Arriving home last week from America, where my attention had been focused largely on the attempted assassination of Trump and the disintegration of Biden, I popped down the road to get what’s left of my hair cut in advance of a weekend wedding.
‘Have I missed much while I was away?’ I asked Harry, my barber.
‘Not really, Rich,’ he said. ‘The council hasn’t bothered cutting the grass verges for months; Mr Patel, the newsagent, has retired; Spurs still haven’t signed a striker and, oh, you heard about the machete fight, obviously.’
Machete fight? Where?
‘Opposite the Tube station, by the chippy.’ Harry then took out his mobile phone and showed me the video, captured on CCTV belonging to one of the local businesses.
A group of youths in hoodies can been seen loitering with intent outside Miracles cafe. A car pulls up and two men similarly dressed jump out wielding machetes.
One of the gang on the pavement has obviously come prepared, too. He whips out his own fearsome-looking blade and a swordfight of sorts ensues, spilling on to the main road. His mates scatter, pursued by the second attacker, slashing away haphazardly.
Less than a minute later, the two assailants climb back into their car and race away. This was a Monday afternoon, around 5pm, on Cockfosters Parade, a row of shops and restaurants at the Northern end of the Piccadilly Line. Women are out shopping, a man is walking his dog.
Cockfosters is a reasonably affluent Outer London suburb, with a relatively low crime rate, far removed from the gritty inner city. It’s a multi-racial, multi-cultural community, 64 per cent white according to the last census, where most people of various heritages rub along harmoniously — Jews, Muslims, Greeks, Turks, Asians, many of them native North Londoners born and bred.
In recent years it has become invigorated by people fleeing the grime and crime which has increasingly come to define the inner boroughs. Award-winning restaurants and upmarket shops, coupled with the green expanse of Trent country park and the ease of travel on the Piccadilly Line, have made Cockfosters something of a destination for diners and day-trippers alike.
Now, perhaps inevitably, gang-related knife crime has followed. It’s rumoured that the machete fight had been pre-arranged by rival gangs from Enfield and Tottenham.
We can’t be certain, because although some of those involved are clearly identifiable on the CCTV footage and two men were treated for stab wounds in hospital, no one has been arrested. Which comes as no great surprise.
Yesterday morning, I asked Mike, our postman for the past 27 years, when he’d last seen a copper on his rounds. He just laughed. You’re kidding, right, Rich? The nearest police station closed two decades ago. Shortly afterwards, someone was stabbed to death on the steps of the nick as they sought help.
The reason I’m telling you this is not just because the machete fight took place a few hundred yards from my own front door, although the thought that
some wannabe gangsta could be wandering around our local shopping parade with a machete tucked into his trackie bottoms is truly terrifying.
Yet apart from a short report on a local paper website, this violent incident has passed without mention on London television news. So widespread is knife crime that it’s not considered newsworthy any more, especially where no one is killed.
Nor is this just about London, where stabbings have more than doubled since Labour mayor Genghis Khan curtailed stop and search. There seem to be more swords on our streets than in the average episode of Games Of Thrones.
Earlier this week a vicious machete fight broke out between rival gangs on Southend sea front, where families were soaking up the sunshine. That one did make national news. But the daily diet of knife crime in our big cities barely registers.
There is an increasing feeling abroad that violent crime and disorder in this country is rife pretty much everywhere.
Welcome to Lawless Britain.
The mob has always been with us. In fairly recent memory we’ve lived through the Brixton and Toxteth riots, the poll tax riots, and the Tottenham riots which spread throughout the country and descended into an orgy of shopping with violence.
But of late, the random violence has escalated, fuelled by the sewer of social media.
The disgusting rioting in Southport that followed the horrific deaths of three young girls at a Taylor Swift dance class appears to have been orchestrated online by knuckle-scraping thugs linked to Tommy Robinson’s English Defence League and incited by false allegations shared on platforms such as whatever Twitter calls itself these days. The lack of information from the police and other official sources only served to fuel speculation.
Still, the kind of morons who turned up to throw rocks at the police don’t need an excuse for a punch-up. They were out again in London taunting the police on Wednesday night
What the hell had that got to do with a blood-soaked atrocity in Southport?
Mind you, what had the death of George Floyd in Minnesota got to do with anyone in Britain?
But that didn’t stop the paramilitary Black Lives Matter marches during the statue-toppling Summer Of Stupidity. Instead of confronting them, the police took the knee, along with our new PM and his deputy.
Yesterday, after meeting police chiefs, Keir Starmer announced the formation of a dedicated response squad to tackle the overgrown football hooligans who took part in the Southport riot from spreading their disorder across the country under the guise of ‘protest’.
It’s just a pity he doesn’t take the same robust approach to the pro-Palestine/Hamas hooligans menacing Britain’s law-abiding Jewish community.
There was also disorder in Hartlepool this week, ostensibly over the Southport killings. Police came under attack and were pelted with missiles — including bricks and bottles.
Manchester, too, saw a mob lay siege to a hotel said to house asylum seekers. Again, rocks were thrown at police. Last week, in one of the worse disturbances, rioters in Harehills, Leeds, flipped a police car on its side and set fire to a bus. After coming under attack, police withdrew from the scene for several hours. It followed a report that the child of a Roma family had been taken into care by social services.
Social media was responsible, too, for two nights of angry protest outside Rochdale police station after a video showed a policeman kicking an Asian man in the head at Manchester airport.
Only later did alternative footage show that the man and his brother had initially attacked the police, raining down punches and breaking a female officer’s nose in the process. But by the time the true facts were known, the damage had already been done.
These riots and protests make the headlines, rightly.
But it’s also those that don’t garner so much attention which creates the growing impression of a lawless nation, where crime is out of control and the police are either unable or unwilling to do anything about it.
No one disputes the police have a difficult, often dangerous job which they frequently perform with bravery beyond the call of duty. The problem is that too much policing today is reactive. If police stations hadn’t been closed and more officers were visible on the streets, surely much of the crime which now afflicts us could be prevented.
In the past month, there have been 12 serious stabbings in London alone, at least two of them fatal. How many of these could have been thwarted if police were patrolling regularly and weren’t reluctant to use the vital tool of stop and search?
Would the wannabe gangstas involved in the Cockfosters machete incident have thought twice if there was a real chance they’d bump into a pair of burly beat bobbies and have their collars felt?
In Lawless Britain, they don’t even fear arrest.
Machetes, Samurai swords and other assorted weapons are as easy to buy as Uber Eats. Yesterday, with one click of a mouse, I found a website which will sell anyone over 18 a horrifying array of machetes, swords, axes and crossbows for as little as £30, free delivery included.
In Bushey, Hertfordshire, recently the wife and two daughters of BBC racing commentator John Hunt were killed in a crossbow attack.
Why do we allow such lethal weapons to be freely available, on open sale, no questions asked?
Violent crime used to be confined to the inner cities. Today it has mutated and migrated to leafy suburbs and seaside towns. No wonder people are frightened.
If it can happen in Cockfosters and Southport, nowhere’s safe.