This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

Theresa May should get herself a stick-on pencil moustache, some very dark glasses and a white military uniform with lots of medals and a set of fancy epaulettes. If she’s going to behave like a Third World leader, she ought to look like one.

Troops on the streets, indeed. What a futile non-answer to the problem of terrorist murder this is, and what a complete departure from centuries of British liberty.

In all my travels, often to less fortunate parts of the world, troops posted on the streets have been an invariable sign of a society on the skids, and a government that prefers force to thought.

How humiliating and embarrassing that such scenes should come to our great free capital.

Actually, I suspect it’s something our dim state machine has wanted to do for ages, and now thinks it has the excuse for. Mrs May’s Cabinet, ignorant and lacking the robust old British loathing of such things, gave in and let it happen.

What is far worse is that the idea was not then mocked and jeered off the stage by the rest of us, as the ridiculous Blair creature’s futile dispatch of tanks and troops to Heathrow was back in 2003.

Year by year our hopeless egalitarian schools and our joke universities turn out more and more citizens who don’t know that you have to defend liberty all the time if you want to keep it.

Can anyone explain to me how militarising the country and dotting it with armed men in camouflage battle dress (designed to help them hide in forests) is a rational response to the atrocity in Manchester? Of course not. The two have no connection.

On the contrary, the sight of a once-great country over-reacting in this pointless way must cause our enemies to snigger in their bushy Islamic beards.

‘Look at the infidels scurrying about at our bidding,’ they must think. Why give them this satisfaction? It seems to me, as it has for some time, that old-fashioned beat coppers with a close, intimate knowledge of the areas they patrol would be much more likely to see these atrocities coming than clanking robocops, soldiers or our vaunted and hyped ‘security’ services, who are always claiming to protect us but have failed so completely in this and several other cases. Such killers almost invariably come from among the swirling underworld of drug-taking petty criminals.

The Manchester murderer, Salman Abedi, was, unsurprisingly, a cannabis abuser. His recent behaviour – yelling prayers in the street – had been strange.

Ought not someone in authority to have noticed when a bearded young religious fanatic with a drug habit started buying large quantities of hair bleach? He plainly wasn’t planning to become a blond. But who was there to listen to such fears? A police car driving by at 30mph? A phone number that nobody answers? A police station that’s shut?

I HAVE noticed that any dissent from the standard view of these events is met, on social media and elsewhere, with attempts to claim that my views show some sort of disrespect to the victims and their grieving families.

I will not give in to this nasty dictatorship of grief.

I am just as distressed by the horrors of Manchester as anyone else. I refuse to be told I’m not sad enough, because I don’t conform to the Government’s thought-free response to it, which has now been failing for many years. Nor should you be.

Get the soldiers back into their barracks, and bring back proper police foot patrols.

Finally, a great film (if only you can find it)

What a joy to see an intelligent film, slick, clever, surprising fast-moving, glamorous and thoughtful. Yet I had to seek it out at a late-night showing at the back of a multiplex, where the big screens were reserved for weary sequels of sequels.

If you can find Miss Sloane, starring Jessica Chastain, please see it. But how can good movies succeed if they are hidden from us?

The BBC’s finest...peddling deadly cocaine

I was banned from the BBC’s supposedly wonderful Today programme several years ago, after I gave a live on-air pasting to the pro-drug Professor David Nutt. Before that I used to get on quite a lot, but since then, nothing.

I have often wondered since if the programme had a deep-seated bias against our drug laws. It always seemed to give prominent coverage to any call to soften those laws.

Well, on Thursday morning, I think we got proof.

Today once essential, has in recent years become so dull and complacent that I often doze off while listening.

It is claimed that its audience has gone up. If so it must be composed of supermarket check-out robots, whose idea of excitement is to shout ‘Unexpected item in bagging area!’ Nobody else could actively want to listen to its lifeless daily rehearsals of Leftish conventional wisdom.

But on Thursday there was an unexpected item in the drugging area. I suddenly realised I was listening to a man giving out the current prices for various kinds of cocaine.

Hang on, I thought, as I shook myself into full wakefulness. The programme normally gives out exchange rates for the US dollar, and the stock market index. But the price of cocaine? This was new. Cocaine is a Class A drug under the Misuse Of Drugs Act 1971.

This means you can get life imprisonment for selling it, and seven years in jail for buying it. To want to know the price, or to give it out, surely condones a serious crime.

And the BBC has a vested interest in being in favour of law enforcement. Its licence fee is collected under the threat of fines and imprisonment.

If the BBC wants that law enforced, it must surely support all law enforcement. I can’t see it being pleased if other media gave soft, wet interviews to advocates of licence-fee evasion.

Yet here was some bloke merrily discoursing on what cocaine costs, which is surely of no interest to any law-abiding person.

Then, wholly unchallenged by an utterly soppy presenter, this character claimed it was ‘difficult to have honest conversations saying you can use lots of drugs with relatively low risks, for most people, if you follow some simple strategies’.

Difficult? Where is it difficult? What’s difficult is to call for the law to be enforced.

Who now denies that cocaine is in common, unchecked use among students, bankers, politicians and, perhaps above all, media and broadcasting types? The guest added (still uninterrupted): ‘Instead of simply saying to people, “Don’t use drugs, they’re dangerous”, that’s not a useful dialogue for people who are making informed decisions to use drugs as a wider lifestyle.

‘That person might also go to yoga and be a vegetarian. You know it’s about a lifestyle choice and we need to help people stay safe with the choices they make.’

I asked the BBC for a response. Not merely was that response useless in the extreme, and nothing to do with the questions I had asked, they actually asked me to use it in full.

Well, I haven’t room to do that, but I will post it on my blog so that you can laugh at it.

*The BBC's reply is now posted on the blog, in the posting immediately after (and so above) this one. Or click on this link

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/05/the-bbcs-defence-of-the-today-programmes-item-on-cocaine.html

Why this is a mad country: Applicants for jobs in nursing are being turned away because they cannot speak good enough English. The response of the authorities is to consider lowering the standards nurses are required to meet. We can all see what is wrong with this, but it will almost certainly happen.

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