"RUN THE EXPERIMENT!" FILES::

-REVIEW: of A Brief History of Crime by Peter Hitchens (Theodore Dalrymple, Daily Telegraph)

Not long ago, I was talking to a policeman who was on the verge of retirement. He was pleased to leave the force, he said, because it had not only become unbearably bureaucratic, but morally and intellectually corrupt. Chief constables were now politicians and spin-doctors, not policemen; policing was more a matter of public relations than of enforcing the law. "In the old days", he added wistfully, "it was different. We were nice to the nice people and nasty to the nasty people."

Under our brave new dispensation, a strange inversion is happening: it is the nasty people to whom the police feel increasingly obliged to be nice. Of course there must have been room for abuse in the old days: not every nasty person is a criminal, and not every policeman's judgment was sound. Still, the system worked as a whole, as evidenced by the astonishingly low crime rate. [...]

Mr Hitchens places the blame firmly where it belongs: on a supine and pusillanimous political establishment that, for four decades at least, has constantly retreated before the verbal onslaught of liberal intellectuals whose weapons have been mockery allied to sentimental guilt about their prosperous and comfortable lives, and whose aim has been to liberate themselves from personally irksome moral constraints, without regard to the consequences for those less favourably placed in society than themselves.

In his, in my view justified, rage at what has been done to British society, Mr Hitchens sometimes over-eggs the pudding or makes a mistake. For example, in trying to prove that prison is no longer any kind of punishment or humiliation for the wrongdoer, he states that prisoners who attempt to escape are not now dressed in the absurd clothes that warned prison officers of their intentions - but this is not so. E-men (as would-be escapees are called in the splendid argot of prison) are still put in "stripes": a blue and yellow outfit that looks like the costume of a Shakespearean fool in a bad school production.

But occasional inaccuracies do not detract from the burden of what he says; and it is clear to me that his outrage is of the genuine and generous variety that comes from a real understanding of the conditions which millions of people now endure - unlike the simulated and self-regarding outrage that is common among liberal reformers.

Most of the reforms that have turned so much of Britain into an urban nightmare were not enacted because of any groundswell of opinion from below.It was the intellectual elite that demanded that the police should be emasculated, that the law's teeth should be drawn, that perpetrators should be treated as the victims of their own behaviour, and so forth. Mr Hitchens traces the genesis of these reforms, and in every case finds the self-satisfaction of people such as Roy Jenkins, who introduced lenient treatment for criminals without ever having personally to face the social concequences.

Mr Hitchens doesn't ask - and a fortiori doesn't answer - the question of why the British political establishment should have proved so craven over the years. Personally I suspect it had something to do with the loss of Empire and world power - what the Chinese call the loss of the Mandate of Heaven. I also think Hitchens is too optimistic about the prospect of the nation coming to its senses: the march of "progressive" sociology through the institutions has been so thorough that there is no constituency left which could preserve the kind of traditional limited polity that he believes Britain once was and which he would like to see restored.

A society that enacts the fever dreams of its intellectual elites at the expense of traditional morality and the common sense of the vast majority of its people is always embarked on an experiment that will go disastrously wrong. Sadly for Britain, as they integrate further into the EU, things will get even worse as they become a laboratory for Franco-German quackery.
Posted by Orrin Judd at April 21, 2003 8:49 AM