As soon as news broke about the armed raid on the Securitas Depot in Tonbridge, Kent, my typical but evil, middle-aged mind read the runes.  The gang held the depot manager, his wife and their 8-year old son captive and got clean away with an unknown sum between £25 million and £50 million.  When Kent Police Assistant Chief Constable Adrian Leppard told reporters that the robbery was executed with military precision by a professional gang operating at the “top level” of organised crime, really, there was little room for doubt that the felons were of the eponymous East End type, ie white dinosaurs with sawn-off shotguns.

Ordinarily, when a major crime story hits the headlines we find the media uniformly too embarrassed to report the awful multicultural truth.  Witnesses, apparently, describe only “men”.  Plod stays as mum as possible.  Then a “man” is captured with his trousers down in a motel in Leicester, and hauled in for questioning.  The charge sheet is made out.  The name - damnit, yes the name - has to be released to the press, who must report it even if everything else about the accused remains an official secret.

After the “guilty” verdict, of course, there has to be the release of a mugshot.  The public discovers to its general amusement that Mkuti Nkibo or whoever isn’t the feckless son of a capstan lathe operator from Wigan and grandson of a lad who played in the Wanderer’s reserves between the wars.

With the Tonbridge raid, however, I thought we might get to play this game in reverse - starting with the felons’ ethnicity and working back towards their names.  Cautious type that I am (more cautious, for instance, than “Lurker” who has already pronounced here via a thread comment) I have held off posting.  But all of a sudden the media are chancers when it comes to crime, and the Telegraph’s Leo McKinstry has beaten me to it in splendid fashion.

He writes:-

One of the BBC’s biggest recent hits has been Life on Mars, in which a modern detective travels back in time to solve crimes in the 1970s. There can be little doubt that the central reason for its success has been the way the programme evokes a spirit of nostalgia for an era before the advent of the human rights culture, when the police did not show too much sensitivity towards the criminal classes and coppers were more concerned about nicking offenders than celebrating multicultural diversity.

Something of the same spirit arises from news of the raid by an armed gang on a Securitas depot in Kent. In the biggest robbery in British history, about £40 million is estimated to have been stolen. Yet for all its sophistication, this seems a curiously old-fashioned crime. In an age of global terrorism, people trafficking, identity theft and drugs cartels, the theft of banknotes from an industrial estate looks almost anachronistic.

And many other features of the raid smack of a bygone age. The Kent police have brought in Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad, a name that conjures up images of The Sweeney and policing by instinct, not the rulebook. Similarly, the Three Squirrels, the Kent pub outside which the unfortunate manager was held up, is the sort of place whose title would have featured in an unconvincing thriller of the 1960s.

... the raid appears to be a throwback to another time. Robberies of vast sums of cash, particularly from banks, were at their peak from the 1960s to the late 1980s. The Great Train Robbery, when £2.6 million was stolen from the Glasgow-London mail in 1963, was the most famous, but there was a host of other daring incidents, such as the theft of £10 million in goods from 120 safe deposit boxes in Knightsbridge in 1987, or the

£6 million take from a Security Express depot in Shoreditch, east London, in April 1983. In 1972, there were 65 armed robberies in the London area alone.

But, gradually, towards the end of the 1980s, police reform began to yield results. Gangs were broken up by super-grasses, while improved surveillance, such as CCTV and security techniques, also restricted the opportunities for theft.

Just as importantly, the criminals themselves had begun to realise that conducting armed bank robberies - or “going over the pavement”, to use the underworld’s parlance - was far less lucrative and more dangerous than the drugs trade.

... The problem for the traditional, white, London gangsters is that the drugs business is truly multicultural. Those playing this game have to operate in a climate dominated by the Russian mafia, Jamaican Yardies, Islamic terrorists and Colombian smugglers. After a few years of trying to deal with such hardcore brutes, armed robbery might seem a more appealing prospect, even if it is less instantly rewarding. It is perhaps telling that this week’s raid was perpetrated in Tonbridge in Kent, a neighbourhood to which many of the old white south London criminal families emigrated.

McKinstry does not make the point that the careful planning of this raid required intelligence.  Nor does he say that its MO, in which the murder of innocents actually means something and isn’t a first resort, bespeaks some connectivity at least to the white kidnap victims, some valuation on their lives.  But what a remarkably frank and, in the context of the police investigation, precocious article he has written.  It can only mean that the post-1948 immigrant is now the stereotypical, professional criminal in England.  We can say it.  The ridiculous official effort to make out otherwise only damns the Establishment alongside the criminals.