If we had a proper patrolling police force of the old kind, many of these incidents would never happen. Such a force would apply the boring laws on drug possession which our armed and scowling gendarmes, and their soppy, pseudo-intellectual chief officers, think are beneath them. Through their intimate knowledge of their beats and their frequent contact with the law-abiding, they would be aware of the strange behaviour of such people long before it became a danger.

For an unarmed, modest, old-fashioned police force, which walks quietly among us, has millions of willing eyes and ears, in the shape of a friendly and supportive public.

But an armed state militia, dressed for combat with its face set in a rigid frown and its hands ever reaching for gun, club or handcuffs, such as we now have, is a stranger to the people. And as well as making us look like a foreign despotism, it will fail in its task.

Our results suggest that fishing at the current scale is enabled by large government subsidies, without which as much as 54% of the present high-seas fishing grounds would be unprofitable at current fishing rates. The patterns of fishing profitability vary widely between countries, types of fishing, and distance to port. Deep-sea bottom trawling often produces net economic benefits only thanks to subsidies, and much fishing by the world’s largest fishing fleets would largely be unprofitable without subsidies and low labor costs. These results support recent calls for subsidy and fishery management reforms on the high seas.