This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

At least our state-school system maintains schools, terrible as many of them are. The NHS, creaky as it is, still treats actual patients.

And in the dear dead days of big nationalised industries, British Coal dug actual coal, British Steel made actual steel, and the same was true of the gas and electricity boards.

But the police force now can’t even be bothered to turn up and investigate burglaries, and its chief spokesperson openly says so.

For the first time we now have a huge and expensive nationalised industry that does not do what it says on the label. The police do not police, as we understand the word. They are busy doing something else, as you will find if you ever try to speak to them. I am not sure what it is.

I discovered this nasty fact many years ago, the night some vandals put a stone through my front window, and I chased after and caught them.

I had to let them go. The sheer hilarious uselessness of the police on that occasion, their general absence, their pitiful excuses for not coming to my aid when urgently asked (‘we couldn’t find you, the officers didn’t know the area’) alerted me to a problem I’d until then been only dimly aware of.

I ended up writing a book about it, gasping with growing amazement as I found out from the archives what had happened to a body I used to trust and admire. I have to say here that many of the police officers I meet or talk to are perfectly decent men and women (though a minority are not, as recent figures of criminal convictions show). It’s just that the police force itself is now trading falsely on a name and reputation it earned in another time.

You’ll find this out if ever you actually need them. In the meantime, how many warnings do you want? I have to say that the statement by Sara Thornton, head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, that ‘if you’ve had a burglary, for example, and the burglar has fled, we won’t get there as quickly as we have in the past’ is a pretty clear indication of how things really stand.

I’m not sure how quickly that actually was, as it happens. Car break-ins long ago went on the police’s ‘ignore if you possibly can’ list, along with drug possession, littering, shoplifting, vandalism, disorderly drunkenness, public swearing, driving while texting or phoning, and a hundred other things they no longer think are their affair. And, as if by some miracle, once the police stop bothering with these offences, fiddled figures claim that they are not happening any more, and the magistrates’ courts are being closed for lack of business. Well I never.

Don’t be surprised if, in 20 years’ time, homicide goes the same way. To save time and trouble, it’ll be recorded as something else (murder is already often downgraded to manslaughter to save time and trouble), and people watching old episodes of Inspector Morse will wonder why anyone is making such a fuss over a dead body.

Once upon a time, I would have minded. Now I just laugh. But, be warned: like other nationalised industries, the police will act swiftly and decisively if you dare to challenge their monopoly. If you are foolish enough to defend your own home against burglary, expect to be arrested, fingerprinted, DNA-swabbed and probably charged. They wouldn’t want the idea catching on that we could manage without them.

The perfect 50s face - and NO cigarette!

Jessica Raine’s captivating features might have been designed for the fashions of the 1950s, or whenever the BBC’s new series Partners In Crime is supposed to be set.

I’m not quite sure when it is meant to be happening. We’re told it’s post-war, yet Jessica is shown reading a fresh new edition of Dorothy L. Sayers’s (very good) 1930 whodunit Strong Poison. And some of the sexual innuendos sound very up-to-date to me. But for once, the director hasn’t forced everyone to smoke all the time to make sure we realise it’s the past. Instead a lengthy scene is set in an actual grammar school, which for most British people is as historic and distant as a dinosaur.

Forget Chilcot - let's probe our Libya folly

Let's forget the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War. We all know who’s guilty, and the main actors are finished and disgraced in the public mind. Instead, let’s have a new and urgent inquiry (report within a year please) into David Cameron’s equally stupid and irresponsible Libyan war, which is the direct cause of the scenes at Calais and Dover, and may, in the long run, mean the end of European civilisation as we have known it all our lives. It is also thanks to people like him that we have, as a country and a culture, given up all the weapons and defences we might once have used to keep our island secure.

You think this can be stopped, or will be stopped? No. All that will happen is that we will get used to it.

Please continue to pray, if you can, for my friend Jason Rezaian, now wrongly held in an Iranian prison for more than a year. Jason, son of a Persian father and an American mother, went to live in Tehran so that he could report truthfully on that fascinating, misrepresented place.

He took me there a few years ago and opened my eyes to much I had misunderstood or never known. His chief concern was to improve understanding between his father’s people and his mother’s people. He was mysteriously arrested and is still being held, despite the outbreak of peace between the USA and the Iranian government. There is no justification for this.

Let him go.

The ignorance of modern politicians – even about the recent past – is astonishing. The Chancellor, George Osborne, said last week that ‘the central attraction of European Union membership was the economic one’.

Yet in 1972 his own department, the Treasury, argued strongly that joining the Common Market would be bad for Britain’s economy. They were dead right.

Their advice was buried and ignored by Ted Heath, whose reasons for joining were clearly political.

I'll return to this another time, but the Tories should not be too pleased if the Labour Party collapses. Deprived of a bogeyman, what will then hold them together?

Last week the number of visits to the Peter Hitchens blog (address at the top of this page), where I have debated with readers on many subjects since February 2006, passed the 20 million mark. If you haven’t visited, may I urge you to do so?

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