Product Description

Crime is a political football - both left and right are terrified of seeming "soft" on the issue, but for all their efforts, or apparent efforts, crime rates continue to rise. Clearly something needs to be done. But what? Peter Hitchens argues that the time has come to re-examine the criminal justice system root and branch - to cope with rising levels of violent crime, and to restore public faith in society's ability to defend itself. Whatever you think of the solutions Hitchens suggests to this problem, you can be sure that they will excite controversy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30779 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Customer Reviews

An uncomfortable read
Hitchens is an articulate proponent of old-Right thinking. Hanging, flogging, retributive justice in general. Most of us would like to think we had moved on from that. But Hitchens doesn't pontificate from a distance. He has been into prisons and speaks with authority about the contempt the criminal classes in Britain now have for weaklings like us who have allowed them to set our nation's agenda. And he skilfully links our weakness in detecting and punishing criminals to our Government's increasing authoritarianism as far as decent law-abiding citizens are involved. If crime is a kind of disease brought on by poverty etc., then we are all potential criminals and should be treated as such. Just as the left has compassion for the criminals in prison, it is afraid of all the potential criminals on the outside. It's a perverted through-the-looking-glass logic which has the police harassing the decent and schmoozing the evil.

It doesn't have to be this way...
It's 3am and you're being burgled. Call the police in the UK, and they might send someone round the next day so that you can claim on your insurance. Tell them that you're going to shoot the burglar, and they'll be round immediately with a swat team and helicopters - to cart YOU away! Have you ever wondered why and when your welfare became less important than the criminal's?

Read Hitchens. His latest book systematically takes apart the development of the police service in the 20th century and exposes how the police force, once a representative of the civil population with close contact on the streets, has become sealed off and paramilitary in its operations over the last 40 years - and lost the respect of the law-abiding public in the process. He sets out how, despite there being more police and support staff per capita of population than ever before, more crimes are being committed, reported and remaining unsolved than at any point during our history. He explains how clear-up statistics have replaced crime prevention as the policeman's focus, and how only 5% of any police force's staff are out 'on the beat' at any point.

Other law and order topics include the encroachment of government surveillance on personal liberty. If the reason for having ID cards is to protect us from terrorism, how did the Madrid bombings happen? Spain had ID cards since Franco. And why weren't they introduced during the height of IRA bombings in the UK? It's these sorts of questions which Hitchens asks to great effect - and he produces a few interesting answers.

It's shocking reading in parts. But whether you lean left or right, this book will give everyone pause for thought.

Brilliant account of the government-EU threat to our freedom
Peter Hitchens is a noted political commentator. This book, a serious, detailed defence of our freedoms, is a worthy successor to his 1999 book, The Abolition of Britain, a passionate defence of Britain's integrity and sovereignty against the EU.

Most EU members lack habeas corpus, the presumption of innocence, single jeopardy, the right to silence and trial by jury. Now the EU wants to impose on us the European legal system (corpus juris), its mode of policing and its own prosecution service. Europol can already operate here, its officers immune from prosecution. Under the European arrest warrant, prosecuting authorities from any EU member country can order the arrest of a citizen of any other EU country. The Crown Prosecution Service is eliding into an EU prosecution service, an unaccountable servant of the state.

Hitchens makes an excellent case against ID cards, which would be compulsory and costly. He notes that the Australians and New Zealanders both defeated the proposal.

He points out that previous British governments wrongly copied US police methods unsuited to 'this wholly different country'. He notes, "the Victorian network of police stations has been lopped as drastically as were the railways by the half-witted Beeching cuts of the sixties." Thatcher closed a thousand police stations, one in three, between 1992 and 2002, and centralised the police force. The public want bobbies on the beat: we want laws enforced, not more laws and rights. Macpherson aimed to institutionalise racism, demanding, "'Colour-blind' policing must be outlawed."

Hitchens urges that we build new mental hospitals, ending the 'shameful Care in the Community programme' and getting the mentally ill out of prisons. He argues persuasively against decriminalising drugs.

This government overrules the rule of law, suspends habeas corpus and defends those who close down theatres. Its acts, particularly the Racism and Xenophobia Directive and a new offence of 'religiously aggravated threatening behaviour' threaten our freedom of thought and speech: behaviour is either threatening or it isn't - the law should deal with actions, not with thoughts.

All these attacks on our freedoms are allowed, if not obligatory, under the EU Constitution.