This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The crevasse between people and politicians is matched by a bottomless chasm between official figures and the truth about life in modern Britain.

Like all ruling castes in the grip of dogma, the Government responds to trouble by pretending it doesn’t exist.

There’s an economic boom that leaves most people feeling poorer, and lots of new jobs that turn out to be empty self-employment.

There’s a massacre of unborn babies that conceals the utter collapse of sexual restraint and responsibility. Even the dwindling marriage figures are artificially boosted by people faking wedlock to get citizenship.

There are schools whose victims walk away dazed after 11 years in full-time ‘education’, barely able to read or count the sheaves of alleged qualifications with which they have been issued.

Some of them are then persuaded to go deep into debt to attend grandiose ‘universities’ which will at least keep them out of the jobless figures for another three years.

And then there’s crime. The simplest way to reduce this is to decide that lots of crimes aren’t crimes any more, so the police stop trying to prevent them and they become normal.Then, you fiddle the figures – until the fiddles are exposed.

Now, a new form of deception is being employed. It is called ‘Out Of Court Disposal’, and it’s just a way of magically making crime disappear by not doing anything to the people who commit it.

In some police areas almost half of crimes are dealt with in this way. The lowest figure is 26 per cent – a minimum of a quarter of all reported crime, swept under the carpet and unpunished, throughout the country.

Generally that means the transgressor gets a ‘caution’ or some other vacuous non-penalty. More than 7,000 of the offences written off in this offhand way last year involved violence. There were 82 robberies and 20 rapes.

Even the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, a body so decayed in mind and force that it recently listened with rapt attention to the ‘evidence’ on drugs of the supposed comedian Russell Brand, recognises that 30 per cent of these outcomes are ‘inappropriate’, that is to say, utterly inadequate for the crime involved.

The truth is that, if the police and courts tried to enforce the laws of England as they stand, we would need about a million police officers, hundreds of new courts and a Gulag-sized penal colony in which to house the resulting prisoners.

The whole thing has been out of control for years. The poorer you are, the more you will know this. The closer you are to the political elite, the less you will know it. It is only when the drug-addled robbers begin hammering on the front doors of the elite that they will stop pretending this is a ‘moral panic’ and recognise that there is something wrong.

Well done in China William - now go and shake hands with Vladimir Putin

Prince William, quite rightly, has been consorting with the bloodstained tyrants of China, still up to their unapologetic armpits in gore from the Tiananmen Square massacre, and still cramming critics into an enormous unjust empire of prison camps, the Laogai.

We have to deal with these people because that is what the world is like.

Similarly, we maintain our alliance in Nato with Turkey. That wildly corrupt country’s increasingly erratic President Erdogan persecutes and imprisons his opponents, and has just moved into a megalomaniac 1,000-room palace in Ankara, costing £400 million and 30 times the size of the White House.

It contains a special laboratory in which five experts analyse President Erdogan’s meals for suspicious substances, a 21st-Century version of the food-tasters of ancient times.

In light of this, how can we get so hoity-toity about President Putin of Russia? His crimes are undoubted, but our faked-up moral outrage is as absurd as Mr Erdogan’s palace.

Alliances, royal visits and trade missions for some despots, sanctions and sermons for Mr Putin. It makes no sense.

You’re being fooled, as you were over Iraq 12 years ago. Please don’t be.

Yet another attack on your pension pot

Gordon Brown was rightly loathed for his state-sponsored raid on the pension savings of Britain’s thrifty classes.

Well, who would you like to blame for the latest version of the same thing – six years of state-imposed flat interest rates that have cost the country’s savers £130 billion?

This vast theft of cash from the careful and responsible will mean a pinched old age for many of its victims, who foolishly thought they lived under a government that supported and protected people like them.

Don't fall for Cameron's school con

Gove and Cameron have both turned their backs on having academically selective schools in every town

How strangely our attitudes change.

When Anthony Blair got his sons into an exceptional, elite state school, much of the world howled in derision.

He pretended to support comprehensive schooling, which he knew in his heart was a failure. And then he pretended he wasn’t pretending.

Now, by some strange alchemy, Tory politicians are doing the same thing, and are being praised for it.

David Cameron and Michael Gove have both turned their backs on the one reform of state schools that would put good education back in the reach of the poor – academically selective grammar schools in every town.

Yet both have sent children to a school that selects instead through the public embrace of faith.

Yet is it Christian for rich professionals to fight with sharp elbows for sought-after places in rare good state schools?

Grey Coat Hospital is a comprehensive only in the sense that Number 10 Downing Street is an inner-city terraced house.

Is it so wonderfully egalitarian, to send your child to a school whose uniform must be bought from a Chelsea department store, and where fewer than one in six pupils qualifies for free school meals

I found out a few months ago that Nick Clegg is astonishingly ignorant about the drug laws in this country.

He really believes that the police cruelly persecute drug users (if only they did).

Ignorance of this kind is wilful. The truth is readily available. He remains ignorant because he does not want to know. Why?

As evidence piles up that cannabis is a dangerous drug, those like Mr Clegg and the businessman Richard Branson should be incessantly asked what their interest is in backing the risky cause of decriminalisation. It is certainly not in the interest of the young people of this country.

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