Farage says woke kills - and the real, hard questions we could be asking are swamped by the culture war |
Emma Webber brought one of her son’s old T-shirts to the hearings into how he died. Holding on to Barney’s clothes is comforting, as is sometimes sleeping in his bed. He was only 19, a student walking home at night with his friend Grace O’Malley-Kumar, when both were fatally stabbed by a paranoid schizophrenic recently discharged from hospital who wasn’t taking his medication.
Valdo Calocane went on to kill 65-year-old school caretaker Ian Coates and gravely injure three others that night before being caught. The T-shirt is still here but Barney is not, as his mother said in a video this week offering her sympathies to the parents of 18-year-old Henry Nowak, the Southampton student who died in handcuffs at the feet of police who failed to realise he was the victim not the aggressor in an attack they had been falsely told was racist.
The two families have never met but are bonded both in grief and in a desire to avoid what Webber called “political grandstanding”. The Nottingham families fought like tigers for a public inquiry into how Calocane was free to kill, which heard evidence on everything from bed shortages and the dismantling of specialist teams seeking out high-risk patients, to the former mental health tsar Prof Louis Appleby’s warning last week that the pendulum had swung too far from public safety towards respecting patients’ wishes. They fervently hope its findings, due next year, will save lives. Yet, if the right........