As regular readers know, there are areas of government policy that I avoid commenting directly on, for very specific reasons.
As regular readers know I used to be extremely active in politics. I had a reputation, or label, as a Loony Lefty, potentially the kiss of death in Lambeth in the early 1990s. I am not sure how I acquired that label but it was underlined during the 1992 General Election Campaign. Young, enthusiastic, energetic, with time on my hands, I canvassed a great many residents of Streatham constituency. My focus was inevitably on the Labour supporters, or those 'don't knows' who were tending to Labour. I wasn't aiming for any doorstep conversions. Indeed, nowadays, it's known as 'Voter ID'. The message I was receiving from Labour voters and Labour-tending swingers in a target key marginal was crime. Or possibly the fear of crime. On the Estates lining Brixton Hill I later discovered the effect that petty crime and anti-social behaviour, not to mention drugs, were having on the lives of average people. By some bizarre backwards logic I was labelled a Loony Lefty for saying that crime was the number one issue amongst 'traditional Labour Voters'.
This morning I had a surveyor round from the local New Deal for Communities project. He highlighted security weaknesses in my home, and in a few weeks time I will have some new locks and London bars fitted. This is available to anybody in the NDC area. Funded from the Regeneration budget.
Talk to just about anybody round here and they will say that they are sick and tired of trying to lead their ordinary lives, only to be molested and harrassed by the scum. Just coming home at 10pm, I was approached by a scumbag demanding a cigarette. I said no, and hastened my walking. "Suck your blood clot' white whore!" he said. (And unless you know Jamaican, you will have no idea just how rude that is)
Then you get the trendy liberals, living in their gated communities or their smug soulless suburbs who would say that any attempt by the police to make that arsehole's life unpleasant is an infringement of his Civil Liberties. We should be more understanding of people like him. We should be more tolerant of those who mug a man I know, just because he's old and walks with a stick. He's so fed up and frightened of it that after fifty years here, he is returning to the Caribbean..
According to the trendy liberals who have never seen the world from outside their 4x4 People Carriers, any attempts by the police to clamp down on the kids who steal, rob and burgal from the small businesses is a failure to understand their 'challenges'. Or a failure to empathise with Youth Culture. Or something equally vacuous and woolly.
Call me a Loony Lefty, but I'm all for punishing the pimps and kerb-crawlers and the over-18 prostitutes, (and I'm also in a favour of a ban on fireworks outside of licensed displays). I am sick of the mindless thugs who think they have a right to disrupt other people's lives.
But, sadly, there are no proposals to reintroduce hanging, drawing and quartering for those who allow their mobile phones to ring during the most reflective phrase of Holst's mystic "The Hymn of Jesus". I shall be lobbying my MP on that one...
