Friends told me an horrific story recently about a teenage boy who had been savagely attacked by a gang outside a pub in a South London suburb. The utterly unprovoked attack, in which the boy was seriously injured, has derailed his revision programme for crucial forthcoming exams. The attackers, who were unknown to their blameless victim and who were several years older than him, posted publicly accessible videos of the attack on the web.
The police have told the parents of the injured boy that they don’t have sufficient evidence to arrest the attackers (they filmed the crime, Plod, and you can access it – pretty much the definition of an “open and shut case” back here on Planet Earth). When pressed harder, Plod admitted they had a pretty good idea of who the attackers were (well, dur!) but that they were “in education” (And? So?)
The mind boggles and the stomach roils.
Have we entered an alternate reality where it’s okay to launch a serious assault on a boy as long as you’re attending school or a Sixth Form College (or wherever these specks of human ordure get together to learn about their “rights” and plan their criminal activities)? And where you can point the police at a piece of irrefutable evidence and they take the side of the criminal? (The victim’s father comes from a notoriously tough Northern city, and his mates have offered to come down and beat the crap out of the young savages whom Plod is so concerned to protect. Sounds a good plan to me, but the father is evidently a better citizen than I am - besides, he knows that Plod would leap into action soon enough if that were to happen, and he knows exactly who would end up in court.)
My preferred form of escapist literature these days are Agatha Christie novels (there were a stack of old Fontana editions on sale at the local Oxfam shop last week). I’m reading Hallowe’en Party at the moment, a whodunit featuring Hercule Poirot in search of the killer of a 12-year old girl who drowned when her head was pushed into a “bobbing for apples” bucket. The novel was published 41 years ago, and it’s instructive to read Ms. Christie’s repeated attacks on wet liberals – after all, it was during the 1960s that this smug mob started their assault on a criminal justice system most of us were very happy with (as if that matters to liberals).
Here’s a passage detailing the views of a lawyer whom Poirot interviews:
“Jeremy Fullerton was an upholder of the law. He believed in
the law, he was contemptuous of many of the magistrates of
today with their weak sentences, their acceptance of scholastic
needs. The students who stole books, the young married
women who denuded supermarkets, the girls who filched
money from their employers, the boys who wrecked telephone
boxes, none of them in real need, none of them desperate, none
of them had known anything but over-indulgence in bringing-up
and a fervent belief that anything they could not afford to buy
was theirs to take.”
No prizes for guessing which way our Agatha voted! But imagine what she’d find if she were able to survey this country today. The “young married women” she refers to are a thing of the past – single mothers, no doubt. The girls filching money from their employers? No need to work – they’re on the dole - and they or their boyfriends can more easily mug a passing tax-payer. As for boys wrecking telephone boxes, well, now they’d be out on the piss attacking innocent kids with deadly weapons, in the sure knowledge that even if they were to wander into nearest police station (if they could find one open) to confess, Plod would be more worried about any injuries they had sustained in the attack rather than the state of their victim: in fact, the cops would probably give the attackers a lift to the nearest hospital prior to visiting the victim’s home to charge him with defending himself too vigorously.
In case we hadn’t got the message, the author proceeds to stitch up a character called Rowena Drake, a stern, middle-aged woman whom Poirot suspects of having seen the murderer exit the room where it happened, but whose excessive compassion for youngsters is preventing her from identifying the culprit. She is described as one of those women “who were often magistrates, or who ran councils or charities, or interested themselves in what used to be called ‘good works’. Women who had an inordinate belief in extenuating circumstances, who were ready, strangely enough, to make excuses for the young criminal.”
Yes, Agatha, we know exactly the kind of woman you’re talking about – only, nowadays, the description also fits practically every man in public service.Even the police!
In case we still don’t know where she’s coming from, the writer – in the very next paragraph – puts her own views into the mind of her detective:
“For himself, Poirot did not agree. He was a man who thought
first always of justice. He was suspicious, had always been
suspicious, of mercy – too much mercy, that is to say. Too much
mercy, as he knew from former experience both in Belgium and
this country, often resulted in further crimes which were fatal to
innocent victims who need not have been victims if justice had
been put first and mercy second.”
It’s so clear, and so sensible, and so bloody obviously right to anyone but the morally insane, it makes one want to weep.
Mind you, if Poirot had expressed such sentiments to today’s equivalent of Chief Inspector Japp, he’d have been packed off to a re-education camp faster than you could say “Mon Dieu!”
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