Douglas Murray

St Helena In an attempt to escape from the world, I have come with friends to St Helena. It is quite a good place for the exercise. Until a few years ago the only way to get to the island was a five-day boat voyage from Cape Town. Shortly before Covid, an airport for this British overseas territory was finally completed at UK taxpayer expense. To protect some local insects the runway was put at a slightly wrong angle, making it difficult – sometimes impossible – to land. The weekly flight from Johannesburg therefore refuels in Namibia in case landing is impossible and the plane has to about-turn. A lifesize statue of Napoleon stands on the balcony.

There are two questions that need to be asked of any society: what is it that is going wrong; and what is it that’s going right that should be done more? It’s only natural to focus on the first question – not least because it is easier. But it is the second question that should be asked more. Whenever I think of the few things that are going well in Britain, I think of the Michaela Community School in Wembley, London. I have visited the school a couple of times. It sits in one of London’s most deprived communities. Set up under the era of Michael Gove’s free schools scheme, it is the creation of Katharine Birbalsingh. Pupils are almost all from non-advantaged backgrounds.

There are only a few rules to column-writing. One of the strictest is never to waste time bouncing off the effluent of morons. So, for instance, it is a rule among British columnists not to use the term ‘Owen Jones’ in an article. It is too easy. Every couple of hours there will be another gaseous eruption. For example, this past week Jones, a YouTuber, has been engaged in campaigning to persuade a ‘queer’ British entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest to withdraw from the competition because of Gaza. It is by no means clear how much the citizens of Gaza care for the ‘solidarity’ of a couple of gay blokes in the UK.

It is often the small constants in the culture that give the game away. Much of the news today is not about anything significant, but rather a sort of lower gossip. Every day, some new scandal bubbles along. Someone is found to have said something once, often a long time ago. The culprit is shamed and condemned. Take the case of Frank Hester, a donor who has given an estimated £10 million to the Conservative party. Few had heard of him until recently. Then it was reported that at a meeting at his company headquarters in 2019, Hester said that Diane Abbott MP made him ‘just want to hate all black women because she’s there, and I don’t hate all black women at all, but I think she should be shot’. Cack-handed, and unfunny, this comment was an easy one to condemn.

What do you do if you can’t solve crime? For the police in this country – as in many other western countries – the answer is obvious. You police non-crime. The fact that our police do not police crime is not my view. It is a fact. Recent figures have shown that they currently fail to solve 90 per cent of reported crimes. Put into real numbers, that is 6,000 criminals every day getting away with serious offences. In 2022 that included 30,000 sexual offences, 320,000 violent crimes, 1.3 million thefts and over 310,000 cases of criminal damage and arson. Or to put it still another way, only 6.5 per cent of crimes led to a charge or court summons, while 2.2 million cases were dropped because no suspect was found. Some areas of the country manage to beat even this record.

Of all the blights on our politics, there are few more tedious than the left-wing campaign group that masquerades behind some poorly constructed frontispiece. The Resolution Foundation – run by the gloriously named Torsten Bell – is a fine example. Torsten allows his publishers to call his Foundation ‘an enormously respected and influential economic research charity’. You may have heard of it, or you may be one of those who focuses your enormous respect elsewhere, but you will probably have seen the BBC and others regurgitate its press releases in lieu of doing actual journalism. The Resolution Foundation routinely discovers things like many people in Britain are poor or ill or suffer from mental health problems. The cause is always Tory cuts. The solution is always more money.

I’m not sure I recognise this country any more. Characteristics that I grew up with have been eroded to the point of disappearance. What were those characteristics? I’d say they included a certain doggedness – an indefatigability, a quiet strength and resilience. Where did they go? We have decided that the men of violence are winning and we must just keep our heads down A little over two years ago, when Sir David Amess was murdered, I remarked here on the appalling ‘tribute’ that his colleagues paid in the parliamentary session given over to eulogies to their recently butchered colleague. Of course the MPs all spoke warmly of the man, but you might have come away with the idea that he had died of natural causes.

A lot of people dream of having what is known as ‘screw you’ money. In my observation, this is not simply in order to be able to live in a castle or own Ferraris or Van Dycks, or whatever is your wont. It is in order to be able to say those fine, demotic words to whomever you like. It should be noted that most people dream of saying the words to someone who is perceived to be above them: someone to whom they might once have been subservient in some way. A boss, for instance. Yet one of the strangest things about the mega-rich is that they do not actually say ‘screw you’ when they ought to.

Some people may have noticed the happy new guidance released between Christmas and New Year by the National Police Chief’s Council. This guidance to police in England and Wales was that police officers ought to try to go to properties that have been burgled. Even better, they should try to do so within an hour of the burglary being reported. This seems to me to be an eminently sensible piece of advice. After all, if you get to the scene of a robbery within an hour, you might be able to track down the stolen goods, log evidence while the crime scene is fresh, or even – imagine – find a burglar. You might wonder why this guidance needed to be given in the first case. After all, there are more than 1,000 break-ins every day in this country.