Policing, crime and personal responsibility, Peter Hitchens

discuss. But the worst of all its faults, and the
reason for which this chimera was created by
politicians in the first place, is the laughable illusion
it gives, that there might be some sort of public
control over the manner in which we are policed.
That, as I explained and argued in my widelyignored
book nearly ten years ago, is all decided
elsewhere. Most fundamentally, it is part of the
convulsive cultural and moral revolution that has
transformed every aspect of this country in the past
half-century. It is part of the misunderstood bargain
of the permissive society, in which we were
encouraged to do what we wanted to do, without
being warned that this would end in a new tyranny
of surveillance, interference and censorship.
How could the old police forces survive as they
were, when law and custom no longer tolerated the
idea that some actions were absolutely wrong? You
cannot punish a person unless you think he is
responsible for his actions. If you cannot punish
him, then the entire apparatus of British criminal
justice, from the police officer’s truncheon to the
execution shed, is instantly obsolete. But rather
than sweep it all away in a night, we kept its
outward forms in place – the helmeted ‘Bobby’
(though he had no beat), the forbidding high walls
around the prisons, the red-robed judges on their
high benches, the juries filing in to deliver their
verdicts. This made it harder to notice that the
constable had become a uniformed social worker,
scared of raising his hand to a malefactor, neutrally
negotiating between ‘victim’ and ‘offender’ and
making no moral judgements; that the prisons were
warehouses where authority had no aim beyond
keeping the doors locked, and the inmates
increasingly took charge; that the judges were
marionettes of the liberal state, constrained by
‘guidelines’, unable to pass sentence until they had
listened to excuse-crammed ‘social inquiry reports’
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