This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

The stupidest thing to come out of the 1960s – and that is saying a lot – was the crazy decision by Enoch Powell (pictured right), then Minister of Health, to shut down and sell off dozens of mental hospitals.

Powell is still admired by some people. In fact, he was a very silly, vain man. The results of this unhinged, greedy and ill-informed action have been catastrophic.

Last week it was officially admitted (though experts have known it for years) that police are having to ignore more and more crimes to look after mentally ill people cast adrift by our broken mental health system. Scotland Yard, for example, gets a call seeking help with a mentally ill person every four minutes.

Zoe Billingham, HM Inspector of Constabulary, said: ‘There are many… instances where police officers, two at a time, are sitting with patients in A&E awaiting assessment or beds.’

Latest figures show 97,796 crimes and 431,060 incidents involved mental health concerns in the year to June 2017.

It is not just the police. Prisons have to cope with alarming numbers of severely mentally ill inmates, for whom they can do little or nothing. And so do we all. Each year there are frightening numbers of episodes in which mentally ill people, shoved out on to the streets and given drugs because there are no beds for them, kill or injure innocent people at random.

And the problem grows worse each year. This is partly because of the shameful surrender to the drugs lobby by police, courts and government, which has made the use of marijuana widespread.

It is now beyond all doubt that the use of marijuana, falsely promoted as a ‘soft’ drug, is closely linked with severe mental illness and criminal violence. If the perpetrators of every violent crime were routinely tested for its use, I think that connection would be even clearer.

Enoch Powell is, in my view rightly, condemned for his careerist, cheap and deliberately inflammatory 1968 speech about immigration, which was selfishly designed to restart his stalled political career and halted all serious discussion on the subject for years.

But this has obscured his equally wrong ‘Water Tower’ speech of 1961, in which he launched the idea that the mentally ill should be cared for in future ‘in the community’. This horrible phrase, which at first sight sounds so cosy and enlightened, was a big, thumping lie.

It meant that people with serious mental problems would in future be stuffed with powerful, poorly understood drugs (which they were expected to take regularly, despite often nasty side-effects), and left to fend for themselves in lonely bedsits, and ultimately in shop doorways, in the bad parts of town.

With typical Powellite grandeur, mixed with the mocking frivolity he was also fond of, he called for ‘nothing less than the elimination of by far the greater part of this country’s mental hospitals as they exist today’. He said it was a ‘colossal undertaking’, which would need to overcome the ‘sheer inertia’ of those who defended the old asylums.

‘There they stand,’ he intoned, ‘isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside – the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day.

‘It is our duty to err on the side of ruthlessness,’ he declared, as he dismissed suggestions that the condemned buildings might find another use.

As far too many people know today – especially the distressed families of young men and women derailed by marijuana use – Powell’s decree was all too successful. Hospital beds for the mentally ill are extraordinarily hard to find and keep.

We are good at destruction in modern Britain, just as the Victorians were good at building.

This country, almost incapable of completing any major building project well and on time, is extraordinarily diligent and quick when it comes to trashing the irreplaceable legacy of a wiser past – ripping up railway lines, destroying grammar schools, driving mental patients out into the wilderness while selling off their hospitals as bijou ‘luxury’ apartments.

No doubt there was plenty wrong with the old mental hospitals, back in 1961. Nobody is suggesting returning to their methods and regimes. But that could have been put right without shutting them down, a money-grubbing, and yes, ruthless, short-sighted folly.

The mistake, like so many others of the time, seems to be so big that nobody will admit it was wrong and reverse it. Yet, if we do not, the price will grow higher every year.

*******

The real baddie lurking in the Black Sea

Here come the wicked Russians again, making trouble in the Black Sea. Or are they? A quick look at a map will tell you Russia is entirely justified in caring a lot about what goes on in the Black Sea. In fact, the Black Sea is to Russia much as the Gulf of Mexico is to the USA, or the Irish Sea is to us. In fact, more so, since the Black Sea is a dead end, not a passage.

So how do you think we might react if the Irish government allowed Russia to build a spanking new naval base on Dublin Bay? And what do you think Donald Trump would do if Mexico allowed Moscow to build a naval HQ on its Gulf Coast? I think there would be trouble. Yet amid all the ‘Big Bad Russia, poor little Ukraine’ coverage of last week’s clashes at the Kerch Strait, did anyone so much as mention that the US Navy is now building an ultra-modern maritime operations centre at Ochakov, in Ukraine, close to Odessa on the Black Sea?

Since this crisis erupted in 2014, it has been about the West pushing into Russia’s comfort zone, and Russia pushing back. We were told in 2014 that the mob in the centre of Kiev were campaigning against corruption. Well, nearly five years since that mob violently overthrew a legitimate government, to the applause of ‘democrats’ everywhere, Ukraine is, if anything, more corrupt and less free than it was in 2014.

Poor Ukraine and its people are being used as a battering ram in a conflict from which they will get nothing. American and EU power is more and more strongly established there.

This is serious. Ukraine is a vital piece of real estate. President Carter’s brilliant strategic adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski explained it best in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard. He said: ‘Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an Eurasian empire.

‘However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.’

Don’t be fooled. It is us making this happen. The First World War was largely about Ukraine and so was the Second. The Third might be the same, if we let it happen. I think Britain should have no part in this foolish, greedy conflict.

*****

Why do so many in the media use the completely wrong word ‘rescue’ when our naval and coastguard ships pick up illegal immigrants, who have been deliberately sent out into dangerous seas in unfit craft by criminal people smugglers? We have not ‘rescued’ them. We have done exactly what the people smugglers hoped and planned we would do.

Nobody should gain entry to this country by this means. They should be taken back to the point where they embarked. In some cases they should be prosecuted first, for endangering the tiny children they cruelly and irresponsibly take with them on these lawless voyages.

*****

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