PETER HITCHENS: I’ve a sneaking suspicion why the Southport child-killer Axel Rudakubana abruptly turned to violence on the age of 13…

A society that does not think does not deserve to survive. The national reaction to the case of the teenage mass-killer Axel Rudakubana is totally unthinking from top to bottom.

Does anyone really believe (as Sir Keir Starmer does) that making knives slightly harder to buy will stop knife crime? No. So that’s that brilliant idea dealt with.

Next? Some try to pretend that Rudakubana, an ignorant, vicious, unhinged dimwit, is a political terrorist because he once looked at a terrorist website on his laptop. They hope this will excuse their dangerous rumour-mongering at the time of the Southport killings, which led to an outbreak of lawless violence. It will not.

Rudakubana is not a terrorist, any more than Paddington Bear is a terrorist. The idea is idiotic. He is plainly crazy, as are many of those who kill on our streets.

A significant number of British people are killed each year by mentally ill persons, though accurate figures are increasingly hard to find.

This fact especially does not suit the Government, which cannot afford to rebuild the badly needed mental hospitals it stupidly sold off 40 years ago.

Rudakubana became crazy around the age of 12 or 13, between being filmed dressed as Doctor Who, cheerful and normal, and becoming the blank-eyed, masked, mumbling grotesque which he now is.

Rudakubana began to display ‘anger issues’ and started to turn to violence around the age of 13. That is usually the point that the children of Britain first encounter marijuana. Within a couple of years, many of them are irreparably damaged, and some are crazily violent.

This happens whether the children involved are in bog-standard comps, slick ‘academies’ or in the smoothest fee-charging establishments.

Marijuana harms all who take it, not least because its victims are told falsely that it is ‘soft’. In fact it is as soft as a nailed club.

Their young brains are half-formed and gravely vulnerable.

It is now quite clear that in some cases the harm is deep and terrible.

Thousands of British families have seen their children tragically decline round about this point in their lives. Some lose the will to work or study and begin lives of drifting. Some lose their minds and can never find them again. In others, it is much, much worse. This is one of the biggest recent social changes in our society and nobody does anything about it because nobody talks about it.

Enforcing the law against marijuana possession is one of the many things the police and courts no longer do. That is why there will be another Rudakubana along pretty soon.

Not that anyone will tell you so, because he will not have been arrested for his illegal drug use, and so there will be no record of it.

All psychiatrists know that some crazy people like to dignify their craziness by adopting political or religious causes they don’t know anything about.

For example, in 2015 a young man called Muhaydin Mire went crazy with a knife at Leytonstone Underground Station in London.

He called out, ‘This is for Syria!’ as he wielded his blade, seriously injuring one of his three victims. I doubt he knew where Syria is, then or later.

For it turned out that he had gone mad after, yes, smoking a lot of marijuana. He was, in fact, so mad that he (literally) thought that Sir Anthony Blair was his guardian angel. He was so mad that his

family had tried to get him put away in a secure mental hospital. Alas these are all full, and harder to get into than Oxbridge colleges, and so their plea was refused.

Even after all this came about, our judicial system continued to insist that his crime was in some way political. Well, there are few better ways to ensure that such horrors continue to happen. Every time they take place, some minister or police chief will at some point say grandly that ‘this must never happen again’.

As they say it, I know it will happen again. I’ve been saying this unceasingly for about 15 years, so I know it’s a bit early to expect anyone to pay any attention.

But our long, stupid indulgence of marijuana use has a huge, bloody price tag attached.

And if you don’t want more Southports, you had blinking well better do something about it.

How can Trump pardon violent culprits involved in this attack?  

I spent much of last week listening to supposed conservatives welcoming the return to the White House of Donald J. Trump. ‘Woke is in retreat!’, they cry. ‘Rejoice!’

Well, let’s see how unwoke the USA actually is after four years of Mr Trump who,

I suspect, cares nothing about this subject. His last stint in office did not make much difference to it, in hard reality.

But even if Mr Trump really is a crusader against political correctness, how high a price are you ready to pay for this?

I’ll leave aside the many repulsive things about the 47th President which all can see. But there is a hard core to his nastiness which is not just ugly and crude. It is flat wrong. What Mr Trump is asking for – if you are a conservative – is your soul. No conservative can scorn the rule of law. Without it, there can be no civilisation and no freedom. So how can you welcome a President who – within hours of coming to power – pardons scores of violent criminals who are also his political supporters?

Those involved played a major part in the shameful attack on the Capitol, symbol of US democracy, when, in January 2021 Mr Trump was claiming he had been robbed of power by a rigged election.

His new Vice-President, JD Vance, said a few days ago: ‘If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.’

Within days, Mr Trump had made a fool of him.

Here’s just one example. Daniel Rodriguez was jailed for 12 years for assaulting police officer Michael Fanone, after other men had dragged him into the mob and then beaten him. Rodriguez plunged a stun gun into the police officer’s neck. The officer later suffered a heart attack.

At a pathetic, rambling, tetchy press conference, in which Mr Trump showed no grasp of the facts, he called one of his questioners ‘horrible’ and absurdly claimed to be the ‘friend of the police‘. I cannot see how any conservative can welcome the arrival in the Oval Office of such a man.