Harriet Sergeant

Mash’s older brother was the same age as Anthony Williams when he slaughtered a stranger in a brutal and random attack. He was in the grip of a psychotic disorder caused by cannabis. We do not yet know what drove Williams, a 32-year-old African Caribbean man, to allegedly try to murder ten people during a 14-minute knife rampage on a train. But Mash is in no doubt cannabis often plays a part in attacks like these. ‘In my community smoking weed is normalised,’ he says. ‘We laugh and joke about hearing voices or having a “para” [a paranoid fit].’ He counts on his fingers: ‘Two brothers, two cousins and multiple friends’ who have experienced hallucinations and delusions. He shakes his head sadly. ‘Weed is killing my people.

‘Not another step!’ The large women in an old T shirt stretched across her bulging shoulders glared at my father. We were standing under a canopy of trees on Hampstead Heath in north London. Sunshine dappled through the leaves onto my face. I was 12 years old and clutched a wet and muddy costume. Through the greenery was a glimpse of lake and naked limbs.  My childhood oasis of tranquillity is under threat My father had come to pick me up from swimming in the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond. He had started up the path only to be confronted by the lifeguard. ‘Women only.’ she growled and pointed to the board declaring ‘Men cannot go beyond this point,’ Then she took in our long-haired dachshund. ‘And he’s male too,’ she said with disgust.

A 24th man has just been charged with the rape of a 13-year-old girl more than ten years ago in Bradford. Twenty-four men. One 13-year-old girl. It takes some absorbing. The case will come to trial in due course, but it prompts reflection on other cases of historic sexual abuse against girls where the victims have been white, working-class, usually in care and very young. One girl admitted her first memory was of sexual abuse aged five. The perpetrators have often been men from the British Pakistani community living under a Labour-run council. It all happened a decade or more ago. Nothing to see here, we are told. Just some unsavoury historic sex crime. Let’s all move along. Harvey Weinstein’s abuse of women also went back years.

A young man in a grey tracksuit and silver mask looks straight at the camera. He is flanked by others in black anoraks, heads jabbed sideways, moving to the beat. The young man raises his hand and curls it into the shape of a gun. ‘Bang, bang, I made the street messy. Bang, bang and I don’t feel sorry for his mum.’ Last year 80 people were stabbed to death in London, a quarter in their teens. Fifty have died already this year. The Met Commissioner, Cressida Dick, deployed 300 extra police at the weekend after six separate knife attacks last week, five of the victims being teenagers, one a 13-year-old boy. Welcome to the world of UK drill rap — the music behind the explosion of teenage deaths on London’s streets.

What a scandal for our times. Oxfam, that upholder of modern-day virtue, unassailable in its righteousness, buried for seven years that its aid workers exploited young girls. The men abused their power to have sex with desperate victims of the Haiti earthquake — the very people they were supposed to protect. Michelle Russell of the Charity Commission is clear about the deception. ‘We were categorically told by Oxfam; there were no allegations of abuse of beneficiaries. We are very angry and cross about this.’ Nor was this a one-off. Helen Evans, the charity’s global head of safeguarding, begged senior staff, ministers and the Department for International Development to act.

I was interviewing ten foster parents in west London for a report on children in care. Foster parents are in great demand, so I was startled to discover that only one of the sets of parents was looking after the sort of vulnerable children you imagine to be in the care system. The others were looking after unaccompanied asylum-seeker children. They made an alarming claim: three of these seemed to be adults passing themselves off as boys. ‘The first thing they ask for is a razor,’ said one foster parent, ‘They’ve got these big beards.’ A woman admitted she found it embarrassing having a grown man posing as a 17-year-old. But the authorities appeared uninterested. ‘Our concerns are just fobbed off,’ said another.

How do we judge a charity? Very badly, it turns out. Until The Spectator revealed the full horror of Kids Company in July, not even the press had asked hard questions of the charity or its founder, Camila Batmanghelidjh. The subsequent political scrutiny showed our democratic process at its best. When Paul Flynn, a veteran Labour MP, told Batmanghelidjh at an electrifying House of Commons hearing to stop talking ‘psychobabble’ he stripped away in an instant the glitz that had allowed one small charity whose sole qualification was the charisma of its leader to fritter away £48 million of taxpayers’ money. ‘We do not live on the moon,’ Flynn told her. ‘We represent areas that have great problems. We know about them.

This election will see me up all night until the last results are in. It will have me knocking on doors, handing out leaflets and driving old ladies to the polling stations. All this is a first for me — and for the many others I find myself doing it with. Why does this election galvanise like no other? One issue has made it up close and personal — Labour’s mansion tax. As one neighbour canvassing with me yesterday remarked, ‘It is landing us in the shit.’ We are all of a certain age. We range from the comfortably off to the quite poor. We have lived in our houses a long time and now we find our homes under threat. A new Labour government will hold a budget in June and send out mansion tax demands shortly after.