Television
Urban misery
James Delingpole
Often, as I motor round the once-fair borough of Hackney and survey the hideous tower blocks, near-empty carparks and unused commercial buildings which now stand on sites once occupied by rows of magnificent Georgian and Victorian vil- las, I find myself muttering, 'They must die! They must die!'
I refer not to the Luftwaffe but to that infinitely more destructive band of crimi- nals — the Stalinist loonies of Hackney Council who spent the Sixties and Seven- ties trying to eradicate all the decent-look- ing properties so that only poor, aesthetically-challenged, Labour-voting types would ever want to live there.
In fact, I hate them so much, I wouldn't kill them straight away. First, I'd peel off their skin and put them in a bath of salt. Then I'd force them to watch videos of the splendid Betjeman Revisited (Channel 4, Friday), so that they could see how our glo- rious towns and villages might still have looked if the benighted planners hadn't had their evil way. Then and only then would I kill them, in a manner so horrible that I daren't elaborate, lest you think I'm some sort of sadistic punishment freak.
`Turns out she's a dumb blonde.' And I'm not. Really I'm not. Not only is my list of candidates for capital sentences impeccably, bleeding-heart-liberally short (just Hackney Council and the team responsible for Friday night's ineffably dreadful new sitcom, Captain Butler, on Channel 4), but I'm actually one of those softies who believes that Michael Howard's got it all wrong and that harsher sentences are not the best way of reducing crime.
I know this from bitter experience. When our cat Beetle steals the pheasant from my dinner plate and I boot him, furiously, into the garden, I know the punishment won't make the slightest impact: stealing pheas- ant is what cats do. Similarly, when I put my honorary stepson James the Rat off sweets and television for a week, I'm depressingly aware that it won't really act as a deterrent against whatever crime he has just committed: all ten-year-old boys are instinctively, incorrigibly evil.
So it came as no surprise to discover from this week's Panorama (BBC 1, Mon- day) that the same rules apply to more seri- ous criminals. Or, at least, it wouldn't have been a surprise if I'd actually watched it — which I didn't because, as is the way with current affairs programmes, you can't actu- ally get hold of preview tapes until it's too late.
But it doesn't matter because the Panorama I really wanted to review about the relationship between drugs and crime — was on last week. This, I thought, would afford me an opportunity to rehearse the many sound arguments for the immediate legalisation of all drugs, and perhaps earn a place on the cover: 'James Delingpole says ...', like I did when I con- troversially suggested that Inspector Morse was rubbish.
Unfortunately, the Panorama went and scuppered my plans by being lame and bor- ing. It was filmed in and around Leeds, supposedly because it represented the gen- teel town which has hitherto been largely unaffected by the 'drugs menace'. Really, though, I suspected — and I'm sure I'm being horribly unfair — it was because the Panorama crew were too girlie to go some- where more dire, such as Moss Side, where they'd have to wear bullet-proof vests.
The interviewing was lazy and fairly unrevelatory. A woman whose son had bur- gled her house to pay for his heroin was asked how she felt. Twice. An addict dis- closed that, each day, he had to steal £150 worth of goods to fee his habit. Sundry coppers agreed that, yes, there'd been a vast increase in drug-related crime: about 70 per cent of all local burglaries were not committed by addicts.
And what, having bored us all rigid with this stale information, did the Panorama team conclude from its research? Well, er, that it might be an idea if more counsellors were made available to persuade recidivist criminal addicts that smack is not the most sensible solution to urban misery.
Great. Now I feel much safer. Burglaries and robberies are soaring. The druggy underworld grows richer by the day. Our taxes are going to rise to help fund a war which will be impossible to win. The police and customs will be granted ever greater powers to pry into our affairs and shove their hands up our bottoms the minute we've hopped of the Eurostar. And Panora- ma implies that the best way forward is to put our faith in the wondrous counselling industry.
Oh, well. Guess I'll have to save my drug argument for another day. In the mean- time, can I just ask: Am I the only one who was nauseated by the coke-sniffing, reefer- toking, smack-dabbling, E-boshing music industry's grotesque hypocrisy in pillorying that hapless singer from East 17?
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