This is how justice has gone so awry in twenty-first century Britain

Telegraph

a day ago

A while back I came across some people who were actually being deported by the Home Office. They were an American couple running the only shop in a remote part of Scotland. Locals were up in arms about the nice couple being booted out.
I think of them when I see stories about some of the people who are allowed to stay in this country by our courts. The Ugandan murderer who clubbed a man to death in the back of an ambulance but was allowed to stay because of his mental health. The Pakistani paedophile was allowed to stay because his life would be at risk back home. The Jamaican murderer who can't be deported because a rival criminal gang in his native country might harm him.
Welcome to justice in twenty-first century Britain. Judges, some of whom are also pro-migrant activists, have decided that the rights of foreign criminals are more important than the right of everyone else to live in safety; there are more than 10,000 foreign national offenders living in the country.
There's a pattern here. The British state persecutes the law-abiding while coddling dangerous people. This worst-of-both-worlds has been dubbed 'anarcho-tyranny'. Examples of it abound. Take Martyn's Law.
Security Guard Kyle Lawler was suspicious of Manchester bomber Salman Abedi, but did not confront him because, he says, he didn't want to be branded a racist. Rather than confronting this real problem, Parliament instead passed a law requiring village halls and small events to draw up bureaucratic terrorism action plans.
Exactly as predicted, the cost of this bureaucracy has led to events being closed for the law-abiding population: Shrewsbury Flower Show (started in 1875) has folded, to some extent, because of the extra costs of security.
Horrific knife crimes have become common. In July 2015, we passed a law saying adults convicted for a second time or more of carrying a knife must receive a minimum six-month prison sentence. But judges are ignoring it – four in ten are not jailed, despite the clear view of Parliament.
Instead of fixing the problem, the BBC and others are promoting an absurd campaign to ban pointed kitchen knives, with celebrity endorsements from people like Idris Elba. That's anarcho-tyranny in action: don't jail criminals but take away granny's cheese knife instead.
If you, a law-abiding person, want to open a bank account or invest money you will face layers of bureaucracy. God help you if you are self-employed. But if you want to set up a blatant money laundering operation like some of the candy stores of Oxford Street or open the 14th 'Turkish Barber' in a tiny town, then HMRC will barely touch you.
I get my train ticket checked every day. But staff on the tube stand idly by while people jump over the ticket barriers. When Robert Jenrick made a film pointing this out, Transport for London (TFL) threatened to prosecute him for 'filming illegally'.
Recently, tube trains on the Bakerloo and Central lines have been covered in graffiti. Various groups have started cleaning off the graffiti. What has been the TFL's response to this? They complained about people cleaning up the graffiti and then claimed they had put it there themselves.
This is the instinct of anarcho-tyranny. Attack the law abiding and the victims, rather than deal with the problem; in two tier Britain, not all protests are equal.
Women protesting the Sarah Everard case had their faces squished to the floor. BLM protesters were treated with kid gloves; while everyone else was instructed to stay home to stop covid, they were allowed to gather in Whitehall for a protest that turned into a riot.
British police arrest more than 30 people a day for online posts, double the rate in 2017. Even the ultra-liberal Economist magazine argues Britain has a problem with free speech. One of the worst things about anarcho-tyranny is its arbitrary nature.
According to a Policy Exchange report, in 2023, Essex Police recorded 808 'Non-Crime Hate Incidents' (NCHIs). Meanwhile, West Yorkshire Police, a force with 38 per cent more police officers than Essex, recorded only 146 NCHIs.
In the last three years Essex police spent time logging two NCHIs every single day – but only solved 6 per cent of burglaries and 3 per cent of rapes.
It is terrible that free speech is being policed like this, but somehow even worse that what you can say now depends on where you happen to live, and the whims of local officials. But then, that's the whole point. Persecuting the law-abiding makes officials feel powerful and important.
The numbers arriving in small boats are soaring under Starmer, and the number of terrorists and criminals who we can't deport because of human rights is ever-growing.
At least ugly new barriers have been recently put up around Parliament to protect us MPs and Peers. By a quirk of timing the work started in the week when the Mayor of London gave a stirring speech declaring that we must 'build bridges, not walls'.
He said this after spending recent years having to install ugly concrete anti-terrorism walls on the ends of all of London's bridges, which law-abiding people must walk round.
The mayor spent money on an ad campaign declaring 'London is open', but for the law-abiding London is less open: when I was born you could walk up Downing Street, or go into parliament without airport style security.
In the grooming gangs scandal, we saw how the authorities turned on the victims and those who tried to blow the whistle. People like detective Maggie Oliver, youth worker Jayne Senior and even Labour MPs Ann Cryer and Sarah Champion paid a career penalty for speaking out; Champion was made to quit her job in the Labour front bench in 2017. Labour first tried to block an inquiry and are now pushing through a definition of 'Islamophobia' that I'm sure would have been used against those whistleblowers.
Our politics are upside down. We pamper those who do the wrong thing, while we punish those who try to do the right thing. It's anarcho-tyranny. Don't like it? Well, choose your words carefully, or you'll end up in jail.