This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

This country is now in the grip of a permanent inquisition into the past. It can never really end, or find out the truth, because there is no objective test of it. Many of those being investigated are dead. The only effect of it is to discredit and undermine what is left of our institutions, from Parliament to the police.

Do people have any idea how much our civilisation depends on trust, or of what will happen when it is gone?

But it is even worse than that. As we boast of our supposed respect for Magna Carta and national liberty, we are trampling on them.

I suspect that many in politics and the media, like me, are worried by this. But they fear to say anything because they can feel the hot breath of the mob on their necks.

The moment you say that Geoffrey Dickens was a buffoon with a poor grasp of facts, that his ‘dossier’ on child abuse might not have amounted to very much, and was lost for that reason, some basement-dweller hunched in the sickly glow of his computer screen will start muttering ‘What’s he got to hide?’ and ‘Perhaps he was one of them’.

From such accusations there is no escape, especially in an age when bemedalled field marshals in their 90s can have their homes searched by officious gendarmes. The word ‘police’ can really no longer be applied to this bureaucratic, continental-style militia of paramilitary social workers, jangling with weapons, loaded with powers they aren’t fit to wield, and almost wholly bereft of common sense.

The quiet collapse of English liberty, and the shortage of people willing to defend it against the braying demands of ‘security’, has left us all powerless against the state. If Lord Bramall is not safe from this sort of treatment, nobody is.

I must stress here that I have no opinions at all on the guilt or innocence of anyone accused of such crimes. I am morally and legally bound to presume that they are innocent, unless and until their guilt is proved.

That presumption, far more than a near-useless vote or a ‘Human Rights’ Act, is the single most important defence we have against tyranny. Once it has gone, in practice, the state may at any time invade your home, seize your possessions, lock you up for ever and melt the key, simply because it does not like you. And it can invent reasons to do so, which a gullible media will unquestioningly accept.

Any judge of spirit, faced with the behaviour of police and prosecutors in modern Britain, really ought to throw out all such cases because it is impossible for those accused to have a fair trial.

Everyone will have seen on TV the processions of grim-jawed gendarmes in white forensic suits carting away computers, houses surrounded with cars and vans with flashing lights, the hovering helicopters, the self-righteous officers enjoying their fame as they trawl for ‘victims’ and promising such persons – as they have no right to do – that ‘You will be believed. We will support you’.

It is no part of a policeman’s job to believe either the accused or the accusers. Imagine how you would feel if the police told alleged burglars awaiting trial, and denying their guilt, that ‘you will be believed’. It is their job, and that of the courts, to assemble a case and seek to prove it before an impartial jury.

Over many years, those protections have been salami-sliced away. The innocent have never been at more risk of ruin. But at the same time, the police and the courts have almost completely failed to deter or control actual crime, much of which now goes unrecorded, unprosecuted and unpunished.

Our system is so upside-down and back-to-front that you can now be cautioned for rape, or be let out on bail after being convicted of crimes as grievous as manslaughter; yet in the late evening of your years, full of honour, having risked your life for your country and having done great service to the state, you can be publicly smeared by some jack-in-office.

The place where our demolished liberty once stood has been cleared of all traces, and rolled flat. In such conditions, we merely await the construction of the new totalitarian state in which our children will have to live.

Ready for action - on HMS Kwik Fit

Now that the Royal Navy’s bluejackets have been re-outfitted to look like garage mechanics, left, has the time come to rethink the whole thing? ‘Royal Navy’ sounds a bit archaic in the modern world. Perhaps we could rename it ‘Navignia’. And ships? They’re pretty old-fashioned too, aren’t they? Do we really need ships? If we can have aircraft carriers with no planes, surely a navy without ships makes sense as well. Kwik Fit could run it.

If the Budget was so good, why am I crying?

Reading the conventional coverage of the Budget on my London train on Thursday, I noticed I was crying actual tears of boredom, which poured involuntarily from my eyes and splashed audibly on to the newspaper.

How could people praise or take seriously this vote-grubbing twaddle of tax cuts, which will be snatched away before they fully take effect, and promises of spending cuts that cannot possibly be fulfilled? How can they do anything but laugh at the cheap bribes on offer, or the blatant political manoeuvres?

I’ll tell you what the Budget really means for most of us – a continued rush towards a low-wage, low-productivity economy of insecure, part-time jobs made tolerable only by cheap credit. And a crucial part of that will be the continued mass immigration that the Government pretends to oppose but, in fact, hopes for, as it keeps pay low.

And this, of course, will continue to worsen our appalling housing, health and transport crises. Our country was not designed for the population it now has, and these problems cannot be solved. We will simply have to accept that everything will, from now on, be worse for all except the super-rich. The biggest casualties of this are those, such as the old skilled working class and the professional middle class, who used to hope for a good life and modest comforts in return for long training and study.

Soon, there’ll be nothing much between the bloated banker’s bonus at one end and the zero-hours contract at the other. We’re becoming the world’s first third-world economy in a cold climate.

After all that fuss about schoolgirls rushing off to be jihadi brides, we are now to have exit checks, like any bog-standard despotism. And do you know what? It will be innocent grannies on their way to Spain who will be held up. Jihadi brides will still somehow slip through. Wait and see.

The redesigned pound coin is obviously small change. How about a New Pound, worth ten of the old ones, and divided for convenience into 20 shillings and 240 pennies?

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