Anthony Daniels’s latest book, published under his pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple, is the essay collection Out into the Beautiful World (New English Review).
The social security system in Britain makes it possible, and perhaps even profitable, for parents — the word is used only in the biological sense — to bring children into the world without thought or care. That indifference is matched by the police.
One should not read too much into a single case, of course: but not too little either. A 24-year-old man in England called Lee James was sentenced to life imprisonment for having kicked the head of his victim so many times (while shouting “Have some of that!”) that he died. Then he and a neighbour dragged the body to a public place, doused it in white spirit and set fire to it.
The dead man was called Bijan Ebrahimi, an immigrant from Iran who had become disabled through disease of his back. He was subjected to a long campaign of abuse by neighbours who accused him of being a paedophile. This was because Mr Ebrahimi filmed some local children destroying his flower-pots and also James drinking and smoking while in charge of one of his children on the lawn just outside his, Ebrahimi’s, window.
James complained to a passing police patrol of Ebrahimi’s “paedophilia”, and though James almost certainly had a criminal record, was known to be a violent “partner” of the mother of his children, and had a visage of inspissated malignity that could have been used by Lombroso as evidence for the plausibility of his theories, the police arrested Ebrahimi, who had long complained to them about the abuse he had suffered from James and others. James, who openly threatened that he would take the law into his own hands if something was not done about Ebrahimi, told the police that he was prepared to go to prison if he attacked Ebrahimi, and that his children would, when they were old enough, be proud of what he had done to protect them. A mob of local people cheered and shouted abuse as Ebrahimi was taken away by the police.
