The Public Safety Foundation
The Public Safety Foundation’s Founder, Rory Geoghegan, writes for The Telegraph:
Perhaps we should force some of our politicians to live in terraced houses or council flats in the roughest parts of Britain.
They’d discover the terror of seeing lads racing about on stolen mopeds with shotguns and machetes. The misery of trying to live, never mind raise children, amid the stench of cannabis or thumping drum and bass. They’d experience life under siege from drug-dealing gangs and anti-social yobs.
Some shifts at the big out-of-town warehouse would expose them to the impact of the bike they use to get there being stolen, or the local bus route being suspended yet again because of persistent crime and disorder.
Working in a convenience store they would come face-to-face with the abuse, threats and violence that accompanies the shoplifting epidemic.
They could do some shifts in a café to find out what it’s like when beggars and pickpockets descend to target customers. They could learn how to cajole aggressive vagrants off the doorstep, wash away the bodily fluids often left behind, and stop them from shooting up in the loo.
Perhaps then, they might not be so complacent about the prime duty of government that was so well-articulated by the late Baroness Thatcher: “to protect the citizen as he goes about his lawful business”.
