Bernard Ingham: Catalogue of crime is a resounding guilty verdict against the liberal elite

Is it any wonder when you realise what people can get away with? Indeed, we are so inured to the laxities of our criminal justice system that it was not until this weekend that I realised what a miserable, degrading start we had made to the New Year.

In five days I recorded what must by any standards have been a record week for the utter nonsense that our spinelessly liberal society produces as news. If this does not shock you, then you ought to see an old-fashioned doctor:

• The use of community sentences means that half of all convicted sex offenders, violent criminals and burglars in England and Wales avoid prison. Only 53 per cent of those who abused children under 13 went to jail in 2012.

n The Centre for Crime Prevention claims that 75 per cent of repeat offenders in 2012 avoided custodial sentences; eight out of 28 with more than 300 convictions walked free.

• A Liverpool driver who racked up 45 penalty points in nine months is still driving.

• Channel 4 remarkably caused a fuss, bearing in mind what else goes on, by showing a thief demonstrating how to shoplift.

• A Jamaican crack dealer jailed and banned from Islington successfully used human rights law to block his deportation.

• A judge suspended an 18-month sentence on a man who has 22 children by 11 women after he was caught carrying £350-worth of cannabis, so he could look after his youngest son.

• Police in the South East say criminal gangs are using children to carry drugs out of London to neighbouring towns.

• The number of children contracting sexually transmitted diseases has more than doubled in 10 years – 5,386 under the age of consent were diagnosed last year, which adds up to at least 5,386 offences against the law.

I could go on and on, to coin a phrase. Like the one third of young offenders who go back to crime within a year of being punished.

Like the thousands of children rushed to hospital every year after injuring themselves while drunk.

And like the 200 acts of violence committed against priests of various denominations over the past five years.

Doesn’t it make you proud to be British?

The only slightly comforting intelligence was that the Prison Officers’ Association subjected their own prison service to withering ridicule for spending £70,000 on trying to find out
why prisoners use mobile phones.

If all this does not demonstrate David Cameron’s contention that our society is broken, I don’t know what does. Our pathetic liberal establishment has over the years done a superbly effective demolition job on a respectable and responsible nation. It continues to ensure the rubble is perpetuated.

They have destroyed any sense of shame by their insistence that there is always a sociological explanation for an individual’s criminality. We are all victims – including gangsters with guns shot by the police – never human beings with a will of our own who should know right from wrong and live within the law.

They now find ways of coping with the burgeoning criminal class they have created by producing assorted ways of keeping them out of prison. The only amazing thing, given the effort to let the basest rogues off, is that our prisons are full to bursting point.

Or is it amazing, given the tales of sex and drugs available on tap in these supposedly corrective establishments?

And then these paragons of liberal virtue ensure we harbour foreign dregs – as if we didn’t have enough of our own – by pleading all too often successfully before wet, nay, waterlogged, judges some human right their deportation would offend.

The idea that criminals forfeit certain rights for their assault on society is apparently held in contempt when the ECHR insists they be given the vote. Society’s mission is to be kind to killers in the vain hope they won’t kill again.

History has amply demonstrated that our – and Europe’s – liberal elite never learn anything from experience. They are as proof against reason as their climate change cousins.

All this adds up to one inevitable conclusion: our criminal justice system has gone to pot. Poor old Wilberforce – not to mention John Howard, Elizabeth Fry and Sir Robert Peel. These reformers surely did not intend this mess.