Righteous rage
WHAT a moment of abject shame for our police and prosecutors, rightly torn apart by the families of Valdo Calocane’s victims.
Their rage and betrayal is off the scale.
Victim Barnaby Webber’s mum Emma said: ‘We have been railroaded. True justice has not been served’[/caption]
A cunning, calculating killer butchered Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates.
But there will be no decades of hard time for him.
Judged schizophrenic, he will spend his life in a cushy mental hospital, perhaps playing snooker, learning the saxophone or painting.
That is hard enough to stomach for the families who are certain he knew right from wrong.
But they claim they had no say in it either — that the downgrading of the murder charges to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility was presented as a done deal.
As Barnaby’s mum Emma said: “We have been railroaded. True justice has not been served.”
If so, who at the CPS, knowing what these poor people had already endured, treated them with such contempt?
As for the mental health teams who lost Calocane, and the cops who failed to arrest him, we despair.
Emma says they have blood on their hands.
It’s hard to disagree.
Resist, Rishi
YOU would expect an international court to kick off if a member state threatened to ignore its rulings.
It’s not likely to admit they’re optional.
But Rishi Sunak must stand firm against the ECHR over the small boats.
First because its ban halting the first Rwanda flight, by a nameless judge in the dead of night, was a left-wing stitch-up.
Second because there are greater concerns than our slavish loyalty to a foreign court we should arguably quit.
Like stopping migrants drowning — and preventing 30,000 others a year from continuing to overwhelm our resources.
The Remainer Left shriek that only “Tory fascists” would defy the ECHR.
What guff. France did so to enforce a deportation Strasbourg disapproved of.
Not a peep then from the Europhile mob.
A bigger stick
FOR decades after the Cold War, Britain and the West grew complacent about peace.
We shamefully slashed our forces.
Putin was considered a mere rogue.
But he is a monster, hell-bent now on building a Russian empire via conquest, and with his economy retooled for war.
Britain already spends more than most Nato members on defence but that will not nearly suffice if Putin takes Ukraine and comes for more.
Donald Trump, if re-elected President, could even pull America out of the alliance. What then?
Other members need to double their spending.
We must get ours to three per cent of GDP — and dramatically increase our manpower and arms before it’s too late.