How to cut crime by 60 per cent at a stroke

THANKS TO the miracles of technology, I can now go back and find out just when it was that I first floated the idea that heroin should be given away free on street corners.

It was, in fact, September 2001. So it’s only taken five years for the politicians and the constabulary to catch up with me.

It really is a simple argument. As Howard Roberts, the deputy chief constable of Nottinghamshire, told an ACPO conference last week, of every 10 crimes committed in this country, six are drugs-related – burglaries, muggings and shoplifting carried out to feed a habit.

(Three of the other four are probably innocent, middle class people being caught by speed cameras, but that’s a different argument.)

I would say that 60 per cent is a modest estimate. After all, there are comparatively few car thefts these days and the big armed robberies have been superceded by identity theft and internet fraud. (Did you buy shares in shredder manufacturers like I told you to a couple of years ago? And are you now piling into pub patio heater manufacturers, ready for the smoking ban?)

I tell you what; in a novel departure for this column, let’s look at some facts, shall we? And bear in mind that these are official figures. Around 30 tons of heroin is smuggled into Britain each year. This feeds 300,000 addicts. To fund that addiction, the average addict needs to find £15,000 a year. To net £15k, he commits crimes costing £45,000. And that all adds up to an average 432 crimes a year committed by each and every heroin addict.

It’s quite gobsmacking. So can we agree that if we remove the need to pay for Class A drugs like heroin, we take away the need to steal? We also destroy the empires of the drugs barons who currently control distribution while dabbling in other kinds of criminality in their spare time.

So, at a stroke, we reduce crime by between 60 and 70 per cent. What would any government – or enlightened society – give for that? True, there’d be a few casualties along the way, but anyone stupid enough to overdose on free dope isn’t going to be much of a loss anyway. It makes such overwhelming common sense that I’m amazed no-one’s had the guts to do it before.

Is there a politician brave enough to have a pop? Maybe Mr Brown is the man. After all, he’s not yet managed to find a way to tax it.

ON THE other hand, he is taxing cheap flights, using that ludicrous Stern report to justify lining the government’s pockets in the guise of environmental concern and “compensating for travellers’ carbon footprints”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite so daft since Jeffrey Archer last pleaded not guilty.

Do you really think that the Powers That Be are going to rush out and plant a couple of trees every time you hop on an EasyJet to Malaga? What utter tosh. The money will go where it always goes: into perpetuating the Turkey Army of unnecessary civil servants whose task is to vote NuLabour back into power next time around.

And if not there, it’ll be poured into the trough where our MPs park their snouts. Did you see that they want a pay increase that’ll take their annual salary up to £100,000? That’s on top of the average £130,000 a year that they claim in expenses – much of it fiddled. It’s enough to make a cat laugh.

NOW HERE’S a tough one for the leather-elbowed, lentil-eating Lefties. Do we want to renew Trident, our nuclear deterrent? Of course not, they cry, coming over all faint. Think of all the Turkey Army jobs that £75 billion could create … err … and all the hospitals and schools it would build.

So let me get this straight. We have well-educated (i.e. pre-1978) professional people in positions of influence in this country who seriously think that it’s fine for North Korea and Iran to have a nuclear capability (we’ll not even mention the French) but we can’t? See that aforementioned cat? It’s now in hysterics.

CURRENT pet hate? You meet someone and, being polite, ask them how they are. “I’m good, thank you,” they reply.

Oh, so you’re good are you? At what exactly? Knitting? White-water rafting? Feng shui? What madness is this?

And in with a bullet at Number 2 are all those snivelling little 20-year-old stoodents who blagged a Daddy-funded month in Thailand or Goa, returning to claim that they’ve been “travelling in their gap year.” And then decide that it’s appropriate to eat with their fingers in your local Indian restaurant.

Travelling? Listen, sonny. When I was your age, getting to the Isle of Wight was a bloody challenge, let me tell you …

THIS COLUMN’S role as a soothsayer continues, with the national media finally catching up with my argument that investing in a trendy, alternative Christmas present - like buying a goat for an African village – verges on crass stupidity. I can’t believe it’s taken them so long to cotton on.

Just think about it. What is the one thing we all know about goats? Yes, they eat everything they come across. So all those daft Lefties who’ve been shipping Billy Goat Gruff out to Somalia have been responsible to laying waste to any crops the poor Africans managed to conjure up from the barren earth. Worse than that, a goat will drink up to 75 litres of water a day, and I think we all know that water is the most precious commodity on that continent.

I wouldn’t mind so much if you could actually visit your goat and see how it was getting on, but this seems impossible. Could it be that most of them have ended up in the cooking pot by Twelfth Night? If so, it’s probably for the best.

O The views of Mr Beelzebub are purely personal and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Editor or staff of this website, of anyone voted for Darren Clarke in the BBC Sports Personality of the Year show (Your wife dies so you go out and play golf? What kind of message is that?), of anyone booked on a Christmas trip to Australia for the cricket, or of anyone who wasn't impressed with the boxing the other night. How that Ainsley Harrison finds time to fit in his training as well as being a TV chef is beyond me.