This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

After more than 40 years as a journalist at home and abroad, often experiencing history at first hand, I am certain of only one thing – that most people in power are completely clueless about what they are doing.

They seldom, if ever, think. They know no history. They are fiercely resistant to any facts that might upset their opinions. They take no trouble to find out what is actually happening.

Here is an example. Ian Austin MP, a member of Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee, last week extruded the following opinion: ‘The police’s number one job is to catch criminals so they can be convicted.’ He was objecting to a scheme that gave priority to contact with the public.

I am pretty sure the same dim view is shared across Parliament, in every police HQ and in most media outlets in the country. Yet it is utterly, totally mistaken. Every arrest and prosecution is, in fact, a failure by the police. It’s necessary, but it’s also secondary.

Their job, the reason we hired them in 1829, was to prevent crime and disorder. That’s what the constable’s oath says, and they successfully did prevent huge amounts of crime and disorder for more than a century, by patrolling on foot.

And so it continued until the country went mad 50 years ago in the first heady years of the Age of Mistakes in which we continue to live – the era of instant mashed potato, Jimmy Savile, Watney’s Red Barrel, tower blocks, comprehensive schools, votes for teenagers, inner ring roads, the Common Market and Dr Beeching’s railway massacre.

What use is a police officer after a crime has been committed, unless he can do first aid?

Most of those errors were made in public view, cheered on, as usual, by the political and commentating classes who invariably mistake novelty for progress.

But the decision to abolish police foot patrols went unnoticed at the time. It was only afterwards that British people of a certain age wondered where the police – once visible everywhere – vanished to.

For the decision was taken in secret, by an unknown body called the Home Office Police Advisory Board, on December 7, 1966. It was adopted by new, unwieldy and unresponsive merged police forces that were created soon afterwards.

Since then, the police do not prevent crime or disorder. They wait for it to happen, and then come rushing along to the scene of their failure, accompanied by loud electronic screams and wails and flashing lights.

What use is a police officer after a crime has been committed, unless he can do first aid? He cannot unstab, unshoot, unburgle, unmug or unrape the victim.

Nothing he does can bring back what has been lost. The chances are that he cannot find or catch the culprit – and if he does, the miscreant will get off anyway, and skip, laughing, down the steps of the courthouse, as two did last week.

If you wait for people to commit crimes before you do anything, you will never, ever be able to build enough prisons to hold them.

It’s obvious if you think about it. It’s not obvious if you don’t.

Proof the Tories stand for nothing

I suppose if a Left-wing political party sought cash from pornographers, it would make a kind of sense.

The Left, after all, cheered on the liberation of pornography by ripping up the obscenity laws and deriding poor old Lord Longford when he tried to warn against this.

But if a party that calls itself ‘Conservative’ readily seeks the money and friendship of such people, it robs itself of its right to use this name.

If conservatism doesn’t stand for faithful marriage, unselfish love, constancy and modesty, then what does it stand for? Anyone who still deludes himself that the Cameron Tories offer any hope to the country will deserve what he gets.

We should pick our 'friends' with a bit more care

Here is a Chinese billionaire, Liu Han, being hauled away by the police. He looks terrified, and with reason. He is now dead, having been executed a few days ago. He may be shouting: ‘I’ve been framed!’ He certainly did so during his sentencing hearing.

Because China has no independent courts, no juries, no presumption of innocence, and because its press is not just unfree but chained to the state, I have no idea if he is guilty of the charges of gangsterism laid against him.

This is interesting because this country and its leaders have good and close relations with China, whose government famously massacred its ‘own people’ in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and got away with it. It seems we send a trade delegation there every week, begging for business and stifling misgivings about the appalling lack of freedom.

In the same way, we are still on good terms with Saudi Arabia, a heavily armed and secretive despotism which bans the practice of Christianity, stages public beheadings and sentences polite and cautious dissidents to murderous floggings. Yet we snarl and snap with righteous moral outrage at Vladimir Putin’s Russia, supposedly a unique demon among nations.

This is silly, and if we do not grow out of it we may find ourselves in a futile and dangerous war in Ukraine, no affair of ours anyway, under the delusion that it is some sort of crusade.

I should point out here that Ukraine is no angel. To say it is corrupt is like saying that the Atlantic is a bit damp. Its leader, Petro Poroshenko, threatened to impose martial law last week. A Ukrainian journalist, Ruslan Kotsaba, was detained last week for protesting against highly unpopular (and widely ignored) efforts to impose conscription, which have led to a temporary ban on foreign travel for men of military age.

Poroshenko is not in full control of the piratical ultra-nationalist militias which are doing much of the ‘pro-Western’ fighting in and around Donetsk.

In fact, I suspect he fears to make peace on sensible terms in case these people violently overthrow him – as they did to his predecessor Viktor Yanukovych.

To those who persist in making out that this is a simple conflict between good and bad, I can only say: Grow up.

There's a serious gap in the regulation of charities. What are we to do when worrying questions are asked about the running of much loved charities that do a great deal of good?

We want to be sure our money is being effectively spent. Last week, The Spectator magazine raised questions about Kids Company, run by Camila Batmanghelidjh.

The Charities Commission, which most people assume keeps an eye on such things, has limited powers and is reluctant to use them.

The best solution, for charities and the public, would surely be a new body with the power to conduct a wholly independent audit of any charity.

Now that the baseless campaign against cream and butter has at last been exposed as the rubbish it was, can we please see the end of the tyranny of skimmed and semi-skimmed milk, horrible in tea or coffee, and probably bad for you.

Amazingly, many coffee shops don’t even stock or use whole milk. Boycott them till they end this stupid policy.

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