Crime

Sunday

Matt Cavanagh

Troubled families policy deserves cross-party support

The report published this week by Louise Casey, the Government’s ‘Troubled Families’ Tsar, has attracted a fair amount of criticism, but what it does illustrate is the chaotic lives these families lead – and the implausibility of thinking that their problems can be solved by the kind of flagship social policies traditionally favoured by either Conservatives or Labour. As Isabel put it, Conservative ‘reform of the welfare system will pass many of the families by. In these stories there is no calculated decision to opt out of the labour market because of generous benefits, more an endless failure to cope with life and the way it has worked out’. Likewise,

Saturday

Jon Mack

Why we should trust trial by jury

The acquittal of PC Simon Harwood on Thursday for the manslaughter of Ian Tomlinson provoked a strong reaction in the press. Leading the charge, the Daily Mail’s headline summed up the mood: ‘Freed, the ‘thug in police uniform’: what jury weren’t told about the PC cleared of G20 killing.’ The criticism was aimed at not only Simon Harwood, but also the Metropolitan police for re-employing the officer with a string of complaints against him, and the court for not allowing evidence of his disciplinary record to go before the jury, the insinuation being that there must be something wrong with a trial process that keeps the jury in the dark about

David Blackburn

The state needs to be stronger

Louise Casey, the government’s ‘troubled families’ tsar, is in loud voice in this morning’s Telegraph. The government, she says, must ‘get stuck in’ and intervene in these lives for the better by getting women to take ‘responsibility’ for themselves and their children. ‘It’s not toughness for toughness sake,’ she says. ‘It’s toughness so we sure their kids get to school so they don’t end up as criminals.’ Casey’s words are underpinned by the view that the state’s approach thus far has been wrong-headed. ‘I also don’t think we should soft-touch those families. We are not running some cuddly social workers’ programme to wrap everybody in cotton wool.’ There are, she

Thursday

Nick Cohen

Tories, oppose family values

For almost a decade now, what social conservatives say and the evidence in front of our eyes has been diverging with remarkable speed. According to the received wisdom, the permissive revolution of the 1960s led to family breakdown, which in turn led to today’s terrifying crime rates. The small snag with the argument is that crime rates are not terrifying. The decline in marriage and rise in divorce notwithstanding, crime rates have collapsed. Social conservatives can take some comfort from the fact that the fall coincides with the increase in the prison population since 1990. But a rise of about 30,000 in the number behind bars is small beer when

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Dirty, ugly things

Sometimes fiction can be more accurate than published facts. Ten years ago a film, Dirty Pretty Things, told about the plight of illegal immigrants into Britain and the least-explored scandals of all: the black market trade in human organs. It was an aspect of Britain’s secret country, the black market occupied by a million-plus souls that produces a tenth of our economic output. Most of these people work illegally, perhaps in criminal endeavour or perhaps honestly, but in fear of immigration police. It is, by definition, an unregulated environment in which all manner of evil can be incubated. It is becoming clear now that one of these evils is the

Monday

Matthew Richardson

Better in Black

It is almost twelve months ago, following the below-par A Death in Summer, that I wondered aloud on these pages whether Benjamin Black (aka Booker-winner, John Banville) had what it took to write a crime series. A resounding yes comes in the form of the fifth instalment — sixth novel overall, after the 2008 stand-alone The Lemur — of the Quirke series, Vengeance. Black has finally rediscovered the formula that made his debut, Christine Falls, so memorable.   To be sure, crime fiction purists will still bemoan the absence of standard clue-laying. The novel begins with the suicide of businessman Victor Delahaye, witnessed by his business partner’s son, Davy Clancy,

Monday

David Blackburn

Helping troubled families

Earlier today, the government, in the form of Eric Pickles, announced that it was launching new incentives to encourage local councils to improve the lives of 120,000 families, identified as ‘troubled families’ by the Social Exclusion Task Force in 2007. Those incentives are: A). £3,900 for each family whose children attain 85 per cent attendance at school. B). £4,000 for each adult in a troubled family who holds down a job for three months. The measures have been welcomed by the Local Government Association, which does not praise this government all that often. The cynic will say that the LGA is merely welcoming more money for its associates. While that it is

Saturday

David Blackburn

Sadly, protest music is alive and well

There is plenty of nostalgia around in this Jubilee Weekend. Any look back on 60 years brings temptation to think that the past was better than the present. This is what Woody Allen calls ‘golden age’ fallacy, which is defined (in his Midnight in Paris) as an age-old and ‘erroneous notion that a previous time period is better than the one one’s living in.’ This disorder was on show during BBC 2’s Review Show last night, where guests were bemoaning the death of protest music.   The panel (dominated by Kirsty Wark and music critic Paul Morley) were discussing BBC 4’s 3 part documentary, Punk Britannia. The first part of

John Preston

A date with death

On 8 January 1937, an old man was taking his prize songbird for an early morning walk in the eastern section of Peking when he came across a woman’s body lying in a ditch. The face had been disfigured, the ribs hacked apart and the heart removed. Pathologists who examined the corpse thought it was one of the worst cases of mutilation they had ever seen — ‘and that was saying something’. She was identified as a 19-year-old British schoolgirl called Pamela Werner, the adopted daughter of a former British consul, Edward Werner. To begin with, the murder was thought to be the work of a random sex maniac. Pamela

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime novels | 26 May 2012

William Brodrick’s crime novels have the great (and unusual) merit of being unlike anyone else’s, not least because his series hero, Brother Anselm, is a Gray’s Inn barrister turned Suffolk monk. The plot of The Day of the Lie (Little, Brown, £12.99), Anselm’s fourth case,  is triggered by the discovery of files relating to Poland’s suppression of dissidents in Warsaw, mainly in the 1950s. Anselm’s oldest friend, now blind, was caught up in a linked later betrayal while working as a journalist in Poland. He wants Anselm to go there in his stead to examine the file that holds the name of the informant who betrayed both him and many

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Let’s talk about this

What a strange place Britain has become. You sometimes need some time away to realise quite how strange. Take yesterday’s main story: the latest paedophile rape-gang case from the north of England. The judge in the trial told the men, during sentencing, that they had selected their victims ‘because they were not part of your community or religion’. But that is the sort of fact which causes the most terrible contortions in modern Britain. The perpetrators were all Muslim men of Pakistani origin and the victims all underage, white girls. We know exactly how we should think, how loud would be our proclamations and our desire to analyse the ‘root-causes’

Saturday

Conrad Black

The American way of justice

Conrad Black sympathises with the NatWest Three — victims of British cowardice and a corrupt US legal system It was the misfortune of David Bermingham and his co-defendants to be very peripherally connected to the Enron debacle. Enron was the ultimate hot financial client for a merchant banker and designer of sophisticated financial vehicles, the author’s occupation at Greenwich National Westminster. Bermingham’s offence was to produce a spectacularly imaginative new structure for an existing financial company, which impressed the Enron financial officers, at a time when Greenwich National Westminster was being offered for sale and NatWest itself was a takeover candidate. His plan was so original that, as he wrote,

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Miliband talks tough

Remember when Ed Miliband couldn’t be found anywhere? Now you can barely get away from him. The Labour leader has been conspicuous by his presence over the past week, whether on the airwaves or in graffiti form (see left, a photo taken on London’s South Bank yesterday). And he’s continued that hi-vis trend today, by launching Labour’s local election campaign in Birmingham. Two things stand out from the speech he gave at that event. The first was his heavy emphasis on the pledges he announced last week: capping railway fares, unfreezing the personal allowance for pensioners, etc. As I blogged at the time, it’s doubtful whether these will actually achieve

Wednesday

Matt Cavanagh

Riots report undermines the Tory diagnosis, but spreads itself too thin

After last August’s riots the debate became quickly polarised. Were socio-economic factors like unemployment to blame, or was it all down to the individual choices of the rioters? David Cameron and other Conservative ministers knew which side of this debate they wanted to be on. They had been taken by surprise by the riots, initially failing to realise how serious things were, but when they got back from their holidays they set out a clear and confident line, brushing off most questions about links to the state of the economy or youth attitudes, and condemning the riots as ‘criminality pure and simple’. The soundbite was deliberately simplistic; Conservative ministers’ actual

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

A man surrounded — and some assumptions exposed

There was an element of bafflement in the early BBC coverage this morning of the welcome news that police have identified and surrounded the suspected killer of seven people, including Jewish children, in Toulouse. To some people’s surprise, the BBC correspondent remarked in the early reports, the suspect turned out to be a Muslim, Mohammed Merah. So the entire tone of the Corporation’s coverage of the killings turns out to have been misplaced. Ever since the dreadful news that a gunman had attacked a Jewish school in Toulouse after killing three French soldiers, the overriding assumption on the part of the Corporation was that, unless the killer was merely unhinged,

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Gotcha! | 13 February 2012

The Spectator‘s cover, a few weeks ago, borrowed one of The Sun‘s most famous headlines: ‘Gotcha’ — but, this time, with tabloid journalists caught in the trap. It was supposed to be a parody. But, this weekend, the Metropolitan Police arrested a further five journalists from The Sun using methods normally meted out to drug dealers: pulling them out of their beds, searching their houses for concealed evidence. No one has been charged, but all five are suspected of paying sources for information: i.e. ‘aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office … and conspiracy in relation to both these offences.’ If the definition of bribery extends to buying sources outrageously-priced

Monday

The Reverend Michael Coren

We must be honest about honour killings

White guilt has terrible consequences. This was made profoundly clear in Canada during the three month trial of Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya and their son Hamed. They were convicted a week ago of the first-degree murder of Zainab (19), Sahar (17) and Geeti Shafia (13), and 50-year-old Rona Amir. The three teens were Mohammad Shafia and Tooba Yahya’s daughters, Hamed’s sisters. Rona was Mohammad Shafia’s first wife. The four women had been drowned in their car in June, 2009. The killers had chosen a canal in Kingston — a university town half-way between Toronto and Montreal — because they assumed that the local police would be less sophisticated

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Huhne resigns

We’ve just had a short statement from Chris Huhne — and, unsurprisingly, he’s resigning as Energy Secretary. His words and demeanour, though, were strikingly defiant. He described the CPS’s decision as ‘deeply regrettable,’ adding that, ‘I’m innocent of these charges, and I intend to fight this in the courts, and I’m confident that a jury will agree.’ In terms of a reshuffle, the likeliest outcome is that Ed Davey will glide into Huhne’s former job, and Norman Lamb will in turn take Davey’s place as a junior business minister. But there may be a pause before that’s confirmed, as Nick Clegg is currently travelling back to London from the Lib

Peter Hoskin

Keir Starmer’s statement on Huhne

And here’s the full text: ‘This statement is made by the Crown Prosecution Service in the interests of transparency and accountability to explain the decisions reached in the cases of Mr Christopher Huhne and Ms Vasiliki Pryce and to explain the time taken in arriving at these decisions. A criminal complaint was made to Essex Police in May 2011, alleging that Ms Pryce had accepted responsibility for a speeding offence committed by Mr Huhne in 2003. That complaint was investigated by Essex Police and a file was passed to the CPS in late July 2011. The CPS advised that further investigations should be made, including obtaining certain material from a

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

My week in Westminster

I’m presenting Radio Four’s Week in Westminster this morning, on deficit wars, London wars, welfare wars, and another set of wars which no one has really discussed yet: the directly-elected police commissioners. There will be about 40 of them elected in November, and candidates are already emerging: Nick Ross (ex-Crimewatch), Colonel Tim Collins and London mayoral hopeful Brian Paddick. I interview two names that have been thrown into the frame, both former ministers and both women: Jane Kennedy (Labour) and Ann Widdecombe (Tory). I wanted to find out just how excited we should be about these elected police commissioners. The theory is very simple: that right now, England’s constabularies report to the Home