Welcome to Lawless Britain: the issue that could decide the next election

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Here are four things that happened in Britain in recent weeks.

A 24-year-old father was brutally stabbed to death in an affluent part of London after a man tried to steal his watch.

An Albanian with 50 criminal convictions was allowed to stay in the country after a judge ruled his crimes were “not extreme enough”.

A pensioner who said he “just wanted to go home” was beaten to death in Islington by three teenage girls who filmed the brutal assault on their phone for entertainment.

And an asylum-seeker from Syria, Mohammed Wahid Mohammed, who was working illegally in Britain, repeatedly raped a 12-year-old girl in Birmingham.

What do all these shocking, hideous, and truly awful cases have in common?

They are all utterly depressing symbols of what we might call Lawless Britain —a chaotic, dark, and degraded society that looks more like the fictional city Gotham than a modern, civilised nation.

A place where criminality is completely out-of-control, anti-social behaviour is being normalised and accepted by our hapless, soft-on-crime elites, and the underlying social contract between the people and their rulers feels like it’s about to collapse.

And I’m clearly not the only person who thinks this way.

Far from it.

While the ruling class scoffed at my recent suggestion that London “is over”, on account of it becoming a cesspit of criminality, immorality, and uncontrolled immigration, brand new polling, just released by Survation, shows that millions of British people feel exactly the same way as I do about not just London but the country. The results really are staggering.

They point to a hardworking, law-abiding majority that is utterly sick and tired of how a toxic cocktail of mass immigration, economic stagnation, and incompetence in Westminster is ripping the heart and soul out of the country, tearing the social fabric apart, and leaving much of the country unrecognisable.

Astonishingly, or perhaps not-so-astonishingly if you happen to live outside the elite bubble in the real world, the pollsters found that roughly half of all British people now think Britain “is becoming a lawless country”.

Just think about that for a moment.

Not a fringe minority. Not an extremist fringe. One in every two people you see on the street think Britain is becoming “lawless”, which rockets to six in every ten Tory voters and three in four Reform voters.

“The safety of the people”, wrote the great Roman statesman Cicero, who tried to uphold the republic in the face of impending collapse, “shall be the highest law”.

But what happens when the state, and the politicians who run it, no longer appear all that interested in fulfilling their first duty by keeping their own people safe?

What happens when those people look out and see not a safe society but one that appears to be breaking down, wrapped in a culture that’s no longer their own, and in a country that’s fast becoming ungovernable?

And what happens when the people have had enough of watching the rampant law-breaking, the deterioration of their local communities, the degradation of their nation and, even worse, the refusal of their elected officials to do anything about it?

The answer, warned Cicero, is their society …