This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Britain today is like a ship, long ago holed deep beneath the waterline, which now begins to list alarmingly, as the sea starts to slop on to the deck.

In many parts of this country, the balance of fear is shifting. Criminals are not afraid of the police and the courts. Normal people are afraid of wrongdoers.

How long before this happens where you live?

And then, what use will your easily broken windows and easily kicked-in front door be, or your burglar alarms to which nobody will respond?

In London, where the horror of knife crime is now plainly out of control, police are failing hopelessly in their efforts to catch and prosecute the culprits, even where there are living witnesses who could identify the men who tried to kill them. But they dare not do so.

As Sarah Jones, a Labour MP who heads Parliament’s all-party group on knife crime, says: ‘What’s particularly shocking is the growing number of offences where the police identified a suspect but they weren’t prosecuted because the victim did not support further action. This suggests a serious problem with victims feeling too afraid or mistrustful to testify.’

I would guess that this goes a lot further.

Many of us who have had dealings of one kind or another with the modern police suspect that, if we go to them, they will probably manage to mess up the case, ably assisted by the CPS, while also giving our full personal details to the suspect.

Even if they get it right, the criminal will be ‘spared jail’ by a feeble judge. Simpler to let it go.

And so the figures of recorded crime have a very distant relationship to actual crime. If there’s no insurance to be claimed, why bother?

Most of us reluctantly recognise that things which were once restrained by the law – general low-level nastiness, vandalism, public drunkenness, illegal drugs – have now been decriminalised by stealth.

The problem is that almost nobody in politics, or the media, or the police, is remotely interested in why this has happened or how to put it right.

The police themselves are like BT, or one of the other monster monopolies, which view the public as a nuisance.

The Police Federation is just another public service union, whose solution to everything is more taxpayers’ cash. But a lingering sentimentality stops us seeing this.

We used to like and respect the police, and we wish we still did, so we are more easily fooled by them than by any other lobby.

Take the current moaning about how their almost complete failure to enforce the laws against burglary, drunk driving, and drug possession is caused by a shortage of officers.

This is not true.

Police strengths are down a bit from their 2009 peak (was that an especially crime-free year?) but are significantly higher than they were in the days when all forces managed to patrol the streets.

The problem is that the police are doing the wrong thing.

Think about it. Please. What use is a police officer after a crime has been committed, unless he or she can do first aid?

The officer cannot unburgle or unmug or unstab you. He cannot unsmash your windows.

If your life has been ruined by a drunken driver, or a motorist texting while driving, he cannot unruin that life. He cannot restore the irrevocably lost mental health of the teen who has smoked marijuana.

The best he can do is, with a lot of luck, arrange for the criminals involved to do a bit of community service, or be sentenced to a fine they won’t actually pay.

His job was to prevent these things from happening, by being a visible, patrolling presence in every town and village.

But he has stopped doing this.

The beats he used to walk long ago vanished. The police stations, hundreds of them, were sold off. So were the police houses. The police road patrols became a rarity.

The modern police deride these simple, effective methods. They claim they cannot halt cybercrime or terrorism or domestic abuse.

Well, this would be a good argument if the modern police methods of hiding in remote office blocks or driving about chatting to each other, worked any better.

But they do not.

I am astonished that the debate on this subject continues at this ignorant, partisan level.

It is as if the captain and his first lieutenant were arguing, on the bridge, about the menu for dinner, while the ship went down by the bows.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Corbynites may love the new film Peterloo, about the indefensible massacre, in 1819, of unarmed Englishmen and women by drunken, stupid soldiers under the command of dolts.

If Left-wing speeches are your thing, there is no shortage of them in this drama, which seemed to me to last slightly longer than the Hundred Years War.

The final scenes of slaughter are, by contrast, powerfully moving.

But the whole point of Peterloo is that it was the middle classes who publicised it, using that great invention, the newspaper, and denounced it, and sought the reforms which ensured that the voice of the people would be heard and heeded in the land, without bloodshed.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I feel great sympathy for the old soldiers now being dragged from their retirement by officious detectives to face investigations about long ago events in Northern Ireland.

Soldiers are owed the total loyalty of the Crown, which sent them into danger and demanded their disciplined obedience.

But I feel no sympathy with most of the soppy politicians now raising their cases and bleating about how unfair it all is.

For these politicians continue to pretend that our abject crawling to IRA gangsters (and ‘Loyalist’ gangsters, too) in Belfast in 1998 was a benevolent, happy peace deal.

It was not. It was a capitulation.

Which is why it is we who withdrew our forces, and we who hauled down our flags and ceded our territory (it will pass to Dublin’s control quite soon).

Our lawless enemies kept their guns and bombs, rose to power, and dined at Windsor Castle.

And it is our soldiers who face police inquiries, while hundreds of grisly terrorists were released from well-earned prison sentences, and hundreds more promised that their bloody crimes are forgotten.

How strange it is that a country which admires Churchill’s defiance of a wicked and mighty enemy applauds our surrender to a small, criminal gang.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We have sold out to the Saudis

Unlike those who rushed to conclusions about alleged gas attacks in Syria, without bothering with evidence, I have waited till it is beyond reasonable doubt that the Saudi regime murdered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, on their own premises, using their own state- paid hoodlums.

And now I can say this to our Government, and to the warlike media voices and MPs of all parties who have postured over the undoubted wickedness of Russia and Syria: You are hypocrites. Your moralising is all phoney.

Because, as we will see in the years to come, the many barbarities of the Saudi regime will not lead to sanctions, or bombing raids or missiles or mass expulsions of diplomats.

Nor will the increasingly obvious aggression and despotism of our other great friends, the Chinese.

These killers and tyrants will still be welcome at Buckingham Palace. And this does not really bother you.

So it is obvious that we, as a country, can be bought, and actually have no morals.

And so either your outrage against Syria and Russia is a pose to make you look better than you are; or you do not know what you are talking about; or you have other, less creditable reasons for seeking conflict with these countries.

That is now established.

*******

'Short Breaks in Mordor' A collection of my reports from places you need to know about but probably don't want to visit - E.g. Pyongyang, Baghdad, Minsk, Teheran, Cairo, Katanga, Mandalay, Deoband, Peshawar, Baku and Tashkent - is now available as a paperback here

https://amzn.to/2R2LaYn

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down