Crime

 Kiev On a cobbled street above the Maidan, an elderly man dressed in fatigues rubs his stubble in the morning sunshine. Would I like a lesson in throwing Molotov cocktails? He picks up a bottle with a long wire loop for a handle, and leads me to a burnt-out public lavatory. A match to the rags stuffed in the bottle’s mouth; an overarm swing, and the bottles smashes against the far wall, flames licking round broken stalls. Would I like to pose for a photo? A young American who has stopped to watch takes up the offer. Three months after protests toppled Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, the Maidan has turned into a tourist attraction. The scene of the protests is still an impressive sight.

Should we be worried about the vast numbers of German-born people living covertly in the United Kingdom? The Office for National Statistics estimates that in 2011 some 297,000 Germans were resident here, the fifth largest non-British-born contingent (after Indians, Poles, Pakistanis and the Irish respectively). What the hell are they all up to? Sitting in smartly furnished homes, biding their time, and waiting, waiting. That’s what I suspect. A report in the Guardian a while back suggested that our German community tended to ‘stay under the radar’, an ability which mercifully eluded them 70 years ago.

A number of interesting things have happened recently: The Law Society has provided legal guidance to ensure that Muslims in Britain can have their wills judged according to Sharia. BBC Newsnight hosted an in-studio row between three Muslims over whether one Muslim should be allowed to say or do anything that is deemed religiously insensitive by any other Muslim. Majority opinion seemed to be ‘no’. Then there has been huge excitement that, after decades during which tens of thousands of girls in Britain were genitally mutilated, charges have for the first time been brought against some suspected perpetrators of this horrific crime. Just in case anyone is lost in all this – this is Britain in 2014. So what do these things have in common?

It was Shetland that tipped me over the edge. Not the place, but the TV series. Although that’s set in the place. So both, really. It’s a crime drama, see, and people keep getting murdered. Roughly speaking, so far, there’s been a corpse every episode. Which by the end of the series will mean eight corpses. Which, given that there are only 20,000 people in Shetland, means that Scotland’s most northerly islands have a murder rate roughly comparable with that of Belize. Or higher, even, because my calculations assume that a series happens in a year, and that we are seeing all the murders there are, rather than just the ones that Dougie Henshall gets called out to. Frankly, it makes the place seem terrifying. But then a lot of places are.

On the evening of the Mark Duggan verdict, Diane Abbott MP tweeted the following: If the #duggan jury believe that he did not have a gun in his hand when he was shot, how can they find it was a lawful killing? #baffled — Diane Abbott MP (@HackneyAbbott) January 8, 2014   Well, Diane, your bafflement is because you weren’t inside the court room for three months listening to the evidence, were you, you idiot?  Does she think her tweet was helpful? Why does she not devote herself to tackling gun crime within the young black male community – or does she think that it is not a problem, a disproportionate problem, and that the reason we hear about it so often is because we’re all racists?

It’s surprisingly boring, legalising weed. In Colorado, where recreational doobie has been utterly without censure for, ooh, about a week and a half now, the Department of Revenue (Marijuana Enforcement Division) has published Permanent Rules Related to the Colorado Retail Marijuana Code, which is 136 pages long and no fun at all. Were I actually in Colorado, I suppose I could always spark something up to help me get to the end. ‘The statutory authority for this rule is found at subsections 12-43.4-202(2)(b), 12-43.4-202(3)(b)(II), 12-43.4-202(3)(b)(III), and 12-43.3-301(1), C.R.S,’ it drones, at the top of the final page. If you like, imagine that read out by a posh girl in a breathy voice over a drum beat, like they used to do in the Orb.

This was supposed to be the year of strife, strikes, misery and more. Instead, to the surprise of Britain's politicians, things have instead gone badly right. I look at them in my Telegraph column today, and here are the top points:- 1. Crime plunges With the austerity and the unemployment, internal government reports predicted that Brits would respond by unleashing a crimewave. Instead, recorded crime has fallen to the lowest level in 25 years: [datawrapper chart="http://www.seapprojects.co.uk/charts/3571387552215.html"] 2. We're doing more with less People think public services are getting better, in spite of substantial cuts in local authority spending. The doomsayers were wrong - thanks to resourceful British public servants, more is being done with less. 3.