state was such that a precise count was impossible. Three were identifiably young children, though little more than the head of one remained. One journalist fainted at the sight.”

But this was done on the watch of a prime minister who once said of capital punishment: “There have been too many cases of things going wrong, of the wrong people being executed, of evidence coming to light after the execution, and sometimes there is just too much of an element of doubt. And I just don’t honestly think that in a civilized society like ours that you can have the death penalty any more.” And yet he started a war of choice, to give his conscience a bit of exercise in a foreign field. These people do not really mean what they say. Innocents may die, as long as they are far away. They can also die, as Jean Charles Menezes did, at the hands of armed police, and nothing will happen.

To understand why this isn’t an anti-Trump slam dunk — indeed, why Democrats bound to crash against majority opinion — look no farther than the noir-action classic Dirty Harry, from 1971.

Harry Callaghan — the film’s hard-boiled, hard-hitting protagonist — became Clint Eastwood’s iconic role. A San Francisco police officer, Callaghan becomes increasingly disillusioned with how liberal proceduralism gets in the way of combating his city’s criminal element. In response, he tortures a depraved serial killer to get him to tell him where his kidnapped victim is, and ultimately shoots the man dead when he could arrest him. The movie ends with Callaghan throwing away his badge.

He knows he can’t pursue justice while upholding the law — or at least, the law as Earl Warren-style judges and prosecutors defined it.

At the time, Left-of-center critics railed against the film’s politics, even as many conceded its unquestionable artistry. The late Roger Ebert called its message “fascist”, while the legendary reviewer Pauline Kael called it “deeply immoral”. The New Republic, then as now the organ of mainstream liberalism, called it “disgusting”.

Yet audiences loved it. Eastwood went on to make four sequels, and even his subsequent career as an Oscar-winning director hasn’t overshadowed Harry in public consciousness. President Ronald Reagan even went so far as to use one of Callaghan’s catchphrases (uttered as he’s about to shoot a criminal): “go ahead, make my day”.

It’s easy to see why the character struck a nerve on both sides. Progressives devoted to procedural rights found Callaghan’s legal shortcuts revolting. But for many others, Callaghan was vindicating a deeper moral precept: namely, that when the law prevents justice, justice should triumph, all the same.

Team Trump is relying on this same principle to maintain public support for the rough justice of its immigration policies. People want to obey the law, and they revere the rule of law. But when the law no longer serves justice — when it systematically works to the advantage of scofflaws and criminals — their sympathies shift. They want justice first and foremost, not the rigorous adherence to procedure. The results can be, and often are, troubling. But once public opinion reaches this stage, arguing against it is like arguing against the weather: it is what it is.

The conflict between law and a deeper justice is at the heart of the public debate over Garcia’s fate. It is undisputed that he was wrongly sent to El Salvador in violation of a court order. Nor is it unclear that a unanimous Supreme Court has ruled that the Trump Administration must “facilitate” Garcia’s return to the United States. In other words, it is clear that as a matter of law, Garcia should come back to the United States.

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By Josh Hammer

But Team Trump and their adherents are playing the justice card. They note that a local law-enforcement agency and the Department of Homeland Security determined that Garcia is a member of the infamous MS-13 gang. He has also been credibly accused of being a wife-beater by his own wife, who filed a police complaint in 2021 alleging that his beatings left her bleeding. He is apparently a “bad hombre”, the type of man Trump has consistently said needs to be expelled from the country.

Law versus justice. Democrats argue that the legal violation is more important than the man he apparently is. Team Trump says it’s more important to protect the safety of the many than the procedural rights of the malefactor. The American majority is likely to side with the Trumpians, for the same reason it cheered Eastwood’s Callaghan.

That’s not to say that Trump’s actions aren’t troubling. The law should be followed, and it’s clear that Garcia can be deported if the charges are true. Conservative columnists Ross Douthat and Byron York each contend the right solution is to bring Garcia back, give him his due process, and then deport him to another country. That seems like the reasonable thing to do, and it’s troubling that the administration seems uninterested in pursuing it.

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By Juan David Rojas

It’s also disturbing that the administration is seemingly ignoring a unanimous Supreme Court. The court’s conservative majority will be the only block against Democratic power if they return to power. Disregarding a Court order might look good to MAGA now, but the Trumpians will rue the day when the tables are turned on them.

But none of that is getting traction now because of Garcia’s history, which looks worse by the day. Americans, especially on the Right, are distrustful of institutions in record numbers. Trump voters are especially distrustful of judges after watching the system be perverted by the years long lawfare campaign mounted against Trump.

The Biden administration’s blatant refusal to enforce the laws against illegal migration, and its twisting of laws regarding refugee status to enable that refusal, also harden conservative hearts. This disobedience of the law, purportedly to pursue justice, is why we have so many hardened gang members and criminals in the US homeland today.

Trump voters will happily say what’s good for the goose is good for the gander and look the other way as their man gets rid of the bad guys — and, no doubt, some innocents — by whatever means necessary.

This spectacle will go on for a while as both sides seem dug into their current positions. Trump thinks it’s good to be on the side of the popular sense of justice and public safety, while Democrats think it’s good to be on the side of judges and the law. Neither has the incentive to actually solve the problem, either for Garcia’s case or for the many similar cases that will surely arise as Trump’s mass deportation ramps up.

But politically speaking, it’s Democrats who are likely to pay the higher price. Democrats once had public opinion on their side regarding immigration. Before then-President Joe Biden allowed millions of people to stream across the border, Americans opposed Trump’s immigration policies. Today, CNN political analyst Harry Enten points out that a clear majority of Americans supports Trump’s policies and backs the immediate mass deportation of all illegal migrants.

Mistakenly deporting a “bad hombre” is exactly the mistake Americans today will tolerate, if it means undoing four years of Biden’s mess. That conclusion will outrage liberals and Democrats. But they should know better, as this is exactly the course the country took as crime rose between the Sixties and Nineties.

A country that once veered toward protecting the rights of the accused when their streets were basically safe increasingly demanded strict law enforcement and longer jail terms. President Bill Clinton’s shift toward this position, encapsulated in the 1993 crime bill that hired 100,000 more police officers and cracked down against crime, was one reason he was able to win as a “New Democrat”.

Democrats belatedly realized back then that they could not win national elections by catering to their liberal base. They seem light years away from accepting reality today, captured as they are by a base that wants nothing more than to see their representatives fight everything Trump does.

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Democrats are wasting a populist moment

By Justin H. Vassallo

Trump and Republicans should realize, though, that public forbearance in this case doesn’t extend to all conflicts with judicial orders. Even Trump voters don’t think he should ignore court orders with respect to immigration cases, and an overwhelming majority (78%) of Republicans generally believe he must obey Supreme Court orders.

In other words, when law doesn’t clearly prevent justice, Americans back the rule of law. Politics is always about public opinion. As Abraham Lincoln said, “with it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed”. On the Garcia case, public opinion is and will remain with Trump. On the broader question of the rule of law, however, it is squarely with the court system.

Democrats, and Trump, should take heed.

The bizarre details of the crime — Kercher was raped, stabbed multiple times, then covered tenderly with a duvet — and the Italian prosecution’s proposal, on no physical evidence, of a Satanic sex ritual orchestrated by Knox, created an international media firestorm that has flared up again with each new legal development. Knox was freed on appeal in 2011 and has been exonerated by Italy’s highest court. But the legal wrangling continues (she has sued to have additional minor convictions overturned), and she remains an object of bizarrely intense public fascination. Her new memoir (she also wrote one shortly after her release) is well-written, persuasive, and genuinely insightful.

It’s also occasionally tone-deaf in a way that seems to expose the reasons the story gripped us so in the first place.

Knox, who was 20 in 2007, has steadfastly maintained her innocence ever since her brief, obscure time in Italian police custody directly after the murder, when she made a series of damaging and incoherent statements that were used against her as a confession. She has always maintained the plausible and evidence-supported theory that Rudy Guede acted alone, and that the Italian police took advantage of her youth and naivety to juice up a salacious case.

Today, she is 37, married, and a mother of two, and lives once again in her hometown of Seattle. She has become a writer, hosts a successful podcast with her husband, the author Christopher Robinson, and is an activist for criminal-justice reform and media ethics. If she was once dangerously naive about her predicament, she is no longer. She explains that her first book, written shortly after her release, was “the story of what Rudy Guede had done to Meredith, and of what the Italian justice system had done to me. It was the story of what happened to me, and it left little room for anything I actually did.” Free is a corrective whose dual mission is to tell her personal story and to defend her right to tell it.

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How the world fell for ‘romantasy’

By Valerie Stivers

White, female, American college students from solidly middle-class families haven’t contributed much to prison literature to date. But the combination of Knox’s intelligence and unique situation is a genuine addition to the genre. As she tells it, she arrived in prison so innocent that “it took me a while to realize that the room I was kept in was in fact a cell, my cell…” As the days and months passed and the gears of justice turned (very slowly, provincial-Italian-style), she had the experiences we would expect: she was scared, alone, isolated, and mistreated by the guards and other inmates (who disliked her as the privileged and famous one).

But she also had experiences we don’t expect: when she was allowed out to exercise in a small courtyard, she jogged, did jumping jacks, skipped, and sang at the top of her lungs, anything to feel free. When she was scared and lonely, she would call up a vision of herself as the happy, innocent, tough little girl she once was, and then she would talk to her younger self about their current troubles. Her raw youth pours off the page.

She was aware, even at the time, that much “invisible luxury” set her apart from her fellow prisoners. She had family to support her and visitors at every visiting hour. She didn’t suffer from the combination of trauma, mental health, and addiction that is common among female prisoners. Nonetheless, she was a prisoner, and accepting the situation as it was, especially after her conviction and sentencing to 26 years, helped her survive. The story of a young girl’s slow, painful grasp of the human essentials is powerful: we always have agency; there are things we possess that can’t be taken away; we must accept the life we actually have, and not pine for the one we wish for.

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What prisons teach us about democracy

By Ian Birrell

After four years of incarceration, Knox was freed on appeal and returned to America, only to discover herself in a different kind of prison. She was traumatized from her ordeal, had panic attacks, and found it difficult to reconnect with family and friends. She was — and is — notorious, a public figure and media sensation, a frequent target of hatred and death threats. For defending her innocence, asserting the value of her own story, or even just being OK, she is perceived as denying the awfulness of what happened to Meredith Kercher. The tabloids, especially in England and Italy, continue to distort her every action into something sinister. “Amanda Knox Wears Bizarre Yellow Outfit as She Marries Poet Boyfriend”, ran a Daily Mail headline from 2020. Once again, she faces the challenge of accepting the life she has, trying to make sense of her experience and to make something good out of something terrible.

The middle section of the book explores the social and cultural factors at play in her case, skillfully woven into the events of her life post-release. She was, she theorizes, the first cancellation of the social-media era and the first person to be subject to the kind of prolonged public shaming that has now become commonplace. She was also a victim of prurience, and the virgin-slut narrative, and the time-honored tradition of pitting women against each other. Cultural factors came into play: the Italian investigators couldn’t comprehend her behavior in the days following the murder, and created a narrative of her guilt as a result. The case became not about the facts, but about her character.

I was moved by the book, and went to see Knox in discussion with British journalist Jon Ronson at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn on Wednesday night without lingering doubts about her innocence. I understood why the people who still believe she is guilty, not least the Kercher family’s lawyer, find her ongoing notoriety to be ghoulish.

If you think she did it, Free is very provocative name for a book. And that “extraordinary” from the opening anecdote has a third valence: Knox has had a more extraordinary life than most people because she has benefited, and not just spiritually, from her hardship. She writes books about it; she befriends other famous people (Monica Lewinsky became a pal); she just executive-produced Blue Moon, a Hulu series about the ordeal set in Perugia, expected to debut this year. But I’d been convinced that these perceptions were not her fault, and that she had no moral obligation to cater to them.

And yet a strange thing happened: the longer she talked, the more it seemed possible that this small, cute, physically unimposing, nerdy-chic Seattle mom in platform boots could have done it. To be clear, I don’t believe she really did it. More important, there has never been any evidence that she did. But there is something about her affect and demeanor that gives off the eerie vibe that if any totally unlikely young woman could secretly be a crazed killer, it’s this one. The more she laughed and said how absurd it was, the more I could see why the police were suspicious.

She mentioned some photographs in a particular situation made her look like “a flippant psycho”, cackling at the ridiculousness to a crowd of fans, but that was exactly what she looked like in that moment. She argued that such perceptions are the awful legacy of suspicion, media-distortion, and our dirty minds. Perhaps greater self-knowledge would come in realizing that it is a mysterious quality of hers, unfortunate to be sure, that was visible to Italian investigators, and has been visible in photography since the early days of the case. I suspect it’s the real cause of our unstoppable slippery fascination with her.

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And there are reasons for it. Knox doesn’t quite know how to treat other people. Her co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito, for example, has only a minor role in Free, mainly as a person whose life was, unlike hers, permanently derailed by the wrongful accusations. He’s still single, Knox writes. He’s a pariah in Italy, and he’s never been able to get steady work. Someone brought him up at the event, and she retold an anecdote from the book about how sad he was during their meeting in Italy in 2022, when a passer-by mistook her baby for his.

I thought Sollecito would have been unlikely to feel good about himself if he were sitting in the audience. Knox’s right to tell her story suddenly seemed more complicated than it had in the memoir. If you’ve come through an awful catastrophe, with multiple victims including yourself, and your ultimate success highlights your fellow survivor’s failure, do you really have every right in the world to promote it far and wide? There are some situations — many, actually — where we can’t say whatever we want, and this in order to protect the feelings of other people. Or we can, but we’ve chosen ourselves over them, and it’s going to look bad.

There’s also Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor of Knox’s case, with whom she strikes up an unlikely relationship in the book’s third section. The narrative slows down a bit here, as Knox enters into an endless wrangle with what she wants from the man — which somewhat contradicts her claim to have found peace. Mignini is willing to engage with her and offer her his friendship, but he won’t say he was wrong about her case. Her final epiphany comes from accepting that there is greater value in just forgiving him. It’s true, and it sounds good (and makes her sound good), but she also mocks him in the book and did so again during the event for being more invested in the relationship than she is. At the event, she tacitly agreed with Ronson, her interviewer, that Mignini is a narcissist. Again, I wondered how he would have felt if he were sitting there, and again I doubted Knox for promoting her own virtue at someone else’s expense.

One of the many themes of the case has been Knox’s ordinariness. She fascinates us, supposedly, because what happened to her could happen to anyone. But Free proves in many ways — both its insight and intelligence, and also its odd failures and lack of self-awareness — that she’s never been ordinary.

The men, mostly from West Africa, are the latest arrivals at a 2,200-bed, male-only migrant center that opened two weeks ago. Some have come from other parts of the city, where shelters are closing down; others from out of state, with one telling me he was sleeping on the subway for two weeks until he heard about the new opening. “I was kicked out of the last shelter for getting in a fight, so I had to find somewhere new,” he says.

It’s conditions like these that have triggered a massive backlash among working-class communities of color in New York. The South Bronx, where I visited, saw a significant red shift in the 2024 election, along with several other neighborhoods in New York’s outer boroughs. This shift has prompted some soul-searching — and shape-shifting — on the Democratic side. Most notably, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo has rebranded himself from a pot-legalizing progressive to a law-and-order moderate in his bid to become the next mayor of New York City.

Given his clear frontrunner status, Cuomo’s “clean-up-the-mess” campaign has already attracted a number of key endorsements. And with the incumbent Eric Adams’s approval rating in the drain, it is likely that Cuomo will clinch the June primary (which would make him a shoo-in for the general election come November, in light of the city’s Democratic tilt). The question, though, is whether his hardened rhetoric will translate into real policy — or if, like Adams, he’ll find himself trapped between an angry electorate and an uncooperative party.

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New York’s migrant crisis is not over. An estimated 44,000 newcomers are still being housed and sheltered — the same number that the city’s entire homeless-shelter system served just three years ago. To date, it has cost the city nearly $7 billion (more than all emergency services combined). According to a poll last month, more than half of Gotham’s residents believe that the situation is “less under control” than it was four years ago, while 32% believe it is “about the same”. Just 9% believe conditions have improved.

It’s true that some shelters are closing, and 188,000 migrants have, according to the mayor, been “helped… to take the next steps in their journey”. It is not exactly clear, however, what these next steps are. No measures have been taken to track or monitor those who have left, and many have been found living in squalid conditions.

Some have crammed into apartments in New York’s outer boroughs, while others have slept outdoors, on trains, or in houses of worship. Last month, for example, the New York Fire Department discovered 70 migrants living in the basement of a Queens furniture store, followed by another discovery of dozens more living in a commercial space in The Bronx.

“They’re either on the street or selling items illegally,” Robert Holden, a Democratic member of the City Council, tells me. “They’re selling food illegally, they’re selling drinks in traffic, they’re on the expressway. And they commit crimes, because many can’t work.”

Holden, who represents a district that swung for Trump in last year’s presidential election, says that residents were tired of the “anarchy” during the Biden administration. Border crossings soared under the Democratic president, averaging two million per year between 2021 and 2023, the effects of which are still being felt today. “Everyone knows people that have moved out over the last five years,” Holden says. “They see the quality of life of their neighborhoods around the city dropping. Everywhere was affected but it hit the working people the hardest.”

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Then there are the shelters that still exist. The mayor’s office states that a total of 53 shelters will close down by June 2025, but new ones, such as the converted storage facility in the South Bronx, are still popping up. “No one told us this was happening,” Alejandro Lopez, a South Bronx resident, says, “so now we have hundreds of jobless men hanging around the neighborhood. It can’t be good.”

“I want them gone — all of them,” says another passerby. “All they do is bring trouble.”

Over the past three years, city leaders struggled to cope with the influx of migrants into their neighborhoods. From deep-blue neighborhoods like Clinton Hill in Brooklyn to more Trump-supporting areas like Staten Island, the message was the same: get them out. But as frustration grew, it created an opening for the ghosts of New York’s past to return.

Andrew Cuomo, who resigned as governor over sexual-harassment allegations in 2021, leveraged the crisis to quietly tiptoe back into the limelight. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year, he described the migrant crisis as a “tipping point” for Gotham, suggesting that the city was stuck in a “death spiral” — a point he doubled down on two months later. And in last week’s announcement video, he tapped into similar themes. “You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person,” Cuomo said. “Or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway … the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence — the city just feels threatening.”

This marks quite the turnaround for a man who once proudly described himself as an “undocumented person”. In a decade as governor, Cuomo pushed or acquiesced to a raft of progressive measures to support illegal immigrants. In 2019, he strongly backed DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and signed the New York DREAM Act, which provided illegal students access to state financial aid for college. That same year, he passed the Green Light Law, granting illegal immigrants the right to obtain driver’s licenses in the Empire State.

As part of the first anti-Trump #Resistance, he issued executive orders opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and sued the Trump administration over policies like the Public Charge Rule, which aimed to deny green cards to immigrants using public benefits. Most famously, when he announced his opposition to the then-president’s so-called Muslim ban, he declared: “As a New Yorker, I am a Muslim. As a New Yorker, I am Jewish. As a New Yorker, I am black, I am gay, I am disabled, I am a woman seeking to control her health and her choices, because, as a New Yorker, we are one community, and the New York community is composed of all of the above.”

Yet the Big Apple in 2025 is vastly different from what it was when Cuomo left office in 2021. Public fatigue with traditionally liberal policies on immigration, public safety, and crime allowed Trump to expand his support across nearly every neighborhood, particularly in districts with sizeable migrant populations.

In The Bronx, for example, where there was (and still is) a big migrant presence, 27% of the borough’s residents backed Trump — almost three times the share in 2016. “Most migrants are good, hard-working people,” says Lisandra Martinez, who lives 10 blocks away from the new South Bronx migrant center. “But there are always one or two who cause problems. If the shelter closes, where are they gonna go? What are they gonna do? We are a close community, and I don’t want them doing bad things around here.”

This, in large part, explains Cuomo’s own transformation from progressive governor to a law-and-order moderate who now says that he will “work” with Trump. New polling shows that 81% of New Yorkers support deporting illegal immigrants convicted of violent crimes, versus just 16% who oppose it.

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But New York’s status as a sanctuary city, combined with resistance from progressive Democrats, has made even this straightforwardly popular initiative difficult to accomplish. Adams in recent weeks has endured heavy attacks from members of his own party for cooperating with ICE in deporting criminal illegal immigrants. Recently, he issued an executive order to allow federal immigration authorities into the Rikers Island jail complex, which prompted calls by House Democrats that he was “selling New York out”.

The question then, is whether Mayor Cuomo would continue in the same vein as his predecessor. As governor, Cuomo was not afraid to take on the progressives in his party when dealing with relatively “safe” issues like taxing the rich, universal health care, and education reform. But on immigration, he marched in lockstep with the Left, even criticizing the ultra-progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio for failing to do enough to protect illegal immigrants from federal enforcement. And when de Blasio maintained that city law enforcement would not cooperate with ICE unless absolutely required, Cuomo went further by threatening legal action against ICE during Trump’s first term.

All of which casts doubt on Cuomo’s rebrand as a border hawk. If the Trump crackdown turns ugly, and ICE deportations accelerate, Cuomo may find it politically expedient to return to his previously progressive positions. Ever attuned to shifts in public sentiment (and among his own party), he will not want to be seen as bending the knee to Trump.

But it is not Cuomo or any political leader who will suffer as a result. As Robert Holden tells me, it is New York’s forgotten class: “My constituents are middle class, and the illegal immigrants are threatening their very existence. They’re making New York less affordable to live in and it’s driving people away. For the past four years we’ve been losing our city. We need to get it back.”

Yet as dark as Gotham could be in those gritty days memorialized in film classics like Taxi Driver, there was always a ray of light: namely, a healthy respect for the police. Any disturbance would stop as soon as an officer stepped into the train, for example. Many of these cops were Vietnam veterans, and you could see the command and experience in their eyes. I remember noticing one officer’s medal above his NYPD shield: “sharpshooter”, it read.

It’s the crucial element missing today, as disorder grips the Big Apple once more. Law-breakers don’t respect law enforcement — and for good reason: they know that, thanks to misguided criminal-justice “reform”, they can re-offend over and over with utter impunity.

I didn’t aspire to be a police officer when I joined the force in 1989. My career choice was born of necessity. I had to provide for my young family, so college had to wait. But there was also the calling to serve communities racked by poverty, lack of opportunity, and lousy infrastructure — a state of affairs embodied by abandoned and burnt-down tenement blocks; buildings spray-painted “X” by the Fire Department were unsafe for first responders to enter.

These buildings became havens for drug dealers and shooting galleries for addicts. As rookie police officers, we were tasked with cleaning up areas like that. To combat the visible signs of a decaying city with high crime rates, we were deployed to the busiest precincts, called “shitholes” by the cops. These were the worst of the worst. We were assigned to crack patrols to tackle the emerging epidemic head-on.

Numerous overtime details were created to address crime spikes, one of which was “Operation Takeback,” to which I was assigned. It included tackling minor violations — vandalism, urination, aggressive panhandling, and the like — that could foster an atmosphere of lawlessness. Little did we know then that this was the so-called broken-windows theory of policing in practice.

As a result, New York City experienced a renaissance beginning in the mid-1990s and early aughts. Formerly depressed communities thrived. Times Square, once dotted with peep shows and porn shops, was transfigured into a family-friendly destination. The hipster culture emerged in Williamsburg, marking a significant cultural moment — a “vibe shift,” to use today’s lingo.

These and other changes were driven by a police culture of strict enforcement. These officers were no-nonsense and motivated. They took pride in their jobs and had the support of the mayor, the NYPD brass, the media, and the people they served. Then it all went downhill again.

Although crime rates overall are still low compared to the bad old days, many indicators are flashing red. Since 2019, there has been a 31% increase in major crimes. The murder rate is almost 20% higher than it was five years ago; robbery is up by a quarter; and felony assault by nearly half. As former Queens district attorney Jim Quinn summed it up recently, “there were almost 29,000 more crime victims in 2024 than there were in 2019.”

Behind each of these statistics are real lives permanently scarred or snuffed out altogether by crime. Some of these cases — such as the woman burned to death on a Brooklyn train, or the man shoved onto subway tracks at Manhattan’s 18^th Street — receive national and even international media attention. But many other victims and their families suffer and mourn in silence.

So what happened?

Partly, it’s because the NYPD became a victim of its own success. We failed to adapt proven formulas to changing conditions. Front-line officers were encouraged to conduct “stop-and-frisk” procedures, and higher-ups demanded it during CompStat meetings (at which leaders review neighborhood crime data). “How many touches do your officers have?” was a frequent question from chiefs who were likely excellent academic test-takers but had limited street experience.

The pressure at times translated into needlessly gruff, insensitive treatment. Several high-profile use-of-force incidents drew sharp criticism from communities of color. Fast-forward to the rise of Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd “reckoning”, and law enforcers in New York and across the country faced unprecedented pressure. With Covid in the mix, it felt like an all-out war on police and law and order.

In the year 2020, under Mayor de Blasio, these trends reached a terrifying crescendo. That was when the state legislature in Albany launched its disastrous experiment with bail “reform,” eliminating cash bail and removing judges’ discretion in detaining criminal suspects. As if that weren’t enough to hinder law enforcers, the activist chorus to #Defund police grew louder.

De Blasio and his police executives didn’t know how to handle it. Even at the height of the Floyd reckoning, overwhelming majorities of African-Americans indicated they wanted the same or even higher levels of policing in their neighborhoods. But instead of taking a holistic view of what the public wanted and balancing competing demands, the de Blasio administration folded to the loudest activists. Hizzoner permitted rioting, property destruction, and assaults on police officers. Mass police retirements occurred nationwide and in Gotham. Police morale sank — and remains low: applicants to the NYPD sank to 8,000 this year, down from 18,000 in 2017.

Mayor Eric Adams, the former NYPD captain who took over from De Blasio in 2022, inherited his predecessor’s crises — and failed to overcome them. Adams appeared to appoint friends rather than qualified executives. Four police commissioners have served under him, formerly unheard of. And on the streets, a climate of criminality continued to fester.

The criminal element felt empowered by the revolving door of the criminal-justice system. Nearly 20% of offenders break the law again, according to data released this week by the New York Department of Corrections. Offenders are often released on the same day they are arrested, and many go on to do more harm even as earlier cases against them are still pending. Yet district attorneys like Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg remain committed to so-called restorative justice and diversion programs that keep criminals on the streets.

All this sends the wrong message to offenders. Criminals have come to believe that crime pays, and there are no consequences; law-abiding New Yorkers live in fear, especially in the confined spaces of the subway system.

Political leaders assert that the public perception of crime, especially in the subway system, is not aligned with actual crime statistics. Things aren’t that bad, they insist, and it’s only sensational media coverage that makes us feel unsafe. It’s true that overall crime rates have decreased — marginally, compared to the worst of the pandemic years. But compared to the renaissance of the 1990s and aughts, things are unquestionably and dramatically worse.

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As NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch recently noted, despite the marginal decline in crime numbers, the department must work to enhance the sense of safety. To tackle crime in the city, especially in the subway system, we need a stronger uniformed presence, particularly at the turnstiles. By preventing ne’er-do-wells from entering the subway in the first place, we can likely win half the battle. And we need officers on the trains. We need undercover cops, both underground and aboveground. Although tough anti-crime units have recently been controversial, they remain a valuable tool for policing.

Today’s cops act as therapists, social workers, racial reconcilers, and peace officers — all rolled into one — as other institutions of social care have eroded. But police officers aren’t a panacea for all social woes. Tackling the root causes of criminal behavior requires ensuring that individuals in crisis have access to mental health and social services. This approach can help reduce recent violent incidents linked to homelessness and mental health issues. Agencies responsible for assisting this segment of the population should also be held as accountable as the police department is. Otherwise, we might well fall back into the state of affairs when I was a boy.

The bad old days are better kept confined to old movies.

The defendant, picked up in a routine traffic stop, denied being the man who’d carried out an inside-job fraud at the shop where he’d worked some years earlier. His name, ID and credit cards matched, and apart from a little weight gain and a new hairdo, he looked exactly like the two available photos of the criminal. A defence “facial mapping” expert pointed out several differences, but our own expert explained them away and supported the identification. Forceful cross-examination of the defence expert led him to concede that he might be wrong. But a last-minute double-check by the police unearthed — finally — one of the fraudster’s former colleagues. His probity beyond question, he was brought to court to say whether he recognised the man in the dock. A guileless “no”, followed by an unfakeably perplexed chuckle when it was suggested it might be the man he used to work with, confirmed the defendant’s innocence. (The two might well have been cousins sharing an identity, but that’s another story.)

It immediately became blindingly obvious to me that the photos of the two men were not the same person at all. You could tell at a glance! But when you are given a theory, and you run with it, it takes something big to bring about that paradigm shift.

In the case of the nurse Lucy Letby, a theory that she was a murderer was alighted upon by one of the ward’s consultant paediatricians very early on — after only a very few of the unexplained deaths or collapses that ended up on her indictment — and the theory was based almost entirely on her having been on shift at the relevant times. There can be little doubt that there was not, at that stage, enough evidence for murder to be anything other than a remote possibility. So either it was a very lucky guess, or this theory was later taken up by others in a way that led to inaccurate expert medical opinion, the misleading presentation of evidence, and a terrible miscarriage of justice.

Following her conviction in August 2023, for murdering seven babies and trying to kill six others, a 13,000-word piece in The New Yorker told a compelling story of her likely innocence. More recently, and once the reporting restrictions were lifted after her conviction in early July in a retrial for the attempted murder of one of the babies on which the jury could not agree, long pro-defence pieces have appeared in The Guardian, Telegraph, Independent and Private Eye. Also recently published — withheld pending the outcome of the retrial — is the written judgement of the Court of Appeal, who refused her application for leave to appeal.

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An appeal first goes to a single judge, who makes a decision on the papers whether to let you argue it at a hearing. In Letby’s case, that judge was Sir Robin Spencer, who turned her application down. Coincidentally — or perhaps not — Spencer was the barrister who led the prosecution of Sally Clark in 1999, who was wrongly convicted of killing two of her young children. That notorious miscarriage of justice, as well as others from the same era, such as Angela Cannings and Donna Anthony, was based on flawed statistical evidence about cot death from the since-discredited and disgraced paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow.

“Unknown unknowns” back then included the possibility of a genetic factor that could explain multiple cot deaths in the same family. It was nearly 20 years before a good candidate was discovered. A growing collection of lawyers, doctors and statisticians believe that something similar — flawed statistics and paediatric misdiagnosis without due respect for unknown unknowns — may have occurred in Letby’s case.

If the first Court of Appeal judge turns you down, you can try again at an oral hearing in front of three others. Letby was again unsuccessful. Their written judgement is long, detailed and illuminating. But it will not, I suspect, relieve much anxiety about a possible miscarriage of justice.

The main issue in the original trial, and indeed the retrial, was whether the deaths and other “events” were deliberately caused. Letby’s biggest problem here was the two allegations of attempted murder by insulin — Babies F and L, committed some eight months apart. Blood test results showed high insulin accompanied by low levels of a chemical called c-peptide. When the pancreas produces insulin, it produces similar levels of c-peptide. Therefore, the Crown said, the insulin was not produced in the body. It was, in other words, artificial. Therefore, it was an attempt to kill.

The inference to foul play with these two babies is arguably much stronger than it is with the more numerous diagnoses of air embolism, which was a more subjective opinion, more dependent on the statistically questionable “shift-pattern” evidence. The two guilty verdicts on the insulin counts were the first the jury returned — the next not coming for three days — and were two of only three unanimous convictions in the trial.

The Court of Appeal records that “the integrity of the blood samples and reliability of the biochemical testing was challenged by [defence KC] Mr Myers. However, in her evidence at trial, the applicant admitted that both babies had been poisoned by insulin, but denied that she was the poisoner.” The Crown made much of this “admission”, but the point is seriously unfair.

Letby was being pushed quite hard to swallow an inference which she was in no position to accept or deny. Her evidence was that she did not poison them — simple as that. So her opinion of the validity of the blood samples and the inferences to be drawn from them is neither here nor there.

This is a common practice by prosecutors, easy to lapse into in the heat of the moment. I’ve done it myself. “So it’s all just a big coincidence is it? Or have these two complainants put their heads together?” — that sort of thing. You’re trying to make a little speech and put the defendant on the back foot, in the course of questioning them about matters within their knowledge — which is what you should confine yourself to. But a defendant’s answers to such questions are not a sound basis for treating a prosecution inference as agreed by the defence. If the reliability of a blood sample is not agreed, or an inference not accepted, there the matter should rest. Her barrister explicitly did not concede the accuracy of the results in his speech to the jury, much less the inferences to be drawn.

And it seems there may be good reason not to accept their validity. The Guardian has reported serious concerns about the results from senior experts in the field. The Telegraph quotes guidance from the relevant lab saying that its tests are “not suitable” where the introduction of artificial insulin is suspected. And The New Yorker piece quotes the Crown’s expert as saying that there was a third insulin case, with similar blood results, not attributed to Letby. The samples cannot be tested again as they were destroyed soon after they were taken — because the babies’ blood sugar levels recovered and there was no suspicion of wrongdoing at the time.

But even without these post-conviction queries, if this were the only evidence, and these the only allegations, I would hope no jury would convict a nurse for attempted murder on that basis. The timing and detail of the insulin results meant that the Crown had to say that not only must Letby have poisoned the feeding bags she herself put up, but also must have poisoned one or more other bags in the store cupboard so that they would unwittingly be administered by other nurses after she had left. (The bags themselves, of course, are long gone.) Would you feel sure a random nurse tried to kill two babies eight months apart, or would you think this might be an instance of why the lab says its tests are “not suitable” for proving the presence of artificial insulin? But of course, this was not the only evidence against her.

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There are also Letby’s online searches for bereaved families, and the collection of medical notes found at her home relating to some of the events she was charged with. Neither of these, I feel, are anything like as bad as they look: they both stand against a background of a much larger number of non-suspicious searches and medical notes.

But for many observers, and perhaps for the jury, the “confession” note is persuasive. For criminal lawyers, less so. That’s because false confessions are surprisingly common. So much so, that a law was enacted to prohibit a confession being given in evidence unless the prosecution can prove beyond reasonable doubt that it was not obtained by oppression or as a result of anything “said or done” that was likely to render a confession unreliable.

How could any nurse subjected to a long investigation into whether they have been murdering babies find the process anything but oppressive? If the case against her can be proved beyond reasonable doubt, one might think it could — and even should — be proved without the mixed inculpatory-exculpatory scrawls of a woman on the brink.

Almost all of the rest of the convictions — that is, all seven murders and three of the alleged attempts — involved the deliberate injection of air, leading to air embolism. One ground of Letby’s appeal impugned the prosecution experts’ diagnosis-by-exclusion — i.e. “we don’t know what else it could be, so it is likely to be air embolism” — as well as their diagnosis on the basis of various kinds of unusual skin discolouration that were observed. The 1989 research paper relied on by the Crown’s experts, Pulmonary Vascular Air Embolism in the Newborn, is very short, and says relatively little about skin discolouration other than that, in about 10% of the 50 or so cases they reviewed, “migrating pallor” in the skin was observed — which, it was not disputed, may be caused by other things.

The Court of Appeal was not impressed by this complaint, or by fresh evidence from the surviving author of the 1989 paper in which he criticised the use to which his research had been put in the Letby case. The experts were entitled to use skin discolouration as supportive of the diagnosis, the court said, as being “consistent with” embolism; the fresh evidence did not undermine that; and the lack of any other plausible explanation is significant.

“Consistent with” does a lot of heavy lifting for the Crown in criminal trials. A piece of evidence only helps to prove something if — and to the extent that — there is a difference between the probability of finding the evidence if the hypothesis (e.g. guilt, or air embolism) is true, and the probability of finding it if it is false. More precisely, it is the ratio between these two that determines the strength of the evidence in either direction. That, in a nutshell, is Bayes’s theorem. So, if you can say no more than that a piece of evidence is “consistent with” the hypothesis, but it is also “consistent with” its negation, and you can’t say how much more “consistent” it is with one rather than the other, then the evidence does not assist you either way. For example, if a prosecutor says “the fact you were wearing gloves makes you more likely to be guilty of this robbery”, that evidence is in fact worthless if it’s winter time and everyone is wearing gloves: wearing gloves is “consistent with” both guilt and innocence, to the same degree.

It seems, though, that the experts used skin discolouration as more than merely “consistent with” air embolism. They used it to prove, to some extent, that diagnosis. Which they are entitled to do, if it is a justifiable professional opinion, but it does point to a fundamental danger with expert evidence: the difficulty a jury has in getting behind the curtain and judging what weight to give it.

One way of achieving this is to look at whether the experts have been wrong before. In the case of the lead expert in Letby’s case, Dr Evans, the defence discovered halfway through the trial that he had been utterly excoriated in a ruling by a Court of Appeal judge in a different case. “No effort to provide a balanced opinion… No attempt made to engage with the powerful contradictory indicators… The report has the hallmarks of an exercise ‘working out an explanation’ that exculpates the applicants… tendentious and partisan expressions of opinion that are outside [his] professional competence.” That level of criticism from a senior judge is not made lightly: they know it can be career-ending. And if the Crown had known of it in advance, I suspect they would have looked for a different expert.

Now, this was on one view a gift to the defence: they could now undermine Dr Evans’s credibility by cross-examining him on it in front of the jury. True, his conclusions in the Letby trial were supported by other experts who had checked his work, but the defence argued that those experts were merely rubber-stamping his opinions. The jury may have had a difficult task in assessing what weight to give the criticisms of Evans’s previous work — one with somewhat binary options: disregard his evidence, or believe it. Ultimately, the Court of Appeal upheld the trial judge’s rejection of the defence’s application to exclude his evidence. It might not have been an easy decision for the trial judge, or the Court of Appeal, and although it may have been the correct decision, I cannot imagine any lawyer would claim the situation overall was entirely satisfactory.

Zooming out, the big question remains: without knowing of the police investigation and the suspicion of foul-play, and the fact that one nurse was on duty for many or all of the incidents under review, would any expert have diagnosed air embolism by the deliberate injection of air, in any of those cases? Certainly none of the pathologists did at the time.

In his recent Private Eye piece, Dr Phil Hammond gives a startling statistic: in a review of more than 1,000 cases of infant death in south-east London, “the cause of mortality was unexplained for about half of the newborns who had died unexpectedly, even after post-mortem examinations”.

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So, the shift-pattern evidence — i.e. the fact that Letby was on duty for so many unexplained deaths and collapses — does seem to have been central to the case against her. And statisticians are questioning its probative power. Even leaving aside the issue of deaths and other negative events that occurred when Letby was not on duty, coincidences of that scale occur — just as someone will win the lottery each week, at odds of 14 million to one.

Also very unusual is the fact that Dr Evans “pitched” his services to the police, when he heard about the investigation in the media. This is not the way experts are normally selected. The defence argued it indicated pro-prosecution bias. The Court of Appeal disagreed.

And then there’s the fact that in the last few weeks Dr Evans has commented publicly on the defence not calling their own expert, who was advising them throughout the trial. Indeed, that expert, Dr Hall, has himself gone on record saying that he “does not know” why he was not called. And the same question was posed by the Court of Appeal, somewhat pointedly: without having called their own expert, can the defence really complain if the jury agree with the Crown’s?

It’s an entirely valid question. But I would be slow to assume the worst. One reason the defence might have chosen not to call Dr Hall (and I am speculating here) is if they felt they had so thoroughly undermined Dr Evans that they were better off leaving it at that. That would be a big tactical call, but covering your own back is not always consistent with protecting your client’s interests.

So, for example: if your own expert would contradict much, but not all, of the Crown’s expert’s conclusions, and you believe the credibility of the Crown’s expert has been totally destroyed, you might judge it prudent not to put your own expert in the witness box. Avoiding the potential for future criticism and hindsight regret by putting your client in what you believe will be a worse position — by calling your own expert — is not a boss move. This is all speculation, but I guarantee that careful thought went into the decision not to call Dr Hall. None of this, though, would mean the conviction is safe.

There is evidence against Letby. And the fact that it’s “circumstantial” is not a valid criticism: circumstantial evidence can be, and often is, utterly overwhelming. But this is where comparison with the Sally Clark case really comes in. The famous statistical error in that trial was that the expert Professor Roy Meadow wrongly treated two putative cot deaths as probabilistically independent. But arguably the more important point is that while the probability of “coincidence” might indeed have been very low, so too is the probability of a mother murdering her children. In Letby’s case, the chance that a randomly selected nurse is a baby killer is vanishingly small. As Carl Sagan put it, paraphrasing the French mathematician Laplace, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Defence lawyers often say to juries that their clients start off innocent: the fact that they are in the dock is no evidence at all. But this is not quite right. If the probability of guilt is zero, no amount of evidence — that is, no Bayesian likelihood ratios, no matter how high or how numerous — will alter that chance. Rather, a defendant’s prior probability of guilt — that is, before any evidence has been called — is just very, very small. But not all crimes are equally common. A randomly selected member of the public is much more likely to have stolen a bike — given the number of bikes that get stolen — than a randomly selected nurse is to be a serial killer of her patients. But there isn’t much room for these fundamental concepts to be explored and explained to a jury.

There has been some commentary to the effect that those protesting Letby’s innocence should pipe down, that they are behaving irresponsibly. But miscarriages of justice do occur, and the Court of Appeal sometimes gets things wrong.

The only route for Letby now would be a referral back to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which would require substantial new evidence of one sort or another. The process is not quick, and the Commission do not refer many cases. But I would not be surprised if one day it happens. I hope it does. If Letby has been wrongly convicted, it would be one of the worst miscarriages of justice we have ever seen. If she is guilty, well, true verdicts, like true scientific theories, are only strengthened by rigorous testing and challenge.

***

This article was first published on 24 July 2024.

What we have seen since the Southport attack is the precise opposite response: uncontrolled spontaneity, which government policy is expressly designed to prevent. When Keir Starmer attended the scene to lay flowers, he was heckled by locals demanding “change” and accusing him of failure to keep the British people safe. Self-evidently, Starmer, who in August had been in power for less than a month, bears no personal responsibility for the attack: instead, he was derided as a representative of Britain’s political class, and of a British state that cannot maintain a basic level of security for its subjects.

In the same way, rioters in Southport — fuelled by false claims the killer was a Muslim refugee — cheered when they injured police during the violent disorder that followed the initial vigil, which included attempts to burn down the town mosque in what can only be termed a pogrom. Like the riot that followed in Hartlepool, violence against emissaries of the state — the police — was coupled with objectively racist and Islamophobic actual and attempted violence against migrants.

There are strong parallels with the ongoing disorder in Ireland, which is an explicit reaction to mass migration: last year’s Dublin riots, sparked by the attempted murder of schoolchildren by an Algerian migrant, were in some ways a foreshadowing for the current mass disturbances in Britain. In Southport, the spark for the rioting — the attack itself — was swiftly absorbed into a wider sense of hostility towards mass migration: protestors carried signs demanding the state “Deport them” and “Stop the Boats” to “Protect our kids at any cost”. As in Ireland, presumably local women were prominent, hectoring police and silencing wavering voices with appeals to group solidarity. While this is a very different dynamic to previous football casuals-dominated street mobilisation organised around Tommy Robinson — as represented by Wednesday’s desultory clashes in Whitehall — liberal commentators in Britain, as in Ireland, have nevertheless chosen to portray the violence as orchestrated by Robinson, rather than him piggybacking on it, as is also the case in Ireland.

Shocked by the jolt to their worldview, British liberals, for whom the depoliticisation of the political choice of mass migration is a central moral cause, have also blamed Nigel Farage, the media, the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and Vladimir Putin for the rioting, rather than the explicitly articulated motivations of the rioters themselves. But there is a matter-of-fact social-scientific term for the ongoing disorder: ethnic conflict, a usage studiously avoided by the British state for fear of its political implications. As the academic Elaine Thomas observed in in her 1998 essay “Muting Interethnic Conflict in Post-Imperial Britain”, the British state is unusual in Europe for being “exceptionally liberal in granting political rights to new arrivals” while dampening interethnic conflict by simply refusing to talk about the issue at all, and placing social sanctions on those who do. When it works, it works: “Interethnic conflict has never been as severe, prolonged, or violent in Britain as it has been in many other countries” — for which we should be thankful.

But as Thomas notes, sometimes it doesn’t work, as in Enoch Powell’s famous intervention, supported by 74% of British respondents polled at the time, when, “once the silence was broken and public debate was opened, the liberals found themselves in a weak position. Having focused on silencing the issue, they had not developed a discourse to address it,” and found themselves discomfited by demonstrations in support of Powell. The Labour government of the day dealt with the rising tensions surrounding immigration by rushing through emergency legislation that imposed an effective moratorium on extra-European immigration via the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, with the aim of assimilating migrants already here and dampening nascent violence by preventing others arriving.

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Under New Labour, however, this mostly successful policy was torn up, with the conscious intention of transforming Britain into a specifically multi-ethnic — rather than multiracial — society, largely derived from the era’s brief enthusiasm for globalisation. Downstream of then-fashionable social-scientific theories on the simultaneous inevitability and desirability of such a transformation, policy papers like the Runnymede Trust’s influential report “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” pushed to reshape Britain as “a community of communities”, a genuinely multicultural state that rejected the “narrow English-dominated, backward-looking definition of the nation”. Ethnic identities — of which the British one was framed as one among many — were to be embraced, within the parameters of the newly multicultural state, and immigration restrictions lifted to achieve this goal.

Yet Labour’s shift towards an explicitly ethnic understanding of community relations would not last long. Following the 2001 ethnic riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley, the Labour government performed a dramatic about-turn. As the Tunisian academic Hassen Zriba observed: “All of a sudden, multiculturalism became the disease that needed urgent solution.” Blair’s government commissioned five separate reports, all of which declared “that excessive cultural diversity is a hindrance to inter-racial harmony, and that community cohesion is the best solution”.

This emphasis on community cohesion was heightened by the mass casualty jihadist attacks of the 2000s and 2010s, leading inexorably — along with the Prevent programme, widened state powers of coercion and surveillance, and the accelerated construction of a civic conception of Britishness — to the “controlled spontaneity” project, the terminus of which we witnessed in Southport. While the other northwest European states which adopted a multicultural ethos, notably Sweden and the Netherlands, have since abandoned it, rhetorically the British state is still committed to multiculturalism.

In practice, however, the British state has quietly adopted a revived version of assimilationism. Over the past two decades, a capacious version of Britishness has been constructed around little more than superficial national symbolism and the desire to avoid ethnic conflict, euphemised as “British values”. Interestingly, Blair himself, who now rejects multiculturalism, has recently become an advocate of Lee Kuan Yew, in whose political philosophy Singapore’s ethnic diversity is, rather than a strength, an undesirable hindrance derived from well-meaning British colonial intentions.

But latent authoritarianism aside, Starmer is no Lee Kuan Yew. His faltering attempt to steer the discourse following the Southport attack towards tackling “knife crime” — itself a British state euphemism — highlights the state’s ideological inability to address ethnic tensions frankly, and so manage them effectively. If it were happening in another country, British journalists and politicians would discuss such dynamics matter-of-factly. This is, after all, simply the nature of human societies. Indeed, it is one of the primary reasons refugees flee their countries for Britain in the first place.

Yet when they occur in our own country, such dynamics are too dangerous to even name. Instead, ethnic groups are euphemistically termed “communities”, and the state-managed avoidance of ethnic conflict is termed “community relations”. When Balkan Roma rioted in Leeds recently, it was as an ethnic group responding to what it saw as the British state’s interference in its lives: the British state, in return, addressed its response to the nebulous “Harehills community”. When Hindus and Muslims engaged in violent intercommunal clashes in Leicester two years ago, it was as rival ethnoreligious groups, and was again responded to by the British state as an issue to be dealt with by “community leaders” — the state euphemism for its chosen intermediaries, in a form of indirect rule carried over from colonial governance.

But when the rioting is carried out by ethnic British participants, as is now the case, the limitations of this strategy reveal itself: the perception of an ethnic, rather than civic British or English, identity is actively guarded against as state policy, just as is the emergence of ethnic British “community leaders”. As such, political advocates of a British ethnic identity are isolated from mainstream discourse, as has been state policy since the Powell affair: any expression of such feeling is what Starmer means by “the far-Right”, rather than any traditionally defined desire to conduct genocides or conquer neighbouring countries. This mainland state of affairs, incidentally, is in strong contrast to Northern Ireland, where the existence of rival Irish and British ethnic groups is the basis of the political system, reified by the British state through the ethnic power-sharing apparatus of the Stormont parliament. In Northern Ireland, Britishness is an ethnic identity: across the Irish Sea, it is a firmly civic one: that these constructions differ is a function of political expediency rather than logical consistency.

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This ambivalence over referring to Britain’s various ethnic groups is contrasted by the British state’s deep engagement with identity groups based on race, a cultural quirk that academics have long highlighted, and which distinguishes Britain from its European neighbours. Even today, political discourse in Britain evades ethnicity for a focus on race in a way unusual outside America, where it stems from an almost uniquely stratified slave economy, overlaid on a settler colonial society deriving from genocide. Yet British liberals squeamish at ethnic identities — especially their own — instead obsess over the politics of race. Ethnic conflict is taboo to even discuss in the abstract: but minority racial rioting, even over imported grievances, is viewed sympathetically.

Perhaps well-intentioned, the assimilationist aim of this dynamic was counteracted by the British state’s parallel promotion of the new “BAME” identity, assembling various geographically unconnected ethnic groups together in one political whole solely by virtue of their non-European origin. Instead of reflecting our lived reality of a country now composed of multiple ethnicities, among which are the majority native British, an entirely artificial racialised binary was constructed for ideological purposes, in which the ethnic British, along with other Europeans, were merely white, while non-white Britons were encouraged to self-identify as a counterbalancing force. I am legally, but not ethnically British — like most descendants of migrants, I am perfectly happy with my own inherited ethnic identity — but in pursuit of its own convoluted logic, the British state instead chooses to define me as white, an identity of no interest to me. The long-term contribution to social harmony of this explicitly racialised innovation was, as both the ethnic conflict literature and common sense suggest, doubtful in the extreme, and the government dropped the BAME label in 2022: its mooted replacement, “global majority” is, if anything, more problematic.

The British state’s differing strategies to ethnic-minority rioting, on the one hand, and British ethnic-majority rioting on the other, are, as conservative commentators observe, markedly disproportionate. This may not be “fair”, but it is not intended to be. The function of British policing such tensions is increasingly not to prevent crime — as anyone living in Britain can see — but simply to dampen interethnic violence, in which the shrinking ethnic majority population is, as the literature is clear, analytically the most obvious and potentially volatile actor. In the words of the sociologist John Rex, whose advocacy for a new multicultural Britain was highly influential during the Nineties, the fundamental task of multi-ethnic governance is the twofold desire to “ensure that those who will come are peacefully integrated and that their coming does not lead to the collapse of the post-1945 political order”.

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That is, after all, the logic of “controlled spontaneity”: to prevent a backlash to sudden atrocities or a generalised sense of insecurity that would detach the ethnic majority from Britain’s post-Blair settlement and potentially lead to the formation of ethnic parties. Indeed, the formation of explicitly ethnic parties is the deciding factor in what academics term the shift from a pluralist society — in which ethnic conflict is managed within the existing political order, as in mainland Britain — to a plural one, where the political system revolves around ethnic rivalries, as in Northern Ireland. We are not there yet, though the formation of notionally Muslim (but de facto Pakistani and Bangladeshi) political groupings is a step in that direction, as is Reform’s entry to Parliament, understood by Farage’s voters and opponents alike as a tacit ethnic British party, though one with a strong post-war assimilationist rather than ethnic exclusionist bent.

The government’s alarm aside, the potential for serious ethnic violence seems limited, as few of the precipitating factors listed by academic specialists exist: the British state retains vast coercive power, sympathetic elites aspiring to lead majority ethnic mobilisation do not exist, and, in any case, the most heated divisions on the validity of the British ethnic group remain within the British ethnic group itself.

Instead, like the daily drumbeat of violent disorder so new to British life, but now accepted as the norm, occasional outbursts of ethnic violence, whether currently by the British or by other ethnic groups acting in their perceived communal interests, will become commonplace, as in other diverse societies. To manage such conflicts, the state will become more coercive, as Starmer now promises his supporters. But modern Britain isn’t hell: for the most part it works, better than most places in the world, even if it is far less orderly or safe than the country we grew up in. There will be no violent rupture, no radical new dispensation: things will continue as they are, only more so. This is the nature of most post-colonial societies, and now it is the nature of our own.

***

This article was first published on 3 August. It was updated on 5 August to clarify the chronology of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act.

Especially given the extreme youth of both boys, and the fact that both ended up dead after being hired to commit murder by an infamous drug dealer, himself in jail, local journalists were quick to characterise the deaths as a tragic novelty. All the same, the newness of these recent killings shouldn’t be overstated. More than a century ago, after all, stories of teenagers butchering each other were front-page stories here almost daily. And then, as now, reporters wondered what caused so much chaos at such a tender age. In 1916, for instance, Le Petit Provençal newspaper characterised the Ace of Clubs gang as a “bunch of young brats” and speculated that they were driven to violence by copying what they read in the newspaper.

These days, members of the DZ Mafia or the Yoda Gang, the two main groups that paint Marseille red, can access their entertainment at a swipe. Yet from their ruthless violence to their international spread, sepia-tinged groups like the Ace of Clubs have nonetheless bequeathed much to their modern successors. More than that, they became inspirations and the names of the gangsters of old are still familiar to the current generation, who like their predecessors often use criminality as a way to climb a social ladder that is otherwise denied to them.

And, perhaps most of all, the continued resilience of criminality in this city by the sea speaks to the utter inability to smash the scourge of poverty — one that ensures there’s always a willing supply of desperate young men willing to kill, or die, for the chance at a better tomorrow.

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Organised crime in Marseille has a long history. Things began at the end of the 19th century, when the city acted as the gateway to France’s colonial empire. In need of cheap labour, the port attracted immigrants from southern Italy and Corsica. The first criminal gangs quickly appeared, when pimps operating in the so-called Reserved Quarter, then one of the largest red light districts in Europe, chose to join forces. Their first ringleader was a former Corsican sailor named François Albertini. Nicknamed François the Madman, he led the Gang of 21, running prostitutes in the Reserved Quarter and getting into fights with other clans.

These disputes soon turned deadly. In 1907, in an echo of today’s killings, Albertini ordered a 16-year-old pimp to murder several rivals. André Anfriani, the teenage assassin, shot three people before being arrested, tried and guillotined. By 1911, Albertini had been detained too, and sentenced to spend life in a penal colony in French Guyana. In the end, the Madman escaped and disappeared, but nonetheless succeeded in planting the seeds of Marseille’s later crime scene. The routes the Gang of 21 used to evade justice — Spain, Portugal and Morocco, or else straight to the US — would soon be employed to transfer prostitutes to brothels in Africa and South America. Over the decades to come, drugs would flow the same way.

The Twenties and Thirties were a golden age of Marseille gangsterism. Corsican clans took over the business created by Albertini, promptly diversifying their trade. Paul Bonaventure Carbone, a tattooed former sailor who took inspiration from Al Capone, became the local godfather. With his partner François Spirito, Carbone gradually gave up prostitution for more profitable businesses: nightclubs; casinos; smuggling. They also opened laboratories to refine heroin, which proved so effective that Marseille became the dope capital of the world after the Second World War.

At the same time, Carbone and Spirito became local stars, entertaining visiting journalists and sponsoring showbiz celebrities. Music hall shows and films were made about them, cheap flicks with names like Justin de Marseille. Collaborationists during the Second World War, the pair were replaced after liberation by the Guerini brothers, who were close to the local Socialist Party and took over the local nightlife. That’s even as they smuggled drugs and cigarettes into Europe from Turkey and Morocco.

From the Sixties, the growing consumption of drugs such as heroin led to the famous French Connection. The world’s premier network of drug trafficking, it was controlled by Le Milieu, a Marseille-Corsican syndicate with the Guerinis among its leaders. After their demise in the mid-Seventies — Antoine Guerini was murdered in retaliation for killing an ex-cop-turned-mobster — figures such as Gaëtan Zampa and Francis Vanverberghe took the reins. With a surname like that, the latter was unsurprisingly known as Francis the Belgian. Gradually, they gave up drugs for safer and more lucrative ventures, including robbing armoured vans and using casinos to launder money. Given the French Connection was at various times exploited by both the CIA and France’s own intelligence service, with the spooks selling drugs to fund off-the-books operations, a change of focus was probably wise.

The gentrification of the Marseille-Corsican mob left a vacuum for others to fill. Since the late-Eighties, in fact, the port’s thriving cannabis and cocaine trade has been run by what has been described as La Mafia des Cités (“The Suburbs Mafia”), originally manned by families from cannabis-growing countries such as Morocco. For his part, the pusher who hired those two doomed teenagers is believed to be a member of the DZ Mafia, one of two Cité gangs now fighting over Marseille’s drug trade. The name hints at its origins. DZ stands for Algeria — a nod to the country’s name on licence plates — and indeed many of the group’s founders come from this former French colony with strong historic ties to Marseille.

The second part of that name is important too: by adopting the “mafia” moniker, the gangsters are emphasising their credentials both as an international criminal outfit. To prove their point, they even ran a video on social media claiming they had no involvement in the recent killings, hoping to retain a degree of respectability in the districts they control. And if that hints at one similarity with the past — where Carbone burnished his reputation via music hall ballads, the DZ Mafia uses Facebook — contemporary Marseille gangsters borrow from history in other ways.

That’s clear, for instance, in terms of the way they showcase nationality. When the Corsicans were running the place, family ties were essential to the gang’s survival. Clan members were often from the same village, also a common tactic with the Cosa Nostra in Sicily. It’s a similar story today: quite aside from the reference to the DZ Mafia’s homeland across the Mediterranean, the gang is partly run from Algeria.

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No less important, gang warfare in Marseille has often been waged along ethnic lines. In the Twenties, for example, black soldiers who remained in the city after the First World War took over parts of the Reserved Quarter, resulting in a deadly conflict with their Corsican rivals. A similar conflict took place in the Nineties, when members of a North African group from the city’s suburbs decided to take over the slot machines, bars and discos controlled by Corsican gangs around Aix-en-Provence. The conflict ended in 2006, when Farid Berrahma, the son of an Algerian miner, was shot nine times at a brasserie outside Marseille. In a strange way, in fact, Marseille seems to have returned to the chaos epitomised by the Ace of Clubs. Just like in the 1910s, the city lacks any single dominant crime lord. Jacques Imbert, Marseille’s last traditional godfather, died in 2019.

More fundamentally, the socioeconomic conditions that allowed those early gangs to thrive remain. Then, as now, large areas of the city are desperately poor — even if the criminals these days have swapped crumbling 18th century tenements for the concrete hell of modern housing blocks.

You can spot echoes of the past elsewhere too. In the Belle Époque, the press sensationalised the gangsters, leading to a situation where they tried to one-up each other in daring and brutality. And where newspapers once fretted about how “cinematographic methods” inspired the Ace of Clubs, their modern successors use social media in a like-minded way, advertising their crimes on Telegram.

Not, to be clear, that everything has remained the same. The wild industrialisation of the early 20th century brought an influx of firearms into Marseille, but François the Madman would surely be amazed at the availability of Kalashnikovs on the dark web. More than that, how criminality actually happens has shifted too. Quite aside from the fall in prostitution, and the rise in drug dealing, how cannabis and cocaine are sold has changed. Until the Nineties, dealers came downtown to sell in the clubs or bars they controlled. These days, punters drive to one of nearly 130 spots, spread across the underpasses and rubbish dumps of Marseille’s northern suburbs. That rendered the competition for territory even more fierce — and bloody.

The year 2023 marked a record for drug-related gang murders. A full 52 people died, most of them youngsters, after a police crackdown led to 2,000 arrests and depleted more established gangs like the DZ Mafia. But crime abhors a vacuum, and the fight to regain control of the most lucrative selling spots now rages more wildly than ever. Things have become so bad that some in Marseille are even starting to romanticise the older generation of mobsters, imagining them boasting a “code of honour” that today’s ruffians lack. That’s leavened by sentimental movies, notably Borsalino (1970) and La Scoumoune (1972), which depict old Marseille as a picaresque film set.

In truth, though, nostalgia is unwise. For over a century, Marseille has suffered beatings, shooting, stabbings. Those early prostitutes, run by men like François the Madman, were treated little better than slaves. And no matter how many thugs the authorities round up, the city’s persistent poverty means there are always people happy to take their place. Especially after a misjudged focus on developing its port to welcome oil shipments — a mistake that wrecked Marseille’s economy after the Yom Kippur War — this has become, to quote one local journalist, “a working class city with bourgeois ghettos”. It hardly helps that though the links between politicians and crime are rather less explicit than during the glory days of the Milieu, graft persists.

After Anfriani’s arrest, back at the dawn of the last century, the French government voted to reform the country’s law and order. New Mobile Brigades were established, with les flics offered a radical new technology — police cars. Nicolas Bessone, the current prosecutor in Marseille, is leading calls for similar shock treatment today. “We badly need new legislation,” he lately proclaimed, arguing that special jails for drug traffickers were sorely needed too.

Perhaps. But challenges remain. Quite aside from Marseille’s underlying socioeconomic conditions, globalisation means modern gangs now have access to faster cars, deadlier guns — and a network abroad that allows them to evade justice. There’s also a lingering distrust of the police in the areas controlled by the gangs, meaning even honest citizens are reluctant to help. That’s hardly unfair: since January, an internal investigation has been examining alleged corruption among local anti-narcotics cops.

Yet these vast hurdles aside, Bessone seems confident that victory is ultimately possible. Asked about whether the war against the dealers could be won, he was defiant: “Absolutely.” He would say that. As those two dead kids so graphically suggest, the fight against Marseille’s gangs is far from done.

Yet in a second scenario, the same woman is the innocent victim of catastrophic bad luck and other people’s bad judgement. Babies still died tragically and perhaps also preventably, but nobody deliberately killed them.

In this version of events, Letby is stuck in a Kafkaesque nightmare: first ostracised and nicknamed “Nurse Death” by colleagues because of her coincidental presence at several fatalities on the ward; then wrongly convicted, partly on the basis of a private “confession” she was encouraged by a therapist to write down in order to deal with mounting anxiety; and finally, the subject of hundreds of lurid headlines about being a “monster”, with her family and personal life raked over gleefully by the press.

In this possible world, her sentencing — 15 whole life orders without possibility of parole — is one of the gravest miscarriages of justice in British history. And in this hypothetical case, the public inquiry now happening is not only a waste of money but may well lead to policies that are not fit for purpose, since they are predicated on false assumptions.

One is left wondering how there can possibly be a fruitful public inquiry into events whose very existence has become so highly contested. The New Yorker kicked things off with a sceptical investigation into the case back in May. This questioned the prosecution’s exclusive dependence on circumstantial evidence, its unorthodox interpretation of several sets of statistics, and the admission of what may have been faulty insulin tests as evidence. A further point concerned the testimony of a key expert witness for the prosecution, Dr Dewi Evans. Evans’s theory about how Letby supposedly harmed seven of her victims — namely by injecting air so as to cause embolism — was accepted by the jury, and yet has since been dismissed by several others in the same field as implausible.

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It is hard to fully imagine the agony of the parents of the infants involved: first believing the death of their precious child to be the result of natural causes, and grieving accordingly; then being forced to come to terms with the horrifying idea that death was maliciously caused by a caregiver they had liked and trusted; and now flung back into a purgatorial space where they don’t know for sure which of these outcomes is real. Small wonder, then, that the parents of one such deceased baby have rejected the speculation about the safety of Letby’s conviction outright, calling it “lies and misinformation” that “makes us sick to our cores”.

In their situation, I am sure I would feel the same. There are only so many grey areas an exhausted mind, desperate for some kind of closure, can accommodate. Other more disinterested parties don’t have the same excuse, however. Camps are now forming among onlookers, declaring for Letby’s innocence and guilt respectively.

“I’m certain Lucy Letby is innocent,” Professor Richard Gill, emeritus professor of mathematical statistics at the University of Leiden is on record as saying. Meanwhile commentator Dan Hodges seems equally sure in the opposite direction, writing in the Mail that “Letby killed those children. And she did it alone. The campaign to free her is a crazy conspiracy theory too far.”

More worryingly given her high judicial status, the chair of the public inquiry Lady Justice Thirlwall has also implied some scepticism about reports of improper process in her opening statements, at least reading between the lines. Accurately noting a “huge outpouring of comment from a variety of quarters”, she added “as far as I am aware it has come entirely from people who were not at the trial” and “all of this noise has caused enormous additional distress to the parents who have already suffered far too much”. Perhaps she had to say something like this — certainly, it would be odd for her to remain studiedly neutral on the existence of the very events she is charged with examining. Yet for the rest of us, surely this is now the most reasonable thing to do.

For the recent revelations from the New Yorker and other sources mean that we no longer know whether Letby is innocent or guilty, strictly speaking. No doubt many of us believed we knew at one point, but we were wrong. Having knowledge is not the same as possessing subjective feelings of certainty: each of us has experienced a time in the past when we felt absolutely certain yet were mistaken. Having knowledge is not even the same as having true beliefs, though it does require them: even a stopped clock tells the time twice a day and all that. In addition to truth, at least according to one venerable philosophical tradition, knowledge also requires that your true beliefs be justified by good evidence and reasoning. It seems that this standard has not yet been collectively reached, either for assertions about Letby’s guilt or her innocence.

In fact, according to a more recent epistemological theory known as contextualism, standards for what counts as knowledge alter with the context. Roughly: the higher the stakes, the more hesitant we are — or should be — to ascribe “knowledge” to those who express a firm view on something. In a banal case, you may happily say you “know” where your car keys are, but if your pregnant wife is begging you to be ready to drive her to the hospital at a moment’s notice, you may suddenly feel a reasonable need to do some extra checking. In the Letby case, given the dramatised nature of each of the possible scenarios — appalling crimes or terrible injustice, and no room in between — the stakes could not be much higher; a fact which suggests that confident claims about knowledge at this stage are likely to be foolish and hubristic, independently of whatever turns out to be true.

Judicial systems in the UK do not require proof of innocence for acquittal, but only the absence of the establishment of guilt; even fully exonerated defendants are not positively demonstrated to be innocent, but only formally presumed so. More generally, a mature mindset requires the ability to sit comfortably with the conditional tense, and to tolerate several competing hypotheticals at once. Yet collectively, we don’t seem very good at this; and are perhaps getting worse at it all the time, in a culture where lots of social capital can be earned by boldly claiming that you know something, and little is apparently lost when you get things wrong.

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But there is also something deeper here. Indeed, the apparent challenge of arguing for just process in a non-partisan, noncommittal way seems to me to have interesting affinities with the struggle many apparently display in upholding the value of free speech in the abstract. I have observed before that people tend to support only the free speech of those they already agree with, secretly or otherwise, seeing no point in positively helping to distribute messages they believe to be false or harmful. In the same vein, people are most likely to argue that Letby’s conviction is unsafe where they also positively believe she is innocent.

In contrast, those who are certain she is guilty are likely to be disincentivised from arguing for any official re-examination of the facts which might bring about her freedom. In the realm of speech, false statements can travel fast and do untold harm; and in the realm of justice, there are mistaken acquittals as well as convictions. If, like Hodges, you are apparently certain that Letby did in fact commit the crimes she was accused of, then as someone also aware of the epistemic fallibility of people and systems generally, you might conclude it would be unacceptably risky to agitate for any new intervention which could lead to her release.

But what this line of thought misses, of course, is that it is not just other people who are epistemically fallible — we each are too. Difficult as it is to stand at a sceptical second-order remove from one’s own thoughts and feelings, every reasonable person should admit that some of his own present beliefs are bound to be wrong — even if he cannot say which ones, exactly. This goes for judges as well as internet sleuths, police officers as well as commentators and columnists. It is the reason why we need free speech even for those we disagree with, and fair process even for those we condemn.

Hence, given the stakes are so high, and the evidence of faulty process is now so suggestive, both those who insist Letby is guilty and those who insist she is innocent should demand her lawyers be given another chance to establish the facts. Last week, she instructed a new legal team with a view to mounting an appeal. It is to be hoped that she gets one. The public inquiry can be no substitute for this and nor is it intended to be. Unless we can properly ascertain Letby’s guilt or otherwise, the inquiry’s findings will always be overshadowed by the terrible possible world lurking next door.

Even more than its neighbour San Francisco, Oakland is known for its extraordinarily high levels of crime. The city’s police force is understaffed by hundreds of officers. Only 35 are on patrol in the city of nearly half a million at any given time, and they’re limited by rules that prevent them from, for instance, pursuing drivers fleeing crime scenes. The situation is so extreme that California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has deployed state highway patrol officers to do city police work.

But the crime that seems hardest to stop is also the most inane: sideshows. In the Eighties, the earliest sideshows were largely benign: young men would cruise through the neighbourhood in swanky cars in a kind of impromptu parade, like something out of the film American Graffiti. “I used to go to sideshows as an 18-year-old,” former Oakland police chief LeRonne Armstrong tells me. “It was just guys from the community showing off nice, restored cars.”

In time, drivers started performing tricks in the intersections. This was not unusual for California low-rider culture — but since then, these sideshows have evolved into something more threatening. “Now it’s a speed exhibition. It’s lawlessness,” Armstrong says.

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Today’s sideshows are typically organised through text chat and WhatsApp groups. But if you’re not in the loop, they appear spontaneous: dozens of cars will suddenly appear at an intersection, often in the middle of the night, surrounded by hundreds of boisterous onlookers. Cars do doughnuts and burnouts with passengers hanging out of the windows, while the crowds film them to post on YouTube and Instagram. People launch fireworks, fire their guns into the air and torch abandoned vehicles. If the cops show up, the crowds just jeer at them.

Sometimes bystanders are hit by drifting cars. Last weekend, a swaggering red Mustang crashed into the crowd, running over a woman. Residents living near the crime scene told me that sideshows have been a problem for years. “It’s every other Friday or Saturday night,” Joel Everett, a 63-year-old church member, tells me. People park on his residential street to join the crowd of spectators, leaving trash, bottles and cans everywhere, and pulling in and out of his driveway to make three-point turns. Everett worries about his car getting stolen or broken into. “You can’t sleep. There’s gunfire,” he says.

Another neighbour, Marcos, who declined to give me his last name, is a 65-year-old truck driver who works at night. One early morning, returning home from work, he had to sit in his car for an hour and a half waiting for a sideshow to disperse just to drive the last block to his house.

In the past few years, Oakland’s sideshows have become more diffuse: according to the city, several hundred intersections are regularly used for sideshows. Spiralling skid marks stain streets all over town. And nowadays, you’re as likely to hear the screeching of tires at 10am as you are at midnight. A single car will do a spontaneous intersection takeover in broad daylight, without a pre-warned crowd gathered for the spectacle. Affluent neighbourhoods aren’t safe, either: one of the most popular intersections is on Skyline Boulevard, on the ridge of the Oakland Hills, alongside a regional park used by hikers, joggers and equestrians. Sideshows have also spread to other cities in the Bay Area, including San Francisco.

Even though sideshows began in Oakland, they now tend to be organised and attended by a marauding group of participants from all over northern California. “I would say 70% are from out of town,” Armstrong says. “It’s a group that’s causing havoc throughout the East Bay.”

With their drunk and hopped-up crowds, sideshows are often preludes to other crimes. Last month, five people were shot during one in East Oakland. In July, a sideshow mob ransacked a convenient store near the airport, racking up $100,000 in damages. In June, 15 people were shot in a gunfight following a sideshow.

With no faith in the city authorities or the police, tormented residents have taken matters into their own hands. Last month, Salcedo and his neighbours put up impromptu barriers in the worst-hit intersections in Oakland’s San Antonio district to discourage the mayhem. They dragged tires into the road, filled them with rocks and dirt, and painted them in bright colours. They installed speed bumps and Botts’ Dots pavement markers purchased on Amazon. And they did all this without the city’s permission or knowledge.

Users on one Oakland subreddit applauded the intervention. “I’m tempted to do something similar,” wrote one user. “The city has failed us so might as well take matters into your own hands.”

For a while, the San Antonio neighbourhood’s guerrilla installations worked. But a driver speeding in a stolen Lexus hit one of the tires and flipped it over. City workers came in one morning soon after and removed the tires, leaving some of the smaller, less hazardous impediments in place.

After that, residents lost patience with the city. At an outdoor meeting with a council member, a city engineer lectured the neighbours about Oakland’s liability for their handiwork. He told them that the impediments were a fire code violation as they blocked the egress of fire trucks, and that the risks they posed to drivers was “non-negotiable”.

“Your liability is more important than my kid being hit by a car?” one neighbour asked. The residents complained of cars running up on sidewalks where kids play; one of the worst intersections is between a park and a middle school. A Brazilian man named Odelson Souza said his two-year-old was once nearly run over. From the neighbours’ perspective, the city is more worried about the hypothetical safety risks posed by their DIY obstacle course than the real risks posed by daily sideshows.

The city is currently testing new hardscape solutions such as bollards and traffic circles, but at the tectonic rate of about one intersection a month. The police, meanwhile, are powerless to shut down sideshows when they involve hundreds of people, many of them armed — though Armstrong told me that they have had some success embedding undercover officers in the crowds, taking pictures of cars and licence plates, and impounding the vehicles in the days that follow. Last year, the county made it illegal to attend a sideshow as a spectator, though that law is being challenged in federal court.

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Besides being annoying, dangerous and occasionally deadly, sideshows have come to embody Oakland’s surrender to brazen criminality. Not far from where Salcedo and his neighbours put up their road blocks, there is open sex trafficking, day and night. Pimps and prostitutes operate outside schools. Meanwhile, the streets alongside Oakland’s 880 freeway are filled with tarp and tent encampments, and decaying RVs clog miles of sidewalk on either side of the Oakland Coliseum, which the city’s last professional sports team will soon abandon.

The defiant screech of the sideshow is a constant reminder to Oakland residents that when it comes to public safety, they’re on their own. But to the residents of San Antonio, it’s even worse than that: they’ve learned that even when they improvise their own fixes, the city will remove them. “Right now, they protect the criminals,” Salcedo told his neighbours at their meeting. “They need to protect us.”

First, the announcement that smoking may be banned even outside pubs. Then, the plan to curb the consumption of greasy food, with a consultation in the works on banning takeaway restaurants in the vicinity of schools.

Supporters of such measures dispute the idea that “fun” is the right word to describe nicotine addiction or junk-food outlets that exploit school kids. As an ex-smoker and general grease-avoider, I have some sympathy with this view. And yet, there’s a deeper subtext to this argument: an ancient, heavily class-inflected dispute over the cultural and historical meaning of “fun”, and what this debate implies about the new rulers of our increasingly less merry England.

It’s an ambivalence with deep roots in English cultural history: one that perhaps especially permeates the Labour Party since its emergence from the 19th-century trade-union movement. But in his choices since entering No. 10, Starmer has revealed that his Labour represents, almost unadulterated, one side of that debate: Fabianism, the Labour not of the industrial masses, but the London bourgeoisie. And the recent backlash against his proposed health interventions reveals that his true enemy may not be “the Right” at all, but something older and more anarchic, and which today is ironically more associated with the working class than any other: the convivial, chaotic and sometimes startlingly violent spirit of “Merrie England”.

Of course, England’s merriment had already been significantly curbed by the time the bourgeois, top-down movement for clean living and socialist government known as “Fabianism” emerged in the late Victorian era, amid George Bernard Shaw’s progressive circle. Now a Labour Party think tank, the Fabian Society formed in 1884 is still alive and well, while its project of progressive taxation, administrator-led social democracy and top-down revolution is discernible all over Labour policy in recent decades.

But the Fabian tendency most starkly in evidence today is that group’s ascetic sensibility. The Fabians emerged from a Christian socialist group, the Fellowship of New Life, whose object was “the cultivation of a perfect character in all” through simple living. Their early members included vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, teetotalers, anarchists, Tolstoyan pacifists, and other radicals. The Fabians separated from the Fellowship over the latter’s prioritisation of spiritual over temporal goals, seeking instead to engage more directly in politics. Rejecting the Marxist framing of class war, this new group sought to make socialism acceptable to the English middle classes.

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To that end, they emphasised gradualism and rational policy development, proposed training a new governance class that would guide England toward socialism for the good of all, and sought to promote a vision of socialism understood as simply an extension of general niceness. In 1913, in their newly-founded magazine The New Statesman, Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb described socialism as “teaching ourselves to be gentlemen” and rolling out a “national standard of good manners”. Contra Marx, there was, the Fabians suggested, no necessary opposition between labour and capital. There didn’t have to be a class war. It was just a matter of educating everyone to be polite, as well as abstemious.

The difficulty with this, though, is that in practice such “education” in socialist niceness and self-restraint has often had to be imposed not just on Labour’s official enemies — conservatives — but also on the supposed beneficiaries of socialism: the working class themselves. For while the 19th-century labour movement represented a mobilisation of that class in its own interests, many bourgeois socialists viewed them more as an object for moral reform by their betters than as people capable of effecting positive change through their own collective agency. And this in turn has produced a longstanding worry: what if the masses are simply too short-termist to know what’s best for them?

For by the late Victorian era, social reformers had long been shaking their heads and tutting at the plebs’ leisure-time priorities. As far back as the 18th century, commentators were already denouncing the moral disaster that resulted from the transposition of English peasant entertainment into an urban, industrial setting: one that had degraded these communities’ enjoyment of festivity from the orderly chaos of convivial “Merrie England” into something more like moral squalor. One historian, writing in 1791, described how English rural people come together for festivals “from all quarters, fill the church on Sunday, and celebrate Monday with feasting, with musick, and with dancing”. By contrast, he reported, among the industrial proletariat such a gathering “never fails to produce a week, at least, of idleness, intoxication and riot”.

But perhaps you think “idleness, intoxication and riot” sounds fun. If so, you would not have been alone even in 1791; by then England had already spent two centuries racked by disagreements over the proper place of merriment. For while some modern commentators claim “Merrie England” never existed, but was invented (usually by conservatives) as a foil for everything they dislike about modernity, premodern England was indeed considerably merrier than its later iterations.

It’s true that, as historian Rebecca Jeffrey Easby argues, Victorian medievalists often constructed an ideal Middle Ages as a foil for everything they disliked about industrial modernity. These weren’t all conservatives: William Morris, for example, often evoked nostalgic visions of return to an idealised premodern communitarian life but also imagined that socialism might provide a cure for the industrial ugliness he hated.

But the England at which they glanced back really existed — after a fashion. As historian Ronald Hutton shows, England’s elaborate ritual calendar comprised a kaleidoscope of feasting, fasting, saints’ days and local traditions that began every year at Christmas and continued till the summer with events such as “wassailing” or “Hocktide”, the day shortly after Easter upon which men could capture and tie up a local woman, only to be released for a fee paid into parish funds.

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Merrie England was ended by the Reformation. By the time Cromwell took the reins as Lord Protector in 1653, saints’ days had been abolished; Christmas, Easter and Whitsun had also been scrapped, and Sunday was a strict, abstemious Sabbath. All that remained in the festive calendar was the anti-Catholic innovation of Guy Fawkes’ Day.

Nostalgia for this premodern world tends to focus on its festive and communitarian qualities. But whether conservative or socialist, Victorian evocations of Merrie England tended to be somewhat sanitised. As Hutton also shows, pre-modern England also made room for darker and more riotous instincts alongside the communitarianism and faith, including barely-constrained forms of violence. For example, one popular feast-day pastime was “cockthreshing”, a game in which a live cockerel was tethered in place by one foot, while people tried to knock it over or kill it by throwing missiles. Cockfighting and badger-baiting were also popular. Still more visceral was the tradition of Shrovetide football games, which had no rules at all, and were described by Sir Thomas Elyot in 1531 as “nothing but beastly fury and extreme violence, whereof proceedeth hurt”.

Shrovetide football survives today in one location: the Royal Atherstone match, which ended in 2023 with a brutal crowd punch-up outside a betting shop. Watching the footage, I can sort of see where the Roundheads were coming from. But it also looks fun. And yet if Victorian social reformers recoiled from “fun” in this medieval English sense, this was surely due to a not wholly unreasonable feeling that Merrie England’s regular outlets for “idleness, intoxication and riot” were, under industrial conditions, impossibly socially destructive. Indeed, corresponding efforts to curb its excesses were in evidence well before the Fabian group was formed: in 1855, for example, a Parliamentary bill sought to restrict Sunday trading, and especially the sale of alcohol, in the hopes that this would encourage the lower orders to church-going and godly abstemiousness.

But Sunday was the only day off for many, and these workers resented having their leisure options curtailed. When they protested, even their reaction expressed Merrie England’s ancient tradition of violence-as-leisure: at the resulting demonstration in Hyde Park, crowds hauled a large eel out of the Serpentine and threw it at the police line, before engaging in pitched, window-smashing battle with officers. They didn’t even stop rioting after the bill was withdrawn; in the view of the Manchester Guardian, the protest had by then escaped its “original and well-meaning authors” and was now driven by “a set of ne’er-do-wells for whom there is no expostulation so suitable as a thick stick”.

And this hints in turn at the deeper subtext to complaints about Starmer’s approach to smoking and greasy food. Though few would spell this out, proposed crackdowns on smoking and junk food feel of a piece with his brusque handling of the recent riots in Southport and elsewhere. And this can only be via something unmentionable even among conservatives: the fact that for many, violence is less “the language of the unheard”, as Martin Luther King put it, than just fun.

Though ever more methodically stripped of official outlets, from the Reformation onwards, this has remained visibly the case for at least a subset of young English men. There are football hooligans, of course; but sometimes, in an echo of the Sunday trading riots, it also passes for political activism. In my Left-wing youth, for example, May Day marches usually meant an appearance by “the Wombles”, a far-Left gang that would don thick padding and bicycle helmets and pick riotously violent fights with the police, ostensibly to Left-wing ends but mostly — we all suspected — because they enjoyed it. More recent instances of the same phenomenon include “Antifa” and, we can reasonably surmise, a good many of those who smashed up their neighbourhoods over recent weeks for ostensibly political reasons.

So should our leaders go beyond keeping the peace, and try to stamp out all forms of “fun”? The last time anyone Fabian-aligned got a sniff of power they nixed the last great holdout for Merrie England’s love of seasonal riot and casual animal cruelty: fox hunting. No doubt those of more Fabian sensibility today will argue that we can and should: that street violence is not a legitimate form of “fun”, any more than animal abuse, or indeed self-destructive behaviours such as smoking or eating fried food. We must be saved from ourselves. In any case, it doesn’t really matter what any of us thinks; Labour’s majority affords them a free hand to try. Those with any residual sympathy for England’s ancient streak of anarchy must brace themselves for a very un-merry few years.

The reality is that, excepting a few enclaves, crackpot identity politics is as alien to this sceptred isle as chlorinated chicken. We’ve never had much use of such foreign imports to be rude to our compatriots. For we have our own very English system of discrimination, and it is called the class system — at times, subtly registered through the policing of accents; at others, less subtly so, as when Thatcher brought out the blowtorches to discipline the miners.

Seen in the longue durée, there was only a brief mid-century blip — Enoch Powell’s Britain — when many abandoned class-thinking and became race-mad, in no small part on account of the identity crisis provoked by the shrinking of the British Empire into the British nation. This had damaging consequences: two generations without black and brown representation in the Commons (not a single person of colour was elected between 1929 and 1987); scores of race riots and hate crimes; and a general aura of unpleasantness and violence, captured with brio in This is England.

Yet there have undeniably been some stabs at course correction in the new millennium. Race is mostly passé. Class is back. It’s a point that Tommy Robinson’s near-namesake Tomiwa Owolade made in a compelling polemic published last year, the gist of which is conveyed by its title: This is not America. These days, there isn’t much of a racial gap to speak of. In Britain, blacks earn 6% less an hour than whites (in the US, 22% less), even outliving the latter (in the US, they die four years earlier on average). The wage gap increases to 13% between Caribbean and white men, and to 42% between Bangladeshi and white men; yet Indian men make 13% more than white men. Class more convincingly accounts for these disparities than race, Caribbean and Bangladeshi communities being overwhelmingly working class. Indian and Nigerian migration, by contrast, tends to be more middle-class.

Therein lies the rub for the hammered herberts who howl “Ingerland” at far-Right rallies in SW1, appealing to a misplaced sense of racial solidarity. For no such thing exists. Their white bourgeois brethren, in fact, see them as an atavistic bunch of yahoos and yobs, primitives from another planet. Ironically, the only people likely to sympathise with their lot are their dark-skinned working-class neighbours, the very migrants they detest.

All of this Tommy Robinson learned in a hard school earlier this month, when, from his Cypriot resort, he exhorted his million followers on X to “show your support” for the “real” England, after the stabbing of three children at a dance class in Southport by an embittered Taylor Swift critic apparently called “Ali al-Shakati”, supposedly a former small-boat passenger. As it was, that the attacker was born in Cardiff to Rwandan immigrants didn’t deter the dregs that drool at the dicta of Robinson from rampaging through the Midlands and the North, torching mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers. The extent of public support for the Robinsonistas was duly revealed a week later, when racist protestors were vastly outnumbered by antiracist counter-protestors across the country. Robinson was shown his station.

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Despite their numerical insignificance, though, there’s no denying that the Robinsonistas represent a Powellite neuralgia that hasn’t entirely died out in Britain. Most Brits have moved on, seeing race as a non-issue, as relevant to the business of friendship and marriage as handedness. Yet a tiny section has clung to its empty certitudes. Suffice to say it pays to inquire into this milieu, its penchants and thought-world, which is why I laboured through Robinson’s literary productions, a dud triptych of semi-literate reflections on race relations.

The facts of his life are well-established, and covered in extenso in his first memoir, Enemy of the State, which appeared in 2016. Né Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a name that conjured up images of bespectacled hippiedom, our antihero very early on took up a rougher nom de guerre for much the same reasons, it seems, that Herr Schicklgruber preferred not to go by that handle. The original Tommy Robinson was a Luton lout, a football hooligan of some prominence in such circles. The one born in 1982 qualified as an aircraft engineer, but then derailed his career for the faux pas of kicking a police officer — intervening to prevent Robinson from attacking his missus — in the head. “For that one kick, I spent five months in jail.”

Thereafter, Robinson set up as a plumber, moonlighting as a football hooligan boss. He turned to politics in 2004, joining the BNP in response to British Muslims allegedly celebrating 9/11. Still, he first became aware of “racial trouble” at a much younger age. Aged 13, he had discerned a “growing gang mentality among the Muslim kids”. In Enemy, he paints a tenebrous picture of Luton — drugs; knives; rapes — as something of a Caracas on the Lea. This he pins exclusively down to the character of Islam, much as one would, I suppose, blame Catholicism for the curse of the Colombian drug cartels.

But he misses the elephant in the room. As the Luton-born, working-class academic Thomas Peak has recently pointed out, if Robinson’s Muslim classmates in Eighties Luton appeared less “integrated”, it was at least partly because they sought safety in numbers after hooligans destroyed their neighbourhood following a football match; the 1985 Luton riot was one of the most egregious of that decade. Despite that episode, Peak recalls a fairly post-racial youth, kids of all colours having a laugh together at the local boxing club and Luton Carnival.

Slow on the uptake, Robinson left the BNP after belatedly discovering that it was a racist outfit. His black friends — who seem to exist only to point to his own reserves of tolerance — were made to wait at the door, since membership was reserved for whites. Five years later, he established a tanning salon and the English Defence League, the latter after having recoiled in horror at Muslim protestors holding up such heretical messages as “butchers of Basra”, as if one had to be a rabid Islamist to oppose Blair’s war, which pointlessly dispatched countless Brits and Iraqi civilians to a premature grave.

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For brawling, then breaching bail conditions, Robinson was sent to prison in 2011. HMP Bedford was full of surprises. “A problem more and more these days,” he incredulously writes, “is that you just don’t know who the Muslims are. Everyone’s dressed the same, and it isn’t just Asians who are Muslims. So blacks, whites, mixed race… anyone and everyone can be a Muslim.” The converts riled him up. “This white geezer McDonald said, ‘I’m fucking Muslim bruv’. And the way he said it, well, that was it. We ended up fighting across the servery and I battered him.” Later, Robinson went on a hunger strike because — so he claims — he was being fed halal meat.

In 2013, our recidivist found himself behind bars again, this time for using a friend’s passport to circumvent a travel ban in order to attend an Islamophobic symposium in the US. Once again, in another telenovela-ish turn, he recanted, making a big show of leaving the EDL and breaking naan with Mo Ansar, the disgraced Lloyds Bank employee turned soi-disant voice of British Islam (one of those dodgy “community leaders”, whatever they are) who helped “reform” Robinson. Profiled in the Telegraph, Ansar was described thus:

“He speaks the language of tolerance and moderation, yet he refuses to condemn the chopping off of hands for theft in Islamic states or homophobia… He has creatively, and quite dramatically, sexed up his professional experience, including falsely claiming to be a lawyer… He runs a sock-puppet Twitter account which he uses to defend himself and attack perceived rivals.”

Incredibly, Robinson warmed to him — “if every Muslim was like you there would be no problem” — even if later in his memoirs, he struck a less charitable note: “Mo was very much a cartoon character, a muppet Muslim.” At all events, it seems that the clincher for leaving the EDL was an £8,000 cheque paid by the think-tank Quilliam, which in return took credit for Robinson’s deradicalisation. But the good character shtick didn’t last long. Yet another prison sentence came hard on the heels of When Tommy Met Mo — the documentary about the encounter — and Tommy wound up in jail once again, this time for mortgage fraud.

Some of the stuff in Enemy of the State is admittedly rather tame. In his criticisms of the niqab, for instance, he appears to have the making of a clubbable French Lefty: “at least the French had the courage to ban the face veil.” But time and again, his racial idée fixe rears its ugly head: the “ethnic cleansing” of Luton by brown Muslims, who apparently have an innate fondness for “grooming gangs”. The facts, of course, tell a different story. As the Home Office concluded in 2020, “group-based child sexual exploitation offenders are most commonly white”. Across Britain, race appears tells us little. But then again, nor does economic deprivation, there being wide variation in similar councils. Sometimes statistics can be illuminating, and sometimes they aren’t. This is a case of the latter.

The most crippling defect in Robinson’s oeuvre is unquestionably his ethnicisation of class, as if the “white” in “white working class” means anything, as if him and Helena Bonham Carter might just have more in common than he does with some thick-necked Muslim bruiser he once shared a cell with. There are passages where he almost gets it, as when he wryly observes that the working classes, irrespective of hue, are typically appreciated only when they dig trenches and die en masse “on the orders of the snooty and superior upper classes”. But then he veers off on a tangent, whingeing about the white working class being “racially victimised” in Britain. Even so, he’s sanguine about the prospects of a cross-class white coalition. His job, he thinks, is to convince “middle-class Englishmen and women to say enough’s enough”. But there are some real howlers in his understanding of class markers — “middle-class tweedies” are apparently “too busy catching up on the latest Sky Atlantic box set” — which makes one suspect whether he’s the right messenger for his audience.

Yet one can see why Robinson might be squeamish about using the c-word, or even “working class” for that matter, without qualifying adjectives. This is because, economically speaking, he has seceded from it. Soon after Enemy came a lucrative gig with the Canadian website Rebel Media. Practically a sinecure, he was paid £8,000 a month for his canny ability to materialise, mirage-like, camera in hand, at the opportune moment when Islamists struck Britain. All the same, he scarcely lasted a year in that job, because he was raking in far greater sums through donations to justify having a boss. These days, he’s toying with the idea of taking up Spanish residency to evade an HMRC investigation; along with two cronies — his ex-wife Jenna Vowles and Man Friday Adam Geary — Robinson owes the state something like £800,000 in unpaid taxes.

It was perhaps only natural, then, in the time-honoured tradition of the gentleman amateur, for the newly minted man of independent means to aspire to the scholarly vocation. Accordingly, Robinson donned his skull cap and set to work on his second opuscule. A departure from his autobiographical obsessions, Mohammed’s Koran, co-authored with the grooming-gang obsessive Peter McLoughlin in 2017 and bearing the lurid subtitle “Why Muslims Kill for Islam”, is a work of Koranic exegesis. But it is not a tome intended for Muslims, we are told at the outset: “If you are a Muslim, please put this book down. We do not wish you to become a killer because this book leads you to understand the doctrines and history of Islam more thoroughly.”

Pitched as a corrective to the thought-world of the “educated” elite, Mohammed’s Koran tells us that peaceful Muslims exist, to be sure, but they’ve got it all wrong. They’ve misunderstood their faith. The rest of the book is taken up with the reordering of chapters of the Koran. The game here is that old parlour game of the Muslim clerical classes: naskh, or the doctrine of abrogation, allowing for the repeal of Koranic verses contradicted by later passages to iron out inconsistencies. By rearranging the text like a clerical DJ, Robinson is able to place all the peaceful bits in the book fairly early on, and so “abrogate” them in favour of the later, violent bits. There you have it: a most vile, violent faith. It’s desperate, puerile stuff.

The exegetical turn proved short-lived. Within weeks, Robinson was back on his laptop, counselling the terrorist Darren Osborne, who went on to drive a van into a Muslim crowd in Finsbury Park, killing one and injuring 11. “I’m not justifying it,” Robinson later wrote on Twitter, adding with a touch of apophasis that “the mosque where the attack happened tonight has a long history of creating terrorists”. Two years later, in 2019, our jailbird did time yet again, for contempt of court, after which he appealed for asylum in the US on InfoWars, a website that vends conspiracy theories and dietary supplements: “I beg Donald Trump, I beg the American government, to look at my case,” he said on air. Sadly for him, this cut no ice with his ochre overlord. He had to stay content in his country pile in Greater Manchester, complete with a hot tub in the garden and a TV set above his bathtub.

A fool and his money are soon parted, however, and Robinson had to pay £100,000, plus legal costs to the tune of £1.5 million, for libelling 15-year-old refugee Jamal Hijazi, who was assaulted by far-Right thugs and forced to relocate after Robinson falsely accused him of attacking “young English girls”. Even Robinson was forced to concede that he had cancelled the kid on the strength of faulty intel: “I have been completely had, how embarrassing man.” He declared bankruptcy soon after, busying himself by stalking an Indy journalist and her partner for which he received a five-year stalking protection order, and swearing at a taxi driver in Bologna: “little paki who drives a car… I’m going to punch you in the head, kick you in the face, because I am the king of the whole Islam race [sic].”

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By Pratinav Anil

Like a dog that returns to its vomit, Robinson returned to the Hijazi affair in his third book, Silenced, a tedious reprisal of who said what to whom about who. Telegraphically put, a précis could read thus: “I was right. The courts were wrong.”

For all his energetic antics and massive platform – Newsnight, Good Morning Britain, the Today programme, Oxford Union, BBC, a Channel 4 documentary, all supplied by a guilt-ridden bien-pensant commentariat questing for earthy authenticity — it is cheering to note that only a miniscule minority of souls have fallen for Tommy Robinson’s grift. In 2019, he polled a mere 2.2% when he ran for MEP. When Gerard Batten brought him into the Brezhnevite bureaucracy of Ukip as “grooming gang advisor”, Farage and seven other MEPs promptly resigned, fearing reputational damage. These are, after all, rather different traditions: Ukip’s origins lie in a fairly conventional postwar Euroscepticism, whereas Robinson’s roots are in the interwar fascism of Oswald Mosley’s kind, now beyond the pale.

Robinson, in short, is an anachronism. There is no existential struggle between white and coloured Britain. Rather, what we have on our hands is an existential struggle between white and Muslim fundamentalists, both sides as thick as mince, and, after a fashion, two sides of the same coin. It is no accident, then, that Robinson has recently praised Muslim conservatives for being “strong in principle” and joined them in opposing the teaching of tolerance to sexual minorities in schools. “Homosexuality is a heinous horrible thing,” a conservative Muslim told the press; “it’s not acceptable in Islam.” Robinson’s response: “I stand with the Muslim parents.” A plague o’ both your houses.