PETER HITCHENS: We can’t defend people in their own homes, so why posture as a great power?
The most idyllic years of my dreamy, untroubled childhood were spent in a Portsmouth suburb called Alverstoke, a place of peace, calm and order, tree-shaded and secluded far from the raucous clangour and bomb-scorched rough edges of Pompey itself.
It never crossed our mind that violence could happen there.
My brother and I roamed freely around the village and down to the nearby sea.
So I have never quite got over the moment when I read, in 1992, that a man called John Taylor, a grandfather aged 48, had died there as he tried to stop a gang of drunken teenagers ripping up his garden fence. He had been hosting a family barbecue.
His son-in-law, Robert Allan, was kicked and punched as he tried to protect himself by curling into a ball on the ground. He had to spend three days in hospital.
Last week we read of Angela Flynn, once an American police officer, being threatened in her own front garden by a group of children (one as young as ten) after she caught them trying to steal a bicycle from her garden, in a suburb of Gillingham in Kent
It was striking that most of the reports of this event concerned her husband, Michael, fired from his school job after putting an angry post on Facebook. Many will think this unfair. But it is fascinating to me that his alleged misbehaviour online was immediately and devastatingly punished. By contrast, we can be pretty sure that the miniature louts will face no serious consequences
The eight youths involved were said to have drunk up to 15 cans of lager each and shared a bottle of Pernod.
They urinated on gardens, kicked down fences, damaged trees and cars and verbally abused anyone they met.
The culprits were eventually caught and there was some outrage over the shortness of their sentences, which ranged from two years to nine months.
But that was not what bothered me. What still troubles me is that the man who died, and the one who was kicked so hard he had to go to hospital, were only doing what normal people do when they are confronted by trouble – speaking out against it.
Is it wise to back Ukraine strikes?
General Mark Milley, chairman of the USA’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, tried to work out some rules for avoiding World War Three, according to Serhii Plokhy’s book about the Ukraine War
There’s a fascinating fact (one of many) in Serhii Plokhy’s book about the Ukraine War which I review today on page 9 of our TV&Critics section.
He says that General Mark Milley, chairman of the USA’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, tried to work out some rules for avoiding World War Three in Ukraine.
One of them was ‘Contain war inside the geographical boundaries of Ukraine’.
You can see why. Russia will not react against the West even if it knows or suspects strongly that it is fighting Western-backed forces in Ukraine.
But if it believes attacks on its own territory are equipped or trained by Western nations, as some recent reports suggest it may do, it may take this as a pretext to hit back at Nato nations in some underhand way.
Ukraine reasonably itches to attack Russian targets and appears to have started doing so.
But was General Milley right? Is this wise? Should we encourage it?
And that if peaceful little Alverstoke was not safe, nowhere is.
I’ve been back there since. It looks much as it did.
Though the heathland where we picked blackberries was long ago built on. But it is physically the same, a soft and comfortable piece of England, where a man should feel secure.
Well, can he feel safe, there or anywhere? A brief search of our electronic library found 83 national news reports in which the words ‘they kicked his head like a football’ appear between 1999 and 2022.
I suspect a larger database including local news sources would provide hundreds more. Google comes up with 136,000 results for the grisly phrase.
The most prominent is that of Garry Newlove, in 2007, who had rushed out of the family home in Warrington, to try to stop youths vandalising his wife’s car.
They had been smoking marijuana. They kicked him to death. It took him 36 hours to die.
His widow, Helen, was made a life peer and then ‘Victims’ Commissioner’. She has campaigned fiercely against the conditions which led to her husband’s death.
And yet last week we read of Angela Flynn, once an American police officer, being threatened in her own front garden by a group of children (one as young as ten) after she caught them trying to steal a bicycle from her garden, in a suburb of Gillingham in Kent.
When Mrs Flynn asked them to leave, one threatened to stab her and to bring people who would rape her and murder the family.
Later, the miniature louts came back with a brick, planning to put it through the Flynn front window.
It was striking that most of the reports of this event concerned her husband, Michael, fired from his school job after putting an angry post on Facebook. Many will think this unfair.
But it is fascinating to me that his alleged misbehaviour online was immediately and devastatingly punished.
By contrast, we can be pretty sure that the miniature louts will face no serious consequences. And what will they grow up to be?
Count yourself lucky if the place where you live is still free from this menace. But, from what I hear and from what people write to me, there are many parts of the country where home-owners think it wise never to challenge these street gangs, places where the price of any sort of objection is smashed windows or worse.
Where old people cower inside as kids repeatedly kick balls against their doors and windows, where Halloween is a real nightmare for the old, weak and lonely, where police seldom come, where shopkeepers put metal grids on windows because they have to, and endure shop-lifting which is never tackled or punished, where there really is no real law at all.
But our Government is too busy showing off its manly virtue in Ukraine to do anything to protect the people who live here.
Enthralling series: Sion Alun Davies and Scott Arthur in Steeltown Murders on BBC iPlayer
Steel yourself for a drama of pure nostalgia
Why do people bore on about the sweary, repetitive incomprehensible TV drama Succession? The only good thing about it is the opening title sequence. I gave it up months ago.
Try instead, on the BBC iPlayer, a clever and subtle police series Steeltown Murders, starring the always-interesting Philip Glenister.
It is especially enthralling because it portrays events in 1973, as seen by veteran police officers 30 years later in 2003, so it portrays two layers of the past, both of which I remember.
How little we know about what is to come. I especially loved the sign outside the busy mine, proclaiming coal as the ‘fuel of the future’ and the British Rail diesel engines nosing by, pulling mile-long coal trains. Pure nostalgia.
Did you miss Oak Apple Day on Monday? A pity.
You were supposed to wear a sprig of oak leaves. This commemorates King Charles II’s escape from Oliver Cromwell by hiding in an oak tree at Boscobel.
Once upon a time, those who didn’t risked being pelted with birds’ eggs, thrashed with nettles or pinched on the behind (illegal nowadays, no doubt).
But, bit by bit, these British traditions fade away, Guy Fawkes has nearly gone. Whitsun disappeared in my lifetime.
Will it be Easter next and nothing but unromantic ‘Bank Holidays’ for ever and ever?
Do they have to be on Mondays, by the way? Wouldn’t Friday be better?
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