Justice on a knife’s edge

Knife crime is in sharp focus, as it were, with 279 people stabbed to death last year.

Applying the standard wartime ratio of three wounded to one KIA, the total number of stabbings must have been at least a thousand.

Hence the pile of newspaper pages devoted to the problem, with words like ‘crisis’ and ‘pandemic’ bandied about, complete with superlative adjectives. Most commentators regard the problem as difficult, if not impossible to solve.

So it is – within the confines of the ‘liberal’ bilge that now functions as a surrogate theocratic religion. (I often put the word liberal in quotes because its most common usage actually means ‘illiberal’.) Dropping those shackles, however, would put an end to routine knife crime in short order.

Much of the problem is due to Mrs May’s tenure as incompetent home secretary, from which she naturally graduated to her present position of incompetent prime minister. Acting in her previous capacity, she practically withdrew the power of stop and search from the police.

This was done in the name of multi-culti ‘fairness’ (this word too means its opposite the way it’s commonly used). For, supposedly driven by their febrile racial hatred, policemen were stopping and searching mostly non-whites.

How unfair was that? If they stopped a black youth sporting a hoodie and a feral scowl, they were duty-bound to search, say, my wife who looks, speaks and dresses like a prettier version of Princess Anne.

Since we can’t afford many cops on the beat, the conclusion made itself: if it was impossible to stop and search everyone, the police should stop and search no one. Even putative racism is a crime much worse than slitting someone’s throat.

Those dissenters against the ‘liberal’ ethos point out that the police have to act on the balance of probability. This isn’t hard to calculate, considering that two thirds of knife-possession offenders under 25 in London are non-white (38 per cent nationally).

But statistics shouldn’t affect principles, and Mrs May stuck to her guns and, evidently, knives. As a result, we’re regaled every day with gruesome stories about this or that 17-year-old A-pupil stabbed to death, for no apparent reason.

Have you noticed how the victim of every murder receiving national attention is an upstanding pillar of society boasting high academic achievement, sunny disposition and universal love?

One is almost compelled to infer that cutting the throat of a ne’er-do-well would somehow be less objectionable. Now I don’t care about the personality of the victim – every human life is equally valuable, and the wanton taking of it equally reprehensible.

It’s the personalities of the murderers that interest me, or especially how they are described. For example, in his sensible, if slightly self-serving, article, Boris Johnson refers to his success as mayor of London in promoting stop and search powers of the police.

As a result, he writes, knife crime went down, and I have no reason to doubt his claim. What I find actively irritating is his non-stop referring to knife-wielders as ‘kids’.

I’ve always been under the impression that, to produce a kid on this side of the Atlantic, one has to have sex with a goat. Though experimental attempts are doubtless made all over the countryside, none of these unions has so far been blessed with offspring – unless of course Jeremy Corbyn is lying about his ancestry.

Mr Johnson, educated at Eton and Oxford, knows this as well as I do, and I bet he never refers to his own children as ‘kids’ in private. He does so in public because he wants to come across as ‘cool’, probably to offset that Eton and Oxford bit.

But he must realise that the same desire to appear ‘cool’ takes ghetto youngsters into less innocuous areas, those in which consuming and selling drugs is as cool as carrying and using a knife.

Youth gangs are overrunning vast tracts of urban real estate, and many use random killings as initiation rites. But even those that don’t still attract countless youths who are evil by nature and have no social, cultural or religious counterweight to their evil.

However, the whole ‘liberal’ ethos, and the justice system as its subset, is based on the a priori assumption that no one is innately evil.

This goes back to Rousseau, with his arrant nonsense about every person being by nature a noble sauvage impeccable in his primordial virtue. And if some people demonstrably act in a less than impeccable manner, they are victims of correctable social conditions.

What I describe as arrant nonsense is to our powers-that-be a sort of secular scripture, with no heresy or apostasy permitted or tolerated. Hence the derisory sentences for criminals caught with knives in their possession – or for criminals in general.

The prevailing article of faith is that all of them can be rehabilitated by having their heads pumped full of New Age inanities. Ideally, this should be done not in prison but ‘in the community’, whose safety is thereby sacrificed at the altar of the new cult.

That’s why the death penalty has become unthinkable everywhere in Europe: it’s seen as what it isn’t, the denial of the sanctity of human life, rather than what it is, the assertion of that very sanctity.

By imposing the death penalty a society communicates with resolute finality that each human life is so sacred that no length of prison sentence can redeem its arbitrary taking. The secondary message is that some people are so evil that they can’t be redeemed, in this world at any rate.

You understand, of course, that I have in mind not our society, but one that has still retained the last vestiges of sanity and common sense. In such a society, the solution to the knife crime pandemic would offer itself.

First, the numerical strength of our police forces should be increased to a level necessary to combat crime. This being one of the few legitimate functions of the state, no expense should be spared.

Second, policemen should be authorised to do their job properly, with no regard for multi-culti perversions. If most people who are stopped and searched are off-white, then so be it – and so it should remain until such people no longer commit most knife crimes.

Third, our courts should pass much stiffer sentences. I’d suggest a mandatory, no-tariff sentence of 10 years for any crime whose perpetrator had a knife on him, even if the weapon wasn’t used; 20 years if it was used; and the death penalty if it was used fatally.

Again, we shouldn’t penny-pinch when it comes to building as many prisons as necessary and filling them to the gunwales.

I’d confidently suggest that only such measures could ever stop knife crime. However, I predict with even greater confidence that no such measures will ever be adopted. Instead we’ll be treated to more stories of ‘kids’ who are out to murder just for the hell of it.

A friend of mine once interviewed in a remand prison a chap who had fatally stabbed a man in the stomach. When asked how he felt about that act, the murderer admitted aptronymically to being ‘gutted’.

I don’t know what happened to him next, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, had he repeated that claim with sufficiently lachrymose passion at his trial, the evil creature got off with a light sentence.

By now he’s roaming the streets again, his trusted combat knife in his belt. The god of ‘liberal’ bilge has to be served.