Crime

Friday

Camilla Swift

Crime fiction at Easter? Look no further than our Scandinavian neighbours

If you thought that winter in Britain had gone on long enough this year, then spare a thought for the Norwegians. Winters in Norway are famously long, dark and bitter, and – for those who experience them year upon year – can be incredibly boring. During one such winter, in February 1923, two Norwegians called Nordahl Grieg and Nils Lie decided to alleviate their boredom by writing a book. The theme? A train robbery; or more specifically, a looting of the train to Bergen. The title of the book? The Bergen train was robbed in the night (or, in its original Norwegian: Bergenstoget plyndret i natt). Having written the book,

Thursday

Alex Massie

Scotland’s War on Clothes: Be Careful What You Wear

Welcome to Scotland, a land where freedoms of expression and other liberties are treated so seriously that the police and prosecuting authorities would never dream of monitoring and judging the clothes you wear. If that sounds like fantasy it’s because, alas, it is. Yes, this is now a country in which wearing the “wrong” kind of t-shirt will land you in court and, as likely as not, result in you being convicted of a breach of the peace. For real. I draw your attention toa recent case at the High Court of Justiciary and the opinion delivered by Lord Carloway (a man who, it might be noted in passing, thinks

Tuesday

David Blackburn

David Cameron’s immigration speech fails to capture the imagination

This morning’s papers have followed the lead of yesterday’s TV news bulletins: the prime minister’s immigration speech was not the success it might have been. The Times is lukewarm (£). The Guardian is suspicious. The Mail is derisive. And our own Douglas Murray is contemptuous of a speech which merely stated the ‘utterly obvious’. Yet again, the government has failed to convince the media. Part of the problem is that the numbers are inconclusive. The Guardian has built on yesterday evening’s BBC news reports, which claimed that only 13,000 migrants from that part of the EU have claimed JSA since 2009. This contrasts with Mr Cameron’s concerns about a widespread ‘something for nothing’

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Ministers avoid awkward vote on foreign criminals as Tories rebel on press damages plan

The Crime and Courts Bill, which contains one half of the government’s response to the Leveson recommendations, has just passed its third reading in the House of Commons. An earlier amendment on exemplary damages, which the Mail’s James Chapman reports this evening has roused the ire of Boris Johnson, saw this group of Conservative rebels troop through the ‘No’ lobbies: Richard Bacon, Christopher Chope, Tracey Crouch, Philip Davies, Richard Drax, Nick de Bois, Andrew Percy, Mark Reckless, John Redwood, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Andrew Turner, Martin Vickers, Charles Walker and Sarah Wollaston. The amendment passed 530 ayes to 13 noes (the list above includes tellers Rees-Mogg and Drax, who are not listed in

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Theresa May tries to deter Tory uprising on foreign criminals

MPs are hard at work in the Chamber tonight: once they’ve finished voting on the Leveson amendments to the Crime and Courts Bill, they’ll move on to everything else in this piece of legislation. And everything else includes that amendment signed by over 100 MPs on Tory and Labour benches which limits the ability of foreign criminals to resist deportation. The Leveson debate has been a bit of a gift to ministers, as this big proposal would have enjoyed far greater attention had the Chamber not ben more exercised over press regulation. But that hasn’t stopped a ‘Dear Colleague’ letter going out from Theresa May to Conservative MPs to explain

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ministerial aides demand to support backbench vote on foreign criminals

All eyes are on what’s happening with the cross-party amendments to two bits of legislation on Leveson, but this afternoon in the Commons there could well be another row on the Crime and Courts Bill. As we reported last week, Conservative MP Dominic Raab has an amendment to the legislation which would limit the opportunities for foreign criminals to avoid deportation. It has over 100 MPs signed up to it, including Labour grandees such as David Blunkett. But I also understand that a number of Conservative PPSs have contacted their whips saying that they would like to support this amendment and that they want to be given leave to do

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Tory campaign on foreign criminals attracts huge support

Dominic Raab’s proposal to stop jailed foreign criminals avoiding deportation on the grounds of a right to family life turns out to be very popular indeed among MPs. It’s got 104 supporters currently, including 91 Conservative MPs, and will be debated as an amendment to the Crime and Courts Bill tomorrow when the legislation reaches its report stage in the House of Commons. The amendment would mean that foreign criminals can only avoid deportation if they risk being killed or tortured on their return, and is intended as a stop-gap ahead of any Tory plans to repeal the Human Rights Act or exit the European Convention on Human Rights. It

Monday

Alex Massie

The Myth of the Immigrant Benefit-Scrounger

The Sunday Express is at it again. It is outraged that Britain’s prisons contain some inmates who were not born in this country. Of course, everyone is hopping aboard the immigrant-bashing bandwagon these days. Immigration, it sometimes seems, is something to be feared, not valued. I understand the political calculation behind all this. The restrictionists have carried the day and there are few votes in seeming “soft” on immigration these days. Which is a shame. But there you have it. Nevertheless, the immigration brouhaha increasingly bears more than a passing resemblance to a moral panic. As tends to be the case, such fears are not utterly groundless but they are

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

What shall we do with the racist lap-top?

Important work from Latanya Sweeney of Harvard University into the inherent racism of internet search engines. She carried out a study which demonstrated a clear difference between the sort of ads that appear on the page if you’re searching for either a “black” name or a “white” name. She used a bunch of names which had previously been identified as being associated with one race or another. For “black” names she used DeShawn, Darnell and Jermaine; for “white”, stuff like James, Emily and The Rt Hon Nicholas Soames or something. When the white names were tapped in, up came adverts for nice sofas and dating agencies and holidays in agreeable

Monday

Fraser Nelson

See no crime, hear no crime and speak no crime

In the current issue of The Spectator, we put on the cover four words that sum up the coalition government’s approach to crime: pretend not to notice. Today’s Birmingham Mail offers a snapshot of what we mean: ‘The data, released under the Freedom of Information Act, showed the crimes were committed by 11,422 lawbreakers – meaning on average each carried out three offences within 12 months of being released on licence or receiving a community sentence.’ That’s an astonishing 33,000 offences in West Midlands committed over two years by those on the alternatives to jail: suspended sentences or community sentences. Or by those released from jail early, in what’s supposed

Wednesday

Daisy Dunn

Crime and Guilt, by Ferdinand Von Schirach

Tis the season for shopping mall scuffles. A man with a red face prized the last Magimix (steel, 600 rotations per minute) from my hands yesterday, citing ‘the stress of January sales’. I got an apology, but not the blender. What is it that makes us so quick to flip? In a far bleaker arena, this is a question that plagues Ferdinand von Schirach, the criminal defence lawyer whose most recent novel, The Collini Case, I reviewed here last year. Von Schirach’s earlier books, Crime and Guilt – both bestsellers in Germany – are compilations of stories derived from real life offences. Von Schirach has been involved in literally hundreds

Wednesday

Nick Cohen

In praise of the bloody-minded Paul Chambers

What freedoms we have in Britain have not come as a rule from revolutions and thunderous declarations of the rights of man. More often than not, our liberties have come because bloody-minded and obstinate men and women have squared their shoulders and decided to fight an arbitrary decision, when others would have surrendered. Paul Chambers has the right to claim a good deal of credit for compelling the Director of Public Prosecutions to stop treating offensive but harmless remarks as crimes. I won’t go through his case in detail because I have told his story elsewhere. But in brief Paul was planning to fly to Belfast to visit a woman

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Shootings in US suburbia, what would J.G. Ballard make of them?

These shootings. I think we need J G Ballard back. Looking back through previous such apparently random events, we might observe that: • The perpetrators are almost always white. • They are almost always lower middle class or middle class. • The areas in which the shootings take place are almost always comfortable, although not luxurious, suburbs, a good distance from the local metropolis. In demographic terms they tend to have a rather lower racial mix than is average for the state. • The median income is always bang on average for the state. They tend to be places with otherwise low crime figures. I don’t really know what this

Friday

James Forsyth

The Connecticut shooting

The news coming out of Connecticut is just awful. 18 children have been gunned down at their school and, reports suggest, that another nine people—including the gunman—are also dead. The gunman’s mother apparently worked at the school, and is believed to be among those he murdered. If this death toll is accurate, it will be the second worst shooting in US history, behind the Virginia Tech incident in 2007. Early reports indicate that the weapon was legally purchased and licensed. It can seem tawdry to talk about politics at a time like this. But there’s no doubt that the gun control debate will now return to Washington. The White House

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Cabinet row over imprisoned SAS soldier

A lunchtime spat has broken out over Sergeant Danny Nightingale, the SAS serviceman who was sentenced to 18 months in prison by a court martial after pleading guilty to possession of a prohibited firearm (a 9mm Glock pistol) and ammunition. Sgt Nightingale’s case has attracted wide public support. His friends and family said that the pistol, which was a ‘war gift’ from Iraqi soldiers he mentored in 2007, had not been packed by him, and added that a brain injury had made him forget that it was among his possessions. Supporters say that, owing to these facts, the sentence is unduly harsh. The government’s hand has been forced. The Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond,

Wednesday

Nick Herbert

Who are the BBC to question the legitimacy of Police & Crime Commissioners?

What’s the test of success of the Police & Crime Commissioners policy? It is, surely, whether the 41 individuals who will be elected tomorrow succeed in cutting crime and antisocial behaviour, and rebuilding public confidence in policing. This is not, however, the test which the BBC – and others – intend to apply. Their correspondent Danny Shaw told the Today Programme this morning that ‘the initial verdict on the success of the PCC experiment will hinge to a large degree on the turnout ….’ Setting aside the throwaway line that giving people a vote is an ‘experiment’, this is surely a deeply contentious comment. Who, you might say, are the

Saturday

James Forsyth

David Cameron tries to drum up interest in the Police and Crime Commissioner elections

David Cameron spent yesterday campaigning for Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner candidates in Bedfordshire and Leicestershire. The visits, though, received scant national attention: the only coverage I’ve spotted so far is on page 33 of The Times. Talk to ministers and they maintain that the Police and Crime Commissioner elections are more visible out in the country than they are in London, where there’s no contest. They argue that the capital-centric nature of the media explains why the press keep writing the elections off as a damp squib. There is, I suspect, some truth to this charge. But an average turnout of only 20 percent would still not be impressive.

Wednesday

Daisy Dunn

Review: The Collini Case, by Ferdinand von Schirach

During the Second World War both Germans and Allies routinely shot civilians in reprisal for attacks on their armed forces. One shudders to think that a ratio could even be set at which such killings could be considered legitimate. In 1941 Hitler set the bar at 100 civilians per soldier. How high is too high? This question plagued the defence of an Italian man named Fabrizio Collini some sixty years later. Ferdinand von Schirach’s The Collini Case is based upon that historical trial. Collini, who has lived in Germany since the 1950s, enters the luxury hotel suite of a man named Hans Meyer. They are near the Brandenburg Gate. He

Tuesday

Mary Hannity

Review – Hawthorn and Child, by Keith Ridgeway

‘The body is a multitude of ways of coming apart’ writes Keith Ridgeway in his most recent novel Hawthorn & Child. He describes these ways. It can be beaten, broken or burnt. It can fall down stairs or in to deep water. The excoriation of adult skin differs to that of a child’s. Ridgeway begins with not a character but a body, and as the bodies amass – sometimes sexualised as well as pulverised – the novel itself begins to come apart, and everything in it. Hawthorn and Child are detectives in North London, tasked with finding a crime boss named Mishazzo and solving the shooting with which the novel

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Cameron tries to show he’s still got it with tough crime announcement

It’s clear the government has had a bad week when the Prime Minister pops up on a Monday with a crowd-pleasing policy announcement. Recent re-launches have been shared by senior Lib Dems and Tories following the collapse of Lords reform, for example, to demonstrate that the Coalition is still working well. But today, the Lib Dems are nowhere to be seen: the Prime Minister’s big crime announcement is a response to a terrible week for the Conservative party, rather than the coalition as a whole. Cameron is using law and order as a traditional Conservative area, arguing that ‘retribution is not a dirty word’ and that alongside a ‘tough’ approach