Smiling in the face of justice
Daily Mail Comment5th September 2006
What a sickening spectacle it was, when 'Prince' Naseem Hamed was released from Moorland Open Prison in Doncaster yesterday after serving only 16 weeks of a 15-month sentence for dangerous driving.
Waving and smiling like a lottery winner, the boxer strode down the road and stepped into a silver Rolls-Royce. Behind was a stretch limousine, blaring loud music and fitted out for a riotous party.
Hamed's brief mention of his victim seems wholly inadequate beside the hideously reckless crime that put him in prison.
Just to show off to his friends, he had driven his £230,000 McLaren Mercedes at 90mph on the wrong side of the road over the brow of a hill, straight into a VW Golf.
The crash very nearly killed 39-year-old Anthony Burgin. It left him with crippling injuries from which he may never recover.
The real scandal, however, is not that one brash, self-obsessed boxer - and his family and friends who laid on that hero's reception for him - seem to lack any sense of decency or shame.
What is really shocking is that thousands like Hamed are being set free after serving the merest fraction of their sentences.
His release, after barely a quarter of his 15 months, epitomises the state of British justice under a Labour Party embarrassed by prison overcrowding but too short-sighted to build the jails the country so desperately needs.
Every drastically reduced sentence like his makes a mockery of the Government's repeated promises to 'rebalance' the system in favour of the victim.
Hamed is not the only ex-convict smiling today. Criminals all over the country are grinning their contempt for a justice system that has lost all its power to instil fear and respect for the law.
March of progress?
It is just as well that the Victorian Duchess of Leeds is no longer around to discover what became of the girls' orphanage, run by nuns, which she built in the heart of the Sussex countryside at the height of the Empire in 1868.
We can guess she would have understood it when the massive gothic pile later became a Catholic junior seminary and then a ballet school.
After all, not only did fewer women want to become nuns as the 20th century progressed, but the state began to take over the charitable work for which the orphanage had originally been built.
But what would the old Duchess have made of the building's present use - as a run-down school for a mere dozen Muslim boys, in which half of every day is devoted to learning the Koran? Wouldn't she have been utterly bewildered?
And wouldn't she have been horrified to learn that the mansion and its grounds would become the focus of today's massive police investigation into a group of terrorists intent on destroying the British way of life?
One other aspect of modern life would surely have puzzled the Duchess.
How incredible that over the past year, the Sussex police have been sending officers and civilians to this bizarre school for 'diversity training' - in spite of the fact that the security services had been warned more than seven years ago that terrorists might be using the building or its grounds.
Doesn't that tell you everything you need to know about security services so obsessed by 'multiculturalism' that they don't dare investigate what goes on under their very noses?
What a great deal the history of one building has to tell us about developments in Britain since the Duchess built her orphanage.
Is this what is known as progress?
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