Mark Steyn: In today’s Britain everything is policed except crime

On last week’s show, a retired Scotland Yard detective gave me a fairly depressing take on the state of British policing. As you know, two centuries ago, Sir Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police invented policing in the modern world, and it is sad to see his successors so comprehensively dishonour a great legacy.

As we noted a week ago, only 1.4 per cent of reported rape cases are prosecuted – in Wiltshire, it’s 0.7 per cent. And you might think that’s to do with the particular difficulties of that specific crime, but in fact the great preponderance of crime now goes unsolved, and indeed uninvestigated. The catchphrase of Her Majesty’s most famous constabulary – the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – is that the Mounties always get their man. But that’s way too much like hard work, so in the UK the coppers would rather get you, because that’s a lot easier. So, as we’ve seen this last year-and-a-half in particular, if you make the mistake of lingering on a park bench too long during your morning stroll or tweeting an infelicitous tweet, half-a-dozen officers will descend.

In today’s Britain, everything is policed except crime – even when that crime has been exposed to the world. Most people around the planet had never heard of Rotherham until a few years ago, and for them the word "Rotherham" designates not a place but an event – like "Lockerbie" or "Chernobyl". But in this case the event went on an awfully long time – for a decade and a half. And the scandal is that the authorities – police, politicians, social workers, the do-gooder industry in general – did not a thing to stop it. In fact, they facilitated it. And as we have learned just this week the event is still going on.

By some strange subconscious dissemination, we have agreed to call them “grooming gangs”, which is a horrible euphemism – indeed, a euphemism that looks at the crime from the perpetrator’s point of view: a worldly man grooms a young girl, as if he’s Professor Higgins getting Eliza Doolittle ready for the embassy ball. Grooming means gang rape; grooming means being abused by dozens of predators; grooming means being dangled over a balcony, and doused in petrol while men dance around you taunting you with lit matches. What’s with the euphemism, Britain?

Five years ago, I spent a few days in Rotherham talking to just a few of the thousands of young women who’d been through some or all of those “grooming” rituals. I was struck by a couple of things – first, the weird lack of media interest in these women even after what happened had all come out. I remember talking to Ms Sammy Woodhouse, a remarkably resilient survivor who’s since written a book, and whom I met in the lobby of a rather cheerless hotel just past the Rotherham hospital. Sammy had a litany of horror stories about not only the indifference but the alleged collusion of the South Yorkshire Police, year in, year out.

As for the political class, having ignored for years what was happening in Rotherham, they transitioned smoothly to ostentatious displays of empathy – if only for a moment. Sammy told me she’d been brought to Downing Street to meet David Cameron.

I was keen to hear how that went. I said: "Was he genuinely interested or did he do that thing where...?"

I don't get to complete the sentence before the girls exploded in laughter. "He did that thing," said Sammy. "You don't even have to say it." And we all laughed again.

And so for a few minutes Mr Cameron "did that thing". He furrowed his brows and put on his concerned expression and looked as if he were listening ...but the eyes were calculating how long he had to pretend to pay attention before it was safe to say thanks awf'lly for coming to see me and moving on to the next photo-op.

These latest girls – over 1,700 new cases, compared to the 1,400 officially enumerated victims back when I was there five years ago – these latest girls presumably won’t even get a photo-op with Boris. Too much of a downer. Not his bag.

The second memory that stayed with me in 2016 was from Sammy’s friend Katie, talking about her own child. "She's blonde, blue-eyed, she's absolutely bloody stunning,” said Katie. “When I drop her off at friends I literally do a circle of the block. And three cars will come past me.” She said there were a lot of brand new Audis with what Fleet Street calls “Asian” drivers. “And they're circling, too, to see if there are young white girls..." And sometimes she’d drop off her daughter, and she’d see the Audi passing again, this time with the girl on the passenger seat.

And afterwards I tried Katie's experiment in a neighborhood she’d mentioned, and I saw it too: the circling cars – and then the cars no longer circling because the girl is in the vehicle, and they're driving away. No police anywhere, and, when I eventually found a constable and mentioned it, he shrugged – because hey, that’s last year’s story. We’ve all moved on. Certainly David Cameron and Theresa May have.

But the gang-rapists and the petrol-dousers and the balcony-danglers haven’t moved on, and it’s business as usual in towns up and down the spine of England. This Remembrance Week we have seen the best and worst of Britain: We honour the glorious dead from a century of war who gave everything, and we learn yet again of police, politicians, bureaucrats willing to turn a blind eye to rape, assault, torture, because to speak up for these victims risks being tagged as racist and sent off for a month of sensitivity training. There isn’t really a lot to be said for a society that simply looks the other way as its most vulnerable girls are abused and trashed