Crime

We held a small party to celebrate the news that the UK had seen its largest rise in population in 50 years: a jump of 1 per cent in only 12 months to a respectable total of 68.3 million people. Just crisps and soft drinks, you understand. Nothing wildly extravagant. All patriots feel proud of the speed with which our numbers have been rising of late, because naturally we wish for the UK to be the biggest and best in the world – and we are on our way. The rights of the likes of Ardit outweigh the rights of the rest of us not to be burgled At the current rate of increase, the populations of Turkey, Iran and Thailand could be surpassed within a dozen or so years, although we have a way to go before we catch up with the real big boys, like Bangladesh.

The guilty plea of the former human rights lawyer Phil Shiner this week to charges of fraud is a story that deserves considerable attention. Shiner had tried to claim £200,000 in legal aid without disclosing that – in the breach of the rules – he had employed an agent to cold-call potential ‘victims’ of mistreatment at the hands of British service personnel in Iraq. An inquiry held by the UK government in 2014 found that the allegations of abuse or violence which Shiner brought forward had little basis in fact: one fighter who was said to have been killed in custody by a British soldier was established to have died in battle, never captured alive.

There have been protests in 30 cities across France, people marching in outrage over the case of Dominique Pelicot who drugged his wife Gisèle and raped her and invited more than 70 other men – strangers – to come to his house and rape her too. Pelicot is a monster, a modern-day Bluebeard. But what has shocked France most is how very many normal Frenchmen he was able to find, in and around his Provencal village, who were up for having sex with an unconscious woman. If the feminists of France really want to stand with Gisèle, they’d educate their sons to abstain from porn A firefighter, a painter, several businessmen… every week as the trial continues another set of these ordinary men shamble into the courthouse in Avignon and make their bad excuses.

I slept only between the hours of 5 and 6 a.m, thanks to self-induced terror tactics. My son Adam stayed over, having offered to accompany me for my angiogram – or ‘the procedure’. He kindly moved my old Honda Jazz round the corner and parked his car in my space overnight. The procedure revealed that a) I am impossible to sedate – I once told a full joke under anaesthetic; b) I am neurotic; and c) I didn’t, after all, need a stent. So why was I so breathless? Could it be because, at three score and ten... er... plus eight, I find myself in love? Prescription: I must walk more, breathe more, change medication and cool it. Adam came back to check on me and rebuked me for moving my car – which I hadn’t, because the doctor said that I shouldn’t drive for a day or two.

Even Horace Rumpole could not have secured an acquittal for Lucy Letby. The more I look at this case, the more I suspect that there could never have been any other outcome than a conviction. I think a great cloud of emotion hung over that courtroom during the whole trial. I think that cloud spread outwards into the public mind before and during the long months of the trial. In my view, the actual prosecution of Ms Letby began on Thursday 5 July 2018, two days after she was arrested for the first time, and more than four years before she finally sat in the dock. The prosecution knew throughout that they had no objective proof of their case, large or small On that day, police officers dug up her tiny garden in a Chester suburb.

Free speech advocates like me need to stop talking about the meagre gains we made under the last government because the present one seems to be listening carefully, taking notes, then gleefully reversing each one. First it torpedoed the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. Then it threatened to put the ‘legal but harmful’ stuff back into the Online Safety Act. Now, Yvette Cooper has said trying to get the police to record fewer ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) was a dreadful mistake. A non-crime hate incident was recorded against a man for whistling the Bob the Builder tune To grasp just how potty this is, you need to understand what an NCHI is.

There was recently a mass public party at which all sorts of offences were committed. As innocent attendees cut loose and jived, shadier actors took advantage. There was a burglary, a robbery, 19 drug offences, 26 acts of theft and no fewer than 30 acts of violence against individuals. There were also two sexual offences – shameful. What hell was this? Where did all this moral abasement occur? Must have been at the Notting Hill Carnival, right? Actually, no – it was at Glastonbury. Yes, at this year’s Glasto, famously the hangout of middle-class white folk who like rock, crimes were committed. In those tent cities, amid the thick haze of Mary Jane, things got stolen, people were punched, women were abused. So should we shut it down?

Whatever happened to the likes of the BBC’s Rough Justice and Channel 4’s Trial and Error? Why did human rights organisations such as Liberty and Justice stop campaigning on behalf of UK prisoners wrongfully jailed? Why are there fewer MPs plugging away on behalf of constituents they believe to have been victims of miscarriages of justice? All this activity seemed to be wound down after the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) began its work in 1997. Outsiders were no longer needed to look into the criminal justice system, many believed, now that we had a one-stop shop for prisoners protesting against their convictions for crimes they insist they did not commit.

There is no doubt that the new government (and in particular the prisons minister, James Timpson) is faced with a serious prison population crisis. Original thinking and a willingness to challenge the system will be the only way out. As HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, I know this all too well. Last month I inspected Durham, a Georgian reception jail which regularly vies for the dubious honour of being the most overcrowded prison along with Leeds, Bedford and Wandsworth. Half of all prisoners are functionally illiterate and yet few are taught to read With remand populations (those who have yet to be convicted) at historic highs, reception prisons across the country are busier than ever.

Thanks to an underage relative who’d stolen my driving licence, I recently found myself ID-less at the local Co-op. I know the woman at the checkout reasonably well, so I said hi, enquired about her day and then asked if I could have my usual vape anyway. She had the decency to look shifty and said: ‘Sorry love.’ Did she not remember me and my ID from just a few days earlier? Was she senile? Did she hate me? I suspected that the reason she was unswayable was because she was bugged. She was wearing a body worn camera and the Co-op’s Security Operations Center was spying on us. The public is accustomed to, or at least aware of, the police’s use of body worn cameras (BWCs). But in recent years, the technology has been proliferating at a dizzying rate.