You cannot cure a disease until you know what it is. At last Britain is beginning to grasp that we have many crazy people in our midst, and that they are crazy because they smoke marijuana.
The obvious solution is to enforce our existing severe laws against marijuana possession, so people stop smoking it. This is what they do in civilised, serious countries such as Japan.
But that logical step may be beyond a lot of our political and media elite. It is also unpopular with a lot of people on anti-social media.
It’s easy to explain the elite problem. Our university-educated classes are full of past and present habitual drug abusers, or people who let their children abuse drugs. Or both. They are held back from admitting the truth by their own disgusting selfishness.
But the Twitter warriors – who are frantic to believe that rampage knife attacks are ‘terrorism’ – are just as bad. They go purple in the face when I say that these pointless slaughters are the acts of unhinged people.
There are dozens of examples, but take Valdo Calocane, the culprit of those crazy, horrible killings in Nottingham. His home stank of marijuana. But nobody in authority cared.
The Southport mass killer Axel Rudakubana appears to have once been a bright and pleasant child but his character and appearance changed totally in his early teens, the time at which so many British children meet marijuana at school and fly off the rails, always into slack despondency and often into desperate, incurable mental illness. Choruses of psychiatrists now link this drug with mental illness. Reams of news reports link acts of mad violence with marijuana users.
But as far as I can find out, nobody inquiring into the Southport horror has even asked if Rudakubana took this drug.
Over many years I have found police totally uninterested in the drug use of violent culprits. This is no surprise, as they don’t want to admit that their laziness and laxity, in refusing to enforce the laws against cannabis possession, have aided an explosion in its use.
But the ‘terrorist’ explanation of such events has now suffered a crushing blow. It simply cannot be sustained by any known facts.
Even so, everyone but me still tried to believe it when news came in of a knife attack on a train last weekend. I observed how the authorities and media reports struggled to imagine that the Huntingdon train assault was in some way terrorist. But it wasn’t.
Codewords for terror attacks were used by police. Two people were arrested, suggesting some co-ordinated action. Then all this crumbled. No possible terror motive or connection could be discovered. The second suspect was quickly released without charge.
I can’t and won’t discuss the first suspect but will wait with great interest for the investigation and trial which must now follow.
Perhaps, out of all this horror and blood, some good may come.
Is there a stupider response to violence on trains than plans for ‘airport-style security’ at stations? If you don’t have such screening at every tiny halt, then it can’t work. It is just collective punishment. If there is anywhere in the country which does need ‘airport-style security’, on the way out as well as on the way in, it is the prisons.
CASE AGAINST LETBY POLICE MOUNTS UP
Has the time come for another police force to look into Cheshire Constabulary’s investigation of Lucy Letby? Is there in fact any evidence against Ms Letby, now locked up in prison for the rest of her life?
I ask because of an astounding criticism of the Cheshire case by a former senior policeman who knows about such things. Dr Steve Watts was once Assistant Chief Constable of Hampshire. He designed the national police procedure policy for investigating deaths in hospitals.
He is worried that the Cheshire force may not have looked properly at alternative explanations for the deaths and harms at the Countess of Chester Hospital, for which nurse Ms Letby has been blamed.
He said: ‘I followed the Letby trial daily and remember thinking, “When are they going to get to the evidence?” and it never arrived. There is no evidence whatsoever.’
He fears that detectives unconsciously decided at an early stage that babies had been deliberately harmed. ‘The material before the court was obtained by an investigation that was unconsciously skewed by confirmation bias,’ he said. ‘I find it difficult to call it an investigation. It seemed it was more an information-gathering exercise to prove that Lucy Letby did it.’
He stressed he is ‘not a Lucy Letby supporter’, adding: ‘The issue is wider and there has been an egregious miscarriage of justice. I thought policing was better than that.’
I hope the Criminal Cases Review Commission and Appeal Court are paying attention. This grim injustice has already gone on far too long.
WILL NIGEL ADOPT MY MANIFESTO?
I am impressed that Nigel Farage has started saying wise things about the economy which is, as he recognises, close to disaster. Absurd 1980s slogans about tax cuts are futile and impossible.
Unless you do something about the cause of all this spending you will get nowhere.
We must end and reverse the lunatic attempt to replace the married family with the state. We must use schools to educate instead of for indoctrination and wild, egalitarian social engineering. And we must abandon the ludicrous idea that crime is a disease to be treated rather than an evil to be deterred and punished.
That would save billions. Next we must grow up and stop pretending to be a superpower, when we cannot defend the beaches of Kent. There you are, Mr Farage – a real patriotic manifesto. But all the things in it are hard and will take years.
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