"...From my Sunday Telegraph column of January 5th 2003:
Meanwhile, America's traditionally high and England and Wales's traditionally low murder rates are remorselessly converging.
In 1981, the US rate was nine times higher than the English.
By 1995, it was six times.
Last year, it was down to 3.5.
New York has just recorded the lowest murder rate since the 19th century.
I'll bet that in the next two years London's murder rate overtakes it.
I got a little ahead of my skis on that last line.
Nevertheless:
London's murder rate has overtaken New York City's numbers for the first time ever, according to a new report.
...What a positively Dickensian roll-call.
Of the three names a Londoner might have had at the time of, say, Darkest Hour, Lewis Blackman was a black man stabbed to death by six teenagers; Hannah Leonard was a middle-aged Irish lady also stabbed to death, by a couple from Kilburn; and Mark Smith apparently met his end at the hands of a woman "of no fixed abode".
At least eighty-five per cent of that grim toll would have been wholly unknown to pre-multicultural London, because neither perpetrators nor victims would have been residents of the United Kingdom.
If you were to say that on Twitter, Scotland Yard would stop investigating today's stabbing and investigate you instead.
...To reprise my old line: In Britain everything is policed except crime.
A great nation is dying in darkness..."
Read on!
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