I’m not certain either solution would be adopted here. Because if the warders at Belmarsh were to be caught dripping acid into the eyes of teenagers, the Guardian would have something to say about it. And there’d be calls for the police to concentrate on the real criminals such as Andrew Mitchell, Damian Green and various bankers.
Last week a young woman who’d been caught up in the London nightclub attack released photographs of her scars. And they were horrible. I’d quite like to meet the man who caused them, for a laugh, and hammer my point across using an actual hammer.
I was slightly amazed to hear, though, that people who use acid as a weapon here can only be done for grievous bodily harm. Knives and guns will put you in court charged with attempted murder, but it’s felt by someone that acid can only cause harm, not death.
Hmmm. I think if someone were to be lowered into a bath of acid, they would not be thinking as their legs melted, ‘Well, it could be worse. I could have been shot.’ Acid can kill. And acid attacks must be seen that way.
But before we get to the question of punishment, we must first address the problem of supply. Knives are tricky to deal with on this front because everyone needs them for chopping up vegetables or carving meat. Kids can get hold of one by going no further than their mum’s cutlery drawer.
Acid is different. I have never once in fifty-seven years thought, ‘Damn, we are low on hydrochloric acid. I must get some next time I’m in town.’
I appreciate there are various heavy industries that need acid to make bits for ships or fertilizers but, again, I bet they don’t buy their supplies from the local chemist.
Bleach is the only issue, because that’s something most households do need. But bleach in gangland is like a Ruger LC9 handgun. A bit wet. A bit lightweight. You’re not going to rise up the ladder in the criminal underworld if all you have is a bottle of Domestos. In a gang, it’s all about looking cool, and for that you need the AK-47 of acids, the full sulphuric. That stuff can melt bone, man.
So step one, I suggest, is simply to treat it, and all its nasty corrosive brothers, like we treat assault rifles, hand grenades and plutonium. They need to be kept on army bases and transported under heavy guard to places where they are really needed. They should not, ever, fall into the hands of Gazza from Dalston.
Instead, the government is talking about implementing measures that would reverse a recent decision that allows shops to sell corrosive substances without a licence. Whereas what it should be thinking is, ‘Why does any high-street shop need to sell it at all?’
And on that cheery note, happy Christmas to everyone – except Tom Watson.
24 December 2017
Just remind me, please, why we think the world is becoming a better place
Over the Christmas period I was introduced by a friend to Amazon’s Alexa device. It’s amazing. You just say, ‘Alexa, play “Long Train Runnin” ’ by the Doobie Brothers,’ and it goes into a record collection of everything ever written, finds what you want and plays it.
Now, I don’t want to sound like an old man but, if Tomorrow’s World presenter Judith Hann had said to me, as I was taking a record out of its sleeve, carefully dusting it and then placing it on a turntable, that in my lifetime the sky would become a giant voice-activated record player, I’d have laughed at her. And it would have been the same story if she’d said I could sit in a car, on a motorway, and watch a feature film on my telephone.
Thanks to technology, and improved medicine, we think the world is getting better but, if we look back at the events from the past year, we can see that, actually, it isn’t. Not really.
For example, if Hann’s colleague Raymond Baxter had said that in 2017 a Muslim would be so devoted to the cause of Islam that he’d strap some dynamite to his chest and walk into a pop concert that he knew would be full of children – and explode – I’d have thought, ‘Oh dear. The breeze of insanity is blowing through the poor man’s head.’
Especially if he’d gone on to say that people would one day drive their vans down the pavement trying to kill as many pedestrians as possible. We’d seen that in a film – Death Race 2000 – but the idea that it could actually happen would have seemed completely idiotic.
Then there’s the business of nationhood. After the First World War, it was decided that the lump of rock and ice in the Arctic Ocean that is now called Svalbard couldn’t just belong to nobody because a villain might come along and build a rocket site there. So it was gifted to Norway. And with Antarctica buried under a mass of treaties, the world was all sorted out.
Now, though, there are countries throughout the world with no effective government at all. So instead of operating from bedsits in Cologne and Belfast, terrorist groups are able to really stretch their legs. And if they do eventually get pushed out of say, Syria, they simply up sticks and move to Libya.
As a child, I holidayed once in Tunisia and, if William Woollard had popped up and said one day, on this very beach, a man will walk along shooting tourists, I’d have called the police and said a madman was on the loose.
Predicting where the next actual war would come from has always been easy. It was Germany. So who would have said, in the late 1970s, that Britain’s next big scrap would be with Argentina? Or when we were yomping over the Falklands, that twenty years later it’d be Afghanistan? Or that the next big nuclear threat would come from North Korea?
A threat so severe, it seems, that Japan is about to circumvent its pacifist constitution and accept that its collection of grey boats staffed by efficient and uniformed sailors is actually a navy. And not a department of the police force.
And then there’s Africa. I would have assumed that, by now, it’d have all been sorted out. But no. Just last month a coup in Zimbabwe saw the lunatic Mr Robert Mugabe ousted and replaced with a chap called Mr Emmerson Mnangagwa. Who, apparently, is even worse.
There might have been a time when Britain would have flexed its muscles over such a move. But this is not possible any more because our army is on a course, learning to no longer say ‘Ladies and gentlemen’ when addressing a crowd, and the navy’s aircraft carrier has no planes and a leak.
Also, the politicians in London are all consumed with how we are going to leave the EU. That’s all they are doing, all of them. All of the time. It makes you wonder how they fill their days when they don’t have the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland to sort out.
There are similar issues in Spain, which everyone thought had been fixed after General Franco went west. Seems not. As nobody at all predicted, Catalonia decided it wanted to break free and organized an election in which the only people who voted were secessionists.
And lo, when they won, the leaders of the campaign decided that it was all too complicated and fled to Belgium. Anyone see that coming?
Meanwhile, in America – well, what can I say about that? In 2016 the Democrats fielded someone so useless that the election, with some help from the Russians, was won by a dotard who thinks ‘bigly’ is a word.
Everyone predicted that Trump’s victory would herald the end of days but, as he approaches the end of his first year in office, there’s no getting round the fact that the Dow Jones is higher than ever, that his tax cuts will boost the economy and that so far, at least, no actual war has started. It’ll be hilarious if he goes on to become the most successful president yet. Would you bet against it?
Really? In this world? Where no one can predict anything? Harvey Weinstein, for example, could not have predicted this time last year that in the next twelve months he’d have fallen so low that he could never again show his face in public.
Or that by inviting young actresses to watch him shower, he would set in motion a chain of events that would see more than thirty high-ranking people in the entertainment industry and beyond accused of being alleged sexual nuisances and cause a sea change in the way the world works. Now it is pretty much illegal to ask a young woman out.
Who knows where this one will end? Will
the stone continue to roll down the hill, until it becomes socially impossible for men and women to converse? Or will the pendulum swing the other way so that next year the big comedy hit will be a remake of Carry On Camping?
The fact is that we don’t know what will happen next. No one ever has done. A point proved by Tomorrow’s World. Every week it was full of the latest innovations that would shape our lives in the future. And it didn’t see the internet coming.
31 December 2017
THE BEGINNING
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MICHAEL JOSEPH
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
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Michael Joseph is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published 2018
Copyright © Jeremy Clarkson, 2018
‘The Fire Inside’ by Bob Seger © 1991 Gear Publishing Company (GMR). Used by permission.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover illustration by Mark Thomas
ISBN: 978-1-405-93906-5
MONEY’S NO OBJECT AND MEN DON’T COUNT WHEN A WOMAN HAS A HORSE
fn1 Polled no votes at all. © Monty Python
If You'd Just Let Me Finish Page 29
