The cold-blooded murder of a young woman on the doorstep of her London home by a teenage hitman was shocking – the price
of a life the £200 paid to the killer.
CCTV pictures released by the Metropolitan Police after the trial showed the gunman pulling the trigger of a sawn-off shotgun before running away and climbing into a minicab.
The assassin, Santre Sanchez Gayle, known for good reason as “Riot” on the streets of north London where he caused mayhem with a gang called the Kensal Green Boys, was just 15 when he was hired to fatally shoot Gulistan Subasi, a 26-year-old woman he didn’t know, in Hackney.
It’s a distressing, disturbing case. A boy not yet old enough to drive, buy cigarettes, order a pint or vote (although I concede the latter was unlikely to have been a major goal in his life, while I suspect he may have enjoyed the others) deliberately took the life of another human being in a chillingly calculated crime.
The police described Gayle as damaged and easily manipulated, which is invariably true when one so young commits a heinous offence, yet you’d expect a politician on the make to ignore the rarity of the case to issue sweeping, misleading generalisations. To declare he thinks society is in dangerous reverse, communities crumbling, respect for people gone, the breakdown of families the final nail in the coffin of a country in dire need of renewal under a new leader. Which brings me to David Cameron.
Have you noticed the Con-servative leader ditched his ludicrous “Broken Britain” rhetoric almost as soon as he installed his hairdryer in Downing Street? It was as if a troubled land was healed by his very presence in Number 10. Up until May last year, Broken Britain was one of Cameron’s favourite refrains. It was also one of his most disreputable in a packed field.
I recall Cameron shamelessly misusing, in January 2010, an awful incident in Doncaster, arguing that two young brothers who tortured a pair of boys in South Yorkshire were part of what was “going wrong” in Britain. It wasn’t. Any more than was Baby Peter’s tragic death in Haringey, which Cameron also seized on for political advantage.
These are, thankfully, relatively rare occurrences. The rarity is underlined by the fact we heard of each of them, the shock value garnering newspaper and television headlines. The same is true of James Bulger’s death in the first half of the 1990s, a heart-breaking loss of life which Tony Blair too, to his discredit, exploited.
Britain wasn’t broken under Labour. The irony is that Cameron has dropped the Broken Britain rhetoric when he’s smashing public services.
The National Health Service will not survive in its current form if the Con-Dems theatrical pause opens the door to “any willing provider” cherry-picking bits ripe for privatisation.
Local authorities are being strangled by spending cuts, which will force councillors to make some pretty unpleasant choices. Slashing spending on police forces by 20 per cent will make communities less safe not safer.
And Cameron has broken the Royal Navy by scuppering its aircraft carrier, an act which on its own would have sunk Labour but triggered no more than a little muffled fire from the right-wing newspapers.
Britons will be Broken when poverty begins soaring, as it will, reductions in child and pensioner poverty achieved over 13 years wiped out as benefits are cut and living standards squeezed.
The children’s centres of Sure Start will be rubbed out, erasing the chances of kids from disadvantaged homes getting on in life.
I’d like to think Cameron is ashamed of his Broken Britain guff, realising it was only ever a great deceit when he’s a vandal-in-chief. But I’d be wrong.
The Prime Spinner is flogging the dead horse that is the Big Society because he feels it’s more aspirational, cover for cuts by asserting it is in the public good we do for free what he is chopping.
Only the naive would buy his Big Con and, thankfully, on this occasion the British public is refusing to be fooled by Cameron’s shoddy spin.
The Labour leadership’s inability to make Cameron’s life a misery is one of the missed open goals of modern politics. The coalition repeatedly trips itself up, an incompetent shambles by any measure.
But with a few honourable exceptions, the Labour hierarchy’s failing to do the business. Cameron cannot believe his luck. The danger is, with Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems an in-built opposition of sorts, Labour is seen as irrelevant. It’s as bad as that.
Unless Ed Miliband and Labour raises its game – and fast – Cameron will be in Downing Street for more than one term.
*****
So Apache helicopters are to fly from the deck of HMS Ocean to blast Libyan targets. RAF planes already fire missiles. British special forces are on the ground in North Africa. Military “advisors” guide rebels. And the bill will soon hit £1 billion.
Surprised? I’m not surprised. Cameron presented Libya as an easy hit and Miliband bought into that, swayed by an admirable desire to assist Libyans demanding freedom and a less admirable fear to do otherwise would make him look weak.
The public called Libya correctly from the beginning. It was sceptical. And that’s the position the Labour leadership should have adopted.
