Armed police in Westminster. Not an unusual sight at all. But passing one the other day made me and my colleague, Dr Madsen Pirie, reflect on how quickly things had changed in Britain - which once prided itself on having a police force that did not need to be armed with anything more dangerous than a whistle. Without any great national debate, we now have an armed constabulary.

Sure, Westminster is full of terrorist targets. But I can see why coppers everywhere else feel the need to be armed too. The latest "International Comparisons of Criminal Justice Statistcs" show that Britain now has the worst record in Western Europe for killings, violence and burglary.

In 2001, UK police recorded 870,000 violent crimes, far more than the next worst, France, at 279,000, and nearly five times Germany's 188,000. Burglaries, at 470,000, were again well ahead of France (210,000) and Germany (133,000).

You can probably suggest reasons why things have got so bad. I can think of several possibilities - and they start with a state-monopoly school system that is no longer prepared to instill in kids that some ways of living are simply wrong, because - as we are now discovering to our cost - they are socially pathological. Insist on parental responsibility and, through parental choice and competitive supply, put parents back in charge of education: that, I think, would have more long-term effect on crime than any number of razzmatazz government "initiatives".