He was elderly, lived in Brixton, and was much disturbed by violence and drug use in his street, so I was certainly not about to challenge his, as they call it, 'lived experience'.

Plus ca change...the last time that I was in the UK, in early 2019, my taxi-driver from Heathrow regaled me all the way into town with tales of knife crime in London, blamed Theresa May for defunding the police, and complained that London was far more dangerous now than when he came from Pakistan in the 1970s...