The Daily Telegraph

The day I first arrived in Nigeria, in the northern city of Maiduguri, everyone was away at the public executions. The men to be executed were armed robbers. I didn't feel particularly outraged, because I knew that public executions would draw crowds wherever in the world they were held. Of course, I also suspected what I discovered on subsequent visits to Nigeria to be true, namely that the biggest armed robbers of all were the police.

Now, in accordance with Sharia law, they are going to stone an adulteress to death in northern Nigeria. Those who will cast the stones (if the highest court in the land permits the sentence to be carried out) will no doubt have a whale of a time, as will the spectators: for few things are more enjoyable than unutterable cruelty committed in the name of justice and virtue.

The way in which the police van carrying Maxine Carr, the woman accused of perverting the course of justice during the investigation into the abduction and killing of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, was attacked by a howling mob demonstrates how popular public executions and Sharia law would be in Britain.

Indeed one suspects that, given the chance, much of the population would probably dispense with due process altogether, as being unnecessarily and dangerously cumbersome. This is certainly the view of successive British governments, that have been slowly eroding the accumulated rules of due process in this country, by abolishing the right to silence, and by trying to introduce preventive detention supervised by doctors.

It might be considered unfair to compare the stoning to death of an adulteress with the behaviour of a mob outside a British court. After all, the sin of adultery is not a serious and punishable crime in the eyes of civilised people, while the murder and abduction of two little girls most certainly is. To execute an adulteress is far worse than screaming abuse at someone accused of perverting the course of justice in a case of this gravity. The two situations are simply not comparable.

On the other hand, the adulteress has at least been found guilty according to the evidence. Maxine Carr is not guilty of anything, but in cases involving sexual offences or children, the mob, like so many in Britain, has no conception of innocence until proof of guilt. Indeed, acquittal means nothing to them: a person is guilty if charged, or even if merely the subject of rumour, and what the courts determine is of no account whatever.

Not long ago, for example, I had a patient who had been charged with a sexual offence who was conclusively proven in court to be innocent: indeed, two of his accusers were subsequently imprisoned for perjury. But it made no difference: he was obliged, for his own safety, to change his name and live elsewhere. In much of Britain, mob law rules, and it cannot be too long before the first lynching takes place.

The hypocrisy of the executioners and would-be executioners in Nigeria is no greater than that of the British mob. In Nigeria, armed robbers execute armed robbers, and adulterers execute (or hope to execute) adulteresses: in Britain, child abusers abuse child abusers.

In my experience from the prison in which I work, men who are charged with having sexual relations with underage adolescent girls are often reported to the police (and subsequently charged and imprisoned) not because they have had sex with these girls, but because they have stopped having sex with these girls: and hell hath no fury like an adolescent girl scorned.

Often, her sexual relations have been connived at by the parents of the child, by neighbours and (of course) by her doctor, who has provided her with contraceptives.

Outrage is felt only post facto: and the man becomes a sex offender, a "perv" who needs protection in prison from the uncontainable moral outrage of burglars and muggers, not because of what he has done, but because he has been found out.

The age of consent has been abolished from below; and as far as much of the population is concerned, the law has nothing to do with justice or truth, but is merely a means of procuring its ends, petty personal revenge prominently among them. When it comes to hypocrisy, neither Nigerian mullahs nor executioners have much to teach the British population.

Even if one had not known that there were young children in the mob outside the courthouse when Maxine Carr arrived, who were terrified by the heaving, menacing mass and the screams of obscenity uttered by the adults, one would know from experience (by the faces, by the deportment, by the mode of dress, by the manner of speech) that at least some of the adults in that mob could themselves be responsible for the abuse of children: by neglect, by abandonment, by serial step-parenting, by alternating arbitrary discipline with gross overindulgence, by violence and by all the other means by which contemporary British parents condemn their children to a life of asocial egotism and continual sordid crisis.

I hold no brief for the northern Nigerians: the cruelty and hypocrisy of the sentence upon Amina Lawal, the adulteress, appals me. I don't believe that northern Nigeria is peopled by men who are utterly faithful to their wives, who have a right to stone adulteresses to death.

But I live in Britain, and what I see around me appals me more, partly because as a Briton what happens here is more important to me than what happens in West Africa, and partly because it is, in its own way, at least as bad.

I see mass incompetence, insouciance, laziness, indifference, stupidity, cruelty and neglect in the rearing of children, for which no amount of ersatz emotion over the death of the two little girls, or a minute's silence in supermarkets, can compensate.

I see the bringing into the world of children by parents who have given no serious thought to the matter, who have neither the capacity nor the intention to devote themselves to the welfare of their offspring, who imagine that their parental responsibilities are fulfilled by an occasional trip to MacDonald's, the purchase of the latest overpriced trainers and a television in every bedroom.

Most of the torrential emotion expressed after the disappearance of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman has the same relation to true feeling as kitsch has to art: it is the product not only of bad taste, but of a profound and entirely justified guilt. It is symptomatic of a nation that has gone entirely to seed.