Why do left-liberals always assume they know how to achieve stuff?

Here’s a standard, off-the-shelf, left-liberal argument we’ve all heard a thousand times:  “Why do we waste all our resources locking up criminals in what are essentially Crime Academies when what we should be doing is spending all that money rehabilitating them – i.e. turning them into decent, responsible, law-abiding citizens?”

This has always worried me, because, like many liberal positions, it sounds so reasonable:  it’s impossible to express such sentiments without feeling deliciously good about yourself. Damn, I even used a live TV debate to cover this very topic -  four guests (one right, one left, one centre, one former jailbird) ended up agreeing that rehabilitation was the answer (with a dash of revenge and a twist of justice thrown in to keep the plebs happy). 

Gosh, how liberal and self-congratulatory we all felt at the end of those 40 minutes of gloriously civilised discourse: all we needed as we stood quaffing chilled white wine in the Green Room were periwigs, lace cuffs, a bit of snuff and a tinkling harpsichord and we would have imagined ourselves eminent thinkers from the Age of Enlightenment (After you with crisps, Voltaire - Oi, Hume, leave some Chablis for the rest of us!). If only, I suspect we all felt, we’d been able to have Ian Brady on thepanel he’d have seen the error of his ways. “Gosh!” he would have exclaimed just before the presenter wrapped up proceedings, “your wisdom and compassion have helped me realise that kidnapping, torturing and murdering children is wrong. I am a changed man! Thank you so much!”

“Don’t mention it, Ian - as the scales have finally fallen from your eyes, and you’re no longer sick,  you’re free to go. Actually, we need a babysitter on Tuesday - would you oblige?”

The other problem with occupying the Dirty Harry end of the Law & Order spectrum is that, as a Christian (albeit a very bad one), I’ve always felt I should be on the side of forgiveness. I mean, it’s one of those aspects of the Christian religion that are simply unavoidable: “Turn the other cheek”?, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do”? (Bringing up “an eye for an eye” is simply cheating, because it’s from theOld Testament, and therefore doesn’t really count.)

Now, the “forgiveness” conundrum isn’t that difficult to solve: the Christian religion (at least, in my interpretation of it) rather assumes that people should repent of their sins before they’re forgiven. If the thief, tax-collector or prostitute is intent on carrying on with the same old same old, then they don’t get forgiven. If they’ve genuinely seen the error of their ways and have repented, that’s when the forgiveness factor kicks in. Otherwise – sod ‘em!

The problem with liberals running the criminal justice system is that (a) they want us to forgive people before they’ve repented, and (b) they expect us to believe anyone who expresses any form of remorse – no matter how evidently lukewarm or obviously fake that expression might be. Never trust a businessman - always trust a criminal. That’s the liberal way.

But that still leaves the “rehabilitation” issue – and here, as so often recently, I have the great American economic historian, Thomas Sowell, to thank for revealing a flaw the size of a planet in the liberal position. You see, liberals assume we know how to rehabilitate criminals, and that it’s just the sheer nastiness of narrow-minded, vengeful, uncompassionate right-wingers that’s preventing us from “curing” burglars, muggers, drug-dealers, rapists and child-molesters and allowing them to lead decent, useful lives.

But, of course, if we knew how to turn scum into responsible human beings – we’d already be doing it! The plain fact of the matter is, we don’t have a clue – and anyone who claims otherwise is (to use Roger Scruton’s handy phrase) an unscrupulous optimist. 

The most hilarious, and most maddening, example of the liberal mind-set is provided by all those nincompoops who tell us that the size of the UK’s prison population (the highest in Europe, they claim) is “obscene” or “shameful” – as if it’s the fault of the criminal justice system rather than the fault of the criminals! The correct response to the size of the prison population, of course, is “Good!” – because it means the police and the courts might not be quite as spectacularly wet and useless as they often give the appearance of being. The fact that we’re still the most criminal society in Europe suggests there should be even more prisoners. 

This assumption of omnicompetence by our liberal elite is about to result in a stake being driven through the heart of our Higher Education system. Clegg, Cable and Willetts tell us they’re determined to reward merit – not results. And that would no doubt be a fine thing to do – but they have failed to identify any reliable method of measuring merit (apart from those nasty old exam results) or any just or effective means of rewarding merit, in the unlikely event they ever discover a means of identifying it.  

Bizarrely, when it comes to figuring out what will and won’t work, the last place these hubristic fools are willing to look for help is the one place where knowledge undoubtedly resides: the past. Human beings have been conducting trial and error experiments for thousands of years – how dumb would you have to be to ignore that extraordinary repository of practical wisdom? 

Very illogical people, liberals – and very destructive.