MURDER AND MAYHEM IS EVERYWHERE.

I may be wrong but it seems to me that there is an awful lot of crime in our country today of a type which did not exist 50 years ago. This is not to say that the country was necessarily a better place in the past but it is to say that criminal activity has become more diverse.

The murder of 2 Syrian women on the streets of Solihull by an Afghan man is a case in point; in my youth, murder on the streets anywhere in Britain, was rare to say the least. Yes, there were criminal gangs who stalked certain parts of London and other major centres and, yes, on occasion violence would erupt, but the murder of ordinary people going about their normal everyday business hardly ever happened. Psychopaths such as John Christie carried out their shocking work and petty thieves like James Hanratty committed atrocities in the course of other crimes, but the type of crime that we see today was virtually unknown.

In recent times we have seen gangs of mainly Pakistani origin abducting young white girls and forcing them into prostitution, and drug dealing gangs, often of Caribbean origin, running amok with knives and guns, particularly in parts of London. We have seen the introduction of the particularly nasty habit of throwing acid over people and we have seen incidents such as that which occurred in Solihull a couple of days ago. So called 'people trafficking' for the purposes of bringing in girls to be forced into prostitution or to be used as unpaid servants, effectively slaves; so called 'honour killings', murder followed by the burning of the corpse, and girls smuggled out of the country to be forced into arranged marriages in various parts of the Indian sub-continent. All of these are crimes new to our society, but imported with the influx of immigrants from around the world, bringing with them ways which are alien to our country.

Perhaps I have been misled by the media's coverage of such events and politicians' reaction to them, but perhaps not. In the last couple of weeks there have been shootings in Kingsbury, Rayners Lane and Southall, all parts of west or north west London which I used to know well and in which such events were unknown. Two teenagers were stabbed in Harrow last Sunday in an area which I know well even today. It seems likely that these incidents have involved gangs, drugs, 'honour' or some other modern cause of criminality.

This escalation in the extent of violent crime has come at the same time as immigration from all quarters of the globe has reached historic heights; whether or not there is a causal link between the two issues, there can be no doubt that our society, with its assorted 'communities', is in increasingly serious trouble.