A COMMON SENSE COPPER...AT LAST. Well done Sir Paul for putting police back on the beat

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Yes, you can turn the clock back. The stupid mistakes of the Sixties can be shown up for what they are, and people in positions of power can begin to reverse them.

I am greatly heartened by the words of Sir Paul Stephenson, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, who said last week that police officers should return to patrolling the streets – alone.

Sir Paul has also said that ‘we have got to maximise the feeling that uniform is governing the streets so people feel safe to walk them’.

I am not sure how many years I have been arguing, in this column and elsewhere, that the whole point of the police force is to prevent crime and misbehaviour by being visible and accessible.

What I am sure of is that, when I first started, the official response – from government, from police chiefs, from ‘experts’ – was always the same. Foot patrols were an antiquated Victorian idea. They were futile, as they hardly ever interrupted a crime in progress. And there weren’t enough officers to do the job.

Unconvinced, I and (after a while) some others argued back. The manpower excuse was a plain lie. We have never had so many police officers at any time in our history.

The point of foot patrols wasn’t to catch criminals after they’d broken the law, but to stop people doing bad things in the first place. They also put the police back in touch with the public, curing them of their current delusion that they are an elite corps and the public are irritating ‘civilians’.
 

Their presence gives confidence to the law-supporting, who are then more willing to stand up against loutishness.

And Sir Paul grasps that it is essential that his officers normally patrol alone. Good for him. I’ve seen pairs of policemen so absorbed in their own chat that they’ve failed to notice offences being committed six feet away. Anyway, it’s much harder to approach them when there are two of them. You feel as if you’re interrupting something.

Now, if this argument can be won, can we also hope for some other triumphs of fact and reason over thoughtless dogma?

Just as car-borne reactive policing has been a proven failure, so has comprehensive education and everything that came with it, so has the abolition of truly local government, so has ‘sex education’, so has the abolition of the married family, so has unlimited immigration, so has membership of the European Union.

It is only inertia, and the complete dominance of all three major political parties by Left-wing liberals, that prevents these idiocies from being reversed.

Just think how much we could do to restore ourselves, if the Tories were sacked as the official opposition – for incompetence, laziness and collusion with the enemy (as they should be) – and a political party emerged in their place which pledged no more, and no less, than the undoing of the Sixties and a fresh start. And it is within our power to sack them.

[WHY NOT-A REAL CONSERVATIVE PARTY FOR A CHANGE?]

At the next General Election, we are being offered an insulting non-choice of more or less identical parties, led by nobodies and committed to carrying on as we are.
 

If you vote Tory you will be voting for a change of personnel without any alteration of policy. Worse, if David Cameron wins, he will claim that he has triumphed precisely because of his greenery, his hoodie-hugging political correctness and his support for Labour schools policy. Proper conservatives in the Tory Party will be powerless and ignored for years to come.

Why put up with it? The Tories are already so sick and rotten and empty of real members that they could not survive ten minutes without state subsidies and the donations of dodgy millionaires.
 

The only decent heavyweight among them, David Davis, is in backbench exile. They are held together by nothing except greed for office and would fall apart if they failed for a fourth time.
 

Proper conservatives can achieve this by the simple expedient of not voting for Cameron’s party, anywhere or ever. The right not to vote is as precious as the right to vote, and it’s time we exercised it.

What an opportunity we have. Once again, we could have a party that actually spoke for us instead of for a dogmatic, anti-British elite. It can be done. Change is possible. Common sense can triumph. Sir Paul has proved it. But we – like Sir Paul – have to be bold if we want to get our way.

Imagine if our children could imagine again

I am lucky enough to remember when there were plenty of programmes for children on the radio.

I was startled a few years ago when someone said, ‘It’s a quarter to two,’ and the words instantly summoned up cosy memories of Listen With Mother. Incredible as it now seems, I was introduced to John Bunyan’s immortal Pilgrim’s Progress by ‘Uncle Mac’. The pictures were far better than anything on TV, but they happened in my imagination.

The imagination is the place where we work out how our actions will affect others. Without it, we’re lost, or at the mercy of the ideas of strangers. It’s also a private place where we can develop our own opinions and personality.

Radio stimulates imagination. TV shrivels it, and substitutes its own conformist picture of the world, making us all the same.

I understand why the BBC has abandoned proper children’s broadcasting, but I think it is a national tragedy – and an avoidable error – that so many parents expose their children to TV before their imaginations are formed.

* Conventional wisdom says the Pope is stupid and wrong to say fidelity and abstinence are better than condoms at guarding Africans from AIDS.

Conventional wisdom, as usual, is talking out of its backside. What the Pope says matters only if anyone listens to him. If nobody does, his opposition to condoms won’t stop anyone using them and will make no difference. If lots of people listen to him, his support for marital fidelity will persuade many people to follow this path, and so save untold lives.

The experience of such countries as Uganda suggests very strongly that he is right when he says this, and that fidelity is a far better protection than a rubber sheath. The only real hope is a change in sexual habits.

I am not a Roman Catholic, but I am weary of the concerted smearing and misrepresentation which the Pontiff constantly faces.

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 Why does it take a newcomer to this country to grasp that we are lost if we don’t all speak the same language?

I think it is because shopkeeper Deva Kumarasiri, who insists that his customers speak English, understands that it is both good manners and practical sense to do so.
 

Yet dozens of local councils actively encourage division and separation by spending fortunes on multilingual posters and leaflets.
 

Perhaps Mr Kumarasiri is influenced by the sad state of his country of origin, Sri Lanka, where a language barrier helps keep apart two increasingly separate and hostile peoples.   

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[Good advice from Peter Hitchins on the forthcoming elections in 2009]

'Proper conservatives can achieve this by the simple expedient of not voting for Cameron’s party, anywhere or ever. The right not to vote is as precious as the right to vote, and it’s time we exercised it.'

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[We have been calling on the electorate to ignore the Gang of Three in Westminster who have sold your FREEDOM and COUNTRY to a Foreign Power and while you still have a Parliament ,which as you know will no longer exist should the Lisbon Treaty be ratified by ALL member states]

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[TREATY OF TREASON]

[Font Altered-Bolding & Underlining Used-Comments in Square Brackets.]

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MARCH-2009