New laws should stop criminals, not make the rest of us miserable

Telegraph

21-02-2025

At the root of much bad policy in Britain lie two truths. The first is that private grief is seldom a good basis for public policy. The second is that it is almost impossible for politicians to say no to a Campaigning Mum.
The latest instance of this is the Government's crackdown on the online sale of knives. I hadn't even realised that this was a Campaigning Mum policy; finding increasingly absurd new ways to restrict access to knives – even as knife crime surges upwards regardless – is the Home Office's preferred displacement activity. This country loves banning things much more than it likes asking hard questions.
But no, up pops BBC Breakfast to put me straight: 'If this would have been in place years ago my son would have been here today', declares Pooja Kanda, whose son was stabbed to death. But at least, the Corporation reassures us, there is 'a new law in his name which will introduce stricter rules for retailers selling knives online'.
There's another unfortunate truth: no worthwhile legislation ever bore someone's first name. Passing general restrictions in response to very particular circumstances is an absurd way to legislate.
For is it really likely that Ronan Kanda would still be here in the event that the Government had cracked down on online sales earlier? Were his killers too young to simply buy one in a shop? Did their parents keep padlocks on their kitchen drawers?
The fact is that violent crime is much less responsive to weapon restrictions – the British State's one response – than policymakers dare admit. As mentioned, knife crime has almost tripled since its post-2010 low point despite all the new laws; even gun crime doubled in the ten years after the handgun ban, and few people have any of those lying around in their kitchen.
Yet what the Government seems oddly shy about calling Ronan's Law – perhaps because it's trying to pretend this is its response to the Stockport murders – is just the tip of the iceberg, and sadly it isn't just Labour who go in for this sort of feel-good displacement activity.
In the last Parliament the Conservatives passed 'Martyn's Law', an onerous set of new costs and impositions on our hard-pressed entertainment sector.
It was officially a response to the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing but, as is the norm with this sort of thing, bore absolutely no relation to the findings of the official inquiry. Easier to make the custodian of the village hall do counter-terrorism training than acknowledge that the Arena's (perfectly adequate) security hesitated to confront the bomber for fear of looking racist.
Conservative ministers also at least 'considered' calls by another coalition of 'grieving families' to ban young drivers from carrying passengers, and restrict their licences until they're 25 – and to hell with the fact that they're legally adults or the practical consequences.
Such demands from the bereaved make emotional sense; whilst nothing can bring their loved ones back, a new law at least lets them tell themselves that their loss wasn't for nothing. It's also difficult for their opponents to avoid getting typecast as heartless libertarians when a policy's advocates are exclusively covered in sympathetic human-interest style.
But Ronan's Law is bad law, as is Martyn's. Each is yet another attempt by the Home Office to look busy without doing anything useful, and even if it worked it would do so only by imposing restrictions on the law-abiding majority rather than focusing on the criminals.
Repeal the lot. The bereaved deserve our sympathy – but not to build monuments to the departed out of needless expense and wasted time.