The police didn't kill Mark Duggan - 50 years of liberal 'compassion' did

Mark Duggan, whose gun death at the hands of armed police provided the spark for the riots which gripped England's cities and towns in 2011

We asked for it. We repeatedly voted for politicians who promised compassion. And now we have compassion coming out of our ears. And we moan that we don’t like the result. Yet we carry on with the same plan, madly expecting it to have a different outcome.

It was ‘compassion’ that abolished the death penalty for murder, so forcing us to arm the police – who had until then been guarded from violent criminals by the real threat of the gallows.

Look how compassionate that turned out to be. The lone armed constable in the dark and dangerous street now has to act as prosecutor, defence counsel, judge, jury, executioner and appeal court, and all in a matter of seconds.

No wonder the inquest jury in the Mark Duggan case ruled that this was a lawful killing. Which of us knows how he would act in such conditions?

And yet why is this bloody system morally better, more just, more kind, more proof against error than a jury trial with the presumption of innocence and the possibility of appeal and reprieve?

But we’re all so compassionate that, when we’re not bombing and invading foreign countries for their own good, we feign horror at the idea of bringing back the hangman.

There’s no logic to it. The liberal bombing of Baghdad and Belgrade unavoidably and predictably killed innocent human creatures. Yet the people who backed the bombing claim that the much smaller risk of hanging an innocent makes capital punishment unacceptable.

Because abolishing the noose is compassionate, the feeble logic of the abolitionists still triumphs. Try defending the death penalty in any ‘civilised’ gathering in this country and see how quickly you are sent to Coventry and dismissed as a Victorian monster.

And then we make ourselves angry at the spectacle of modern Britain on TV, the claimers of benefits turned into a sort of national entertainment.

But why do these unhappy, hopeless people exist? Who corrupted them, by offering them the chance to live in this dreadful, doomed way, while at the same time giving them no moral guidance or help?

We did, repeatedly electing governments that offered compassion to the poor, in the form of a welfare state with its moral heart ripped out.

Try suggesting that there is a difference between the deserving and the undeserving poor, in any public forum, and feel the temperature drop below freezing. And yet a welfare state which refuses to recognise this is bound to corrupt people into idleness and worse.

Roughly 50 years ago, beguiled by smiley reformers, we chose the wrong future. We adopted ideas which were mistaken and have proved to be disastrous.

We called them ‘compassion’. But who were we really being compassionate to? Not, as it turns out, to the poor we claimed to be helping. They suffer most from the compassion of our criminal justice system – which in 2012 was so compassionate it refused to imprison 28,997 offenders who had committed at least 25 crimes.



It is the lives of the poor that are blighted by anarchic schools that can’t teach, and by amoral handouts. It is their streets which are full of the drugs whose use we won’t punish. It is they who have been first to experience the abolition of fathers and stable families, which leads directly to the growth of criminal gangs.

Familiy of Mr Duggan and their supporters, as well as others campaigning for answers over the deaths of loved ones at the hands of police, release doves during a vigil at Tottenham police station yesterday

All these policies were implemented in the name of compassion. But who were we being gentle to? Why, we were being nice to ourselves, sparing ourselves the hard and unpopular decisions and choices that make civilisation possible, like indulgent parents who mingle neglect with bribes, only on a vast scale. And we still are.

To hell with compassion. Give me good honest harshness any day. It’s far kinder in the long run.

Isn't it rather insulting and racially bigoted for the police to assume the ‘Black community’ will be particularly upset by the death of a gangster? Black people, just like everyone else, hate and fear crime and criminals.

BRITAIN'S STORMY SHORES: A 'RISK THAT I WOULD BE THRILLED TO RUN What a lot of silly fuss about people risking the giant waves that have thundered against our shores during the last week.

Next thing you know, the whole sea will be fenced off and patrolled by portly wardens telling us to keep away lest we fall in.

Awesome spectacle: People brave the waves at Porthcawl Harbour, South Wales, on Monday If I lived in Porthcawl, I would certainly have got as close as I could to the raging of the sea. I have had the good luck to see most of the great sights of the planet, from the Himalayas to the Grand Canyon, and our lovely coastline

in a storm is at least the equal of all of them.

Anyway, we should never forget that the sea, in its many moods, was what kept us safe and made us a great and rich nation.

I told you ADHD was a myth...

Wait long enough and the rest of the world will catch up with everything in this column. For years I’ve been pointing out that there is no objective, testable evidence at all for the existence of the fake ailment ‘ADHD’.

Now here comes Dr Richard Saul, one of the US’s leading neurologists (that’s a real qualification based on hard science), with a new book called ADHD Does Not Exist. Of course it doesn’t, but it soothes a lot of bad consciences, triggers a lot of welfare payments and makes a lot of money for the pill manufacturers.

So you get into trouble for saying so. Will ‘dyslexia’, that other great phoney excuse of our age, be next? I do hope so.

'Pretty much right about the First World War': Blackadder, starring Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie, Tony Robinson and Stephen Fry, captured the essence of a war that was stupid and wrong, says Peter Hitchens

The TV series Blackadder was infantile Left-wing drivel. But, alas, it was still pretty much right about the First World War. That war was worse than futile. It was malevolently stupid and wrong. It destroyed this country, wiping out the best men of a whole generation before they could become fathers. We still suffer for that.

There was no good reason for this country to enter that war. We weren’t really obliged to defend the invented country of Belgium. The great Lord Palmerston oiled out of a similar commitment to Denmark in 1864, and nobody cared.

The US benefited hugely from staying out, then and later. Germany ended up dominating Europe anyway, through the EU, but only after millions of deaths, the destruction of countless homes and the horrors of Hitler and Stalin – all of which we would have been spared if France had been swiftly defeated in September 1914. If Michael Gove could just stop being so keen on supposedly benevolent wars, he would see that.

