Can someone explain how the third runway will end up with a £49bn cost? That just seems so out of this world for what is a land purchase and a few kilometres of tarmac.
Can anyone explain to me how we are considering spending all that money on Heathrow, which is a bloody fool place for an airport anyway, and not on HS2/HS3 where it would make a major difference to the national economy outside London?
Ah, hold on, now I get it.
Eh? "We", as in the taxpayers, aren't spending a penny on the third runway - it will be borrowed by BAA and paid eventually through regulated airport charges and shopping revenue, unlike HS2 and HS3 that have to be paid for mostly by taxpayers because the fare revenue won't remotely cover the gigantic construction costs.
I think the third runway is a terrible idea myself. Even the airlines don't want it as it will result in a tripling of the charges they pay, which are already the highest in Europe. Much better and cheaper to expand Gatwick, Luton and Stansted.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
There are also offences of causing death by careless driving and causing serious injury by dangerous or careless driving which did not exist even as recently as 2005.
Back then it was only causing death by dangerous driving, dangerous driving, careless driving or causing death by careless driving while under the influence of drink or drugs
Yes - however those in the past would usually have been charged with a different offence - eg careless. So it may not be fewer charged offences, but different offences.
(We are still missing "causing injury by careless / dangerous", as "serious injury" starts at "broken bones" approximately. So the injury less than that is down to civil action, though I think Courts in England may have discretion to order compensation, as they do to impose driving bans, but it would be very rarely used.)
Compared to HS2, you do see how Heathrow is going to get the cash back mind. Increase of 66m passengers a year - £38/additional passenger over 20 years or £15 over 50 years.
Yes, there's a 25y payback period even with no significant price rises just due to the extra volume and rental space in a new terminal building. If Heathrow even get a third of the proposed price rises past the airlines that will bring the payback period down to 15 years but I expect the airlines will tell them to get fucked. Even at 25y it's pretty easy to justify, but £49bn just feels like such a big number for a project that was estimated at £18bn in 2016.
England pace bowler Chris Woakes has been ruled out of the remainder of the decisive fifth Test against India after suffering a shoulder injury on the opening day at The Oval.
So a wicket keeper can be replaced (for fielding). But bowlers and batsmen cannot be replaced to do their specialist skill set.
I know cricket doesn't want to go down the road of substitutes taking an active role but I don't understand why there is an exception for keepers. As PB's will know, keeping is a specialist art.
Because the alternative could be pretty hazardous.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
England pace bowler Chris Woakes has been ruled out of the remainder of the decisive fifth Test against India after suffering a shoulder injury on the opening day at The Oval.
So a wicket keeper can be replaced (for fielding). But bowlers and batsmen cannot be replaced to do their specialist skill set.
I know cricket doesn't want to go down the road of substitutes taking an active role but I don't understand why there is an exception for keepers. As PB's will know, keeping is a specialist art.
Because the alternative could be pretty hazardous.
I'm not seeing it. Standing back you are a slip with gloves. Standing up (a) its usually to a spinner and (b) you have pads, box and gloves.
I'm not seeing the hazard to be honest. Not with helmets.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
There's a slight problem isn't there with people who say we should go by the statistics, not perception. This is the exact opposite of what the same people say when it comes to lots of other things when they use the phrase "lived experience" to trump everything else. So racism is lower today than it was in the 1970s but that doesn't matter because the lived experience of some people today is that it's worse than then.
"BBC faces mounting calls to pull MasterChef series"
Tyranny of the minority. Only one person has objected among all the contestants. The only people it actually will hurt is the contestants, who won't get shown and for the ones that shine this is their big break.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
I wonder if there is also some kind of homogenisation effect.
Go back to my childhood, and there were nice places and nasty places, and you could avoid a lot of trouble by avoiding the nasty places. Now, for whatever reason, that is less effective. Maybe the crims are more mobile, maybe we just don't look out for our neighbours quite as well.
Not difficult to have less crime overall, but more crime affecting people with a voice.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
I wonder if there is also some kind of homogenisation effect.
Go back to my childhood, and there were nice places and nasty places, and you could avoid a lot of trouble by avoiding the nasty places. Now, for whatever reason, that is less effective. Maybe the crims are more mobile, maybe we just don't look out for our neighbours quite as well.
Not difficult to have less crime overall, but more crime affecting people with a voice.
A good example of crime being more mobile, county lines. The much more tame local drug dealers in small towns has now been driven out by much more violent big city gangs bringing their "beefs" over territory.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
In terms of spread of crime, I would guess that the internet has made it very easy to scope out all areas of the country and also knowledge can spread really quickly both where is worth doing crime but also how to do crime and reduce being detected / caught.
The resurgence in stealing of cars is definitely down to this. Every measure the car companies put in place, as soon as one person has defeated them, that knowledge spreads like wildfire. In the 80s, some kids works out a weakness in a particular car, the whole country won't know the next day.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
To use an old term, a recession is seen as being more like an "Act of God", or as our ancestors would have seen it, like The Year the Harvest Failed. A bad thing, but you tighten your belts, eke out resources, and wait for a better time.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
Or rather, inflation is quite bad for everyone, unemployment is horrible for the unemployed but no problem at all for the vast majority still in work.
Sweating off the bust following a boom via inflation might be morally preferable to doing it via unemployment, but it's hard to win an election afterwards.
Hopefully we can bat well and get to around 350 which should make the series win safe.
I had the sense last night that England needed the close more than India did, and that has come true today. Although the day was reduced in overs, it was a long day, Woakes injured himself, and I felt that they let India get away a bit. Most of the damage has been contained this morning though.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
I just don't think there is much evidence for the increase in sexual assaults. It's bumping around quite a lot; there might be an upwards trend from 2014 to now, but it's not clear and we'd need a statistician to test it. Rape in particular is basically flat, and not higher than 2011, 2008.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
In terms of spread of crime, I would guess that the internet has made it very easy to scope out all areas of the country and also knowledge can spread really quickly both where is worth doing crime but also how to do crime and reduce being detected / caught.
The resurgence in stealing of cars is definitely down to this. Every measure the car companies put in place, as soon as one person has defeated them, that knowledge spreads like wildfire. In the 80s, some kids works out a weakness in a particular car, the whole country won't know the next day.
I think the tipping point for people thinking we’re a lawless/broken country is when they have their mobile/smart tech stolen.
They go to the police and say FindMy iPhone tells me my phone is at this address and the police say ‘nah, can’t do anything about it, here’s a crime reference number, claim on your insurance.’
It’s happened to a lot of friends, it irks, especially when you don’t have insurance to claim on.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
What really annoys me, and I suspect millions of other voters, is that the government are now less good at what I would consider their prime responsibilities - like making sure our borders are secure, preventing crime (in many cases by keeping criminals off the streets), and that people who work or receive benefits have the right to do so - whilst at the same time getting involved in more and more of everyone's lives. Whether it is the idiotic online safety malarkey, or the feeding of children at schools, or insisting you need various types of ID to fulfil tasks that never required these.
Hopefully we can bat well and get to around 350 which should make the series win safe.
Yes agree. I suppose the critical question is whether the extra bulk (apparently he is walking around at 185lbs!!!) before he gets down to 168 will slow him down or whether he will retain his sharpness and the extra weight will give him more power. Tony Bellew thinks the latter. It's difficult to back against Crawford and after Bivol we know that Canelo isn't invincible, but that was a different kettle of maggots. Bivol was the bigger man (and it showed). Meanwhile Bud is coming up in weight. And how.
Canelo is favourite (1.62 bf) but as I say it's difficult to back against Bud. I would back Crawford (2.82 bf). It's going to be a cracker.
In terms of spread of crime, I would guess that the internet has made it very easy to scope out all areas of the country and also knowledge can spread really quickly both where is worth doing crime but also how to do crime and reduce being detected / caught.
The resurgence in stealing of cars is definitely down to this. Every measure the car companies put in place, as soon as one person has defeated them, that knowledge spreads like wildfire. In the 80s, some kids works out a weakness in a particular car, the whole country won't know the next day.
I think the tipping point for people thinking we’re a lawless/broken country is when they have their mobile/smart tech stolen.
They go to the police and say FindMy iPhone tells me my phone is at this address and the police say ‘nah, can’t do anything about it, here’s a crime reference number, claim on your insurance.’
It’s happened to a lot of friends, it irks, especially when you don’t have insurance to claim on.
Well thats another aspect, the detection rate / clearance rate for these "low level" crimes is basically low single digits. So not only are you a victim, but the police just shrug at you.
I remember our family home was burgled in the 90s, the plod were all over it and caught the scumbags within days and it was found they had done something like 20 homes in a couple of weeks. That doesn't happen now for plebs like we were.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
There's a slight problem isn't there with people who say we should go by the statistics, not perception. This is the exact opposite of what the same people say when it comes to lots of other things when they use the phrase "lived experience" to trump everything else. So racism is lower today than it was in the 1970s but that doesn't matter because the lived experience of some people today is that it's worse than then.
I can't think of anyone who thinks racism is generally worse today than in the 1970s. The point is usually that racism hasn't gone away or been solved. So, the situation might be better than in the 1970s, but it's still bad.
Also, I don't think the people who "say we should go by the statistics, not perception" are "the same people" who "use the phrase "lived experience" to trump everything else".
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
What really annoys me, and I suspect millions of other voters, is that the government are now less good at what I would consider their prime responsibilities - like making sure our borders are secure, preventing crime (in many cases by keeping criminals off the streets), and that people who work or receive benefits have the right to do so - whilst at the same time getting involved in more and more of everyone's lives. Whether it is the idiotic online safety malarkey, or the feeding of children at schools, or insisting you need various types of ID to fulfil tasks that never required these.
And an awful lot of those things go back to the Tory party saying shop lifting isn’t important enough for the police to deal with and similar with the boats where processing asylum cases was deprioritized because it meant they could reduce processing costs (as welfare and housing costs are in a different departments budget)
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
I just don't think there is much evidence for the increase in sexual assaults. It's bumping around quite a lot; there might be an upwards trend from 2014 to now, but it's not clear and we'd need a statistician to test it. Rape in particular is basically flat, and not higher than 2011, 2008.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
Rape is way up. And the idea this is just “better reporting” or “new methods of recording” is insulting. Lefties said the same thing about the huge rise in rapes in Sweden until the evidence otherwise became overwhelming
It wasn’t a statistical anomaly. The rise was real and the rise was largely due to immigration
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
What really annoys me, and I suspect millions of other voters, is that the government are now less good at what I would consider their prime responsibilities - like making sure our borders are secure, preventing crime (in many cases by keeping criminals off the streets), and that people who work or receive benefits have the right to do so - whilst at the same time getting involved in more and more of everyone's lives. Whether it is the idiotic online safety malarkey, or the feeding of children at schools, or insisting you need various types of ID to fulfil tasks that never required these.
Defending borders, controlling crime, maintaining the value of the currency are the ancient responsibilities of governments, and governments that fail in those respects are usually in trouble.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
What really annoys me, and I suspect millions of other voters, is that the government are now less good at what I would consider their prime responsibilities - like making sure our borders are secure, preventing crime (in many cases by keeping criminals off the streets), and that people who work or receive benefits have the right to do so - whilst at the same time getting involved in more and more of everyone's lives. Whether it is the idiotic online safety malarkey, or the feeding of children at schools, or insisting you need various types of ID to fulfil tasks that never required these.
And an awful lot of those things go back to the Tory party saying shop lifting isn’t important enough for the police to deal with and similar with the boats where processing asylum cases was deprioritized because it meant they could reduce processing costs (as welfare and housing costs are in a different departments budget)
The Conservatives simply did not consider criminal justice or defence to be priorities, which is extraordinary really.
Protecting the lifestyles and property values of the better off retired, on the other hand, was about the only priority.
Compared to HS2, you do see how Heathrow is going to get the cash back mind. Increase of 66m passengers a year - £38/additional passenger over 20 years or £15 over 50 years.
Yes, there's a 25y payback period even with no significant price rises just due to the extra volume and rental space in a new terminal building. If Heathrow even get a third of the proposed price rises past the airlines that will bring the payback period down to 15 years but I expect the airlines will tell them to get fucked. Even at 25y it's pretty easy to justify, but £49bn just feels like such a big number for a project that was estimated at £18bn in 2016.
It'll have doubled over the last 10 years through inflation and addition of bullsh1t process alone.
Against the costs, you need the benefits for the UK economy. Extra 66 million passengers a year and maintaining Heathrow as a hub and spoke airport is hugely important for the UK economy, worth in the hundreds of billions.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
I just don't think there is much evidence for the increase in sexual assaults. It's bumping around quite a lot; there might be an upwards trend from 2014 to now, but it's not clear and we'd need a statistician to test it. Rape in particular is basically flat, and not higher than 2011, 2008.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
Rape is way up. And the idea this is just “better reporting” or “new methods of recording” is insulting. Lefties said the same thing about the huge rise in rapes in Sweden until the evidence otherwise became overwhelming
It wasn’t a statistical anomaly. The rise was real and the rise was largely due to immigration
You are in danger of conflation. Most rape is NOT the stranger in the dark alley, its someone known to the victim, often someone who is in an intimate relationship but chooses not to consent. How many cases of rape by immigrants can you point to? Pretty sure Reform will be all over them.
Society has changed in the last few years. Things that were tolerated before are not now. There is a greater culture of not staying silent, but of reporting abuse.
Your thesis is this that the rise in reported rapes in the UK (pace Sweden) is because of immigration. Well prove that with facts.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
What really annoys me, and I suspect millions of other voters, is that the government are now less good at what I would consider their prime responsibilities - like making sure our borders are secure, preventing crime (in many cases by keeping criminals off the streets), and that people who work or receive benefits have the right to do so - whilst at the same time getting involved in more and more of everyone's lives. Whether it is the idiotic online safety malarkey, or the feeding of children at schools, or insisting you need various types of ID to fulfil tasks that never required these.
Defending borders, controlling crime, maintaining the value of the currency are the ancient responsibilities of governments, and governments that fail in those respects are usually in trouble.
Which are hard.
It's much easier to ban stuff or put in more process without actually changing accountability or risk.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
Without being delicate about it, in pre-modern times the boats would have been sunk (and the casualties accepted to stop them and deter others) and/or those who landed would have been arrested and dropped by force back on the continent whether the state liked it or not.
What cuts across it all today is a huge web of domestic and international law, and the channel is too narrow for "neutral" waters that might offer other options, so it's either French or British - in practice British since the French won't do anything and are only interested in extortion.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
I just don't think there is much evidence for the increase in sexual assaults. It's bumping around quite a lot; there might be an upwards trend from 2014 to now, but it's not clear and we'd need a statistician to test it. Rape in particular is basically flat, and not higher than 2011, 2008.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
Rape is way up. And the idea this is just “better reporting” or “new methods of recording” is insulting. Lefties said the same thing about the huge rise in rapes in Sweden until the evidence otherwise became overwhelming
It wasn’t a statistical anomaly. The rise was real and the rise was largely due to immigration
The crime survey that you are using to support your other conclusions does not support this one.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
I just don't think there is much evidence for the increase in sexual assaults. It's bumping around quite a lot; there might be an upwards trend from 2014 to now, but it's not clear and we'd need a statistician to test it. Rape in particular is basically flat, and not higher than 2011, 2008.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
Rape is way up. And the idea this is just “better reporting” or “new methods of recording” is insulting. Lefties said the same thing about the huge rise in rapes in Sweden until the evidence otherwise became overwhelming
It wasn’t a statistical anomaly. The rise was real and the rise was largely due to immigration
The crime survey that you are using to support your other conclusions does not support this one.
The data tells us that racism and sexism are lower now than in previous decades but we're constantly told that what matters is lived experience not facts.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
I just don't think there is much evidence for the increase in sexual assaults. It's bumping around quite a lot; there might be an upwards trend from 2014 to now, but it's not clear and we'd need a statistician to test it. Rape in particular is basically flat, and not higher than 2011, 2008.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
Rape is way up. And the idea this is just “better reporting” or “new methods of recording” is insulting. Lefties said the same thing about the huge rise in rapes in Sweden until the evidence otherwise became overwhelming
It wasn’t a statistical anomaly. The rise was real and the rise was largely due to immigration
You are in danger of conflation. Most rape is NOT the stranger in the dark alley, its someone known to the victim, often someone who is in an intimate relationship but chooses not to consent. How many cases of rape by immigrants can you point to? Pretty sure Reform will be all over them.
Society has changed in the last few years. Things that were tolerated before are not now. There is a greater culture of not staying silent, but of reporting abuse.
Your thesis is this that the rise in reported rapes in the UK (pace Sweden) is because of immigration. Well prove that with facts.
I would, easily - but the subject is largely off limits and I would be banned
And given that I’m enjoying the cricket chat, I don’t want that
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
I just don't think there is much evidence for the increase in sexual assaults. It's bumping around quite a lot; there might be an upwards trend from 2014 to now, but it's not clear and we'd need a statistician to test it. Rape in particular is basically flat, and not higher than 2011, 2008.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
Rape is way up. And the idea this is just “better reporting” or “new methods of recording” is insulting. Lefties said the same thing about the huge rise in rapes in Sweden until the evidence otherwise became overwhelming
It wasn’t a statistical anomaly. The rise was real and the rise was largely due to immigration
The crime survey that you are using to support your other conclusions does not support this one.
The data tells us that racism and sexism are lower now than in previous decades but we're constantly told that what matters is lived experience not facts.
I don't doubt that at all. I think the UK's probably better in almost every way when it comes to that sort of discrimination, with the exception of Trans people who have almost certainly seen a big increase in abuse over the last few years - at least by the data available in Scotland.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
I just don't think there is much evidence for the increase in sexual assaults. It's bumping around quite a lot; there might be an upwards trend from 2014 to now, but it's not clear and we'd need a statistician to test it. Rape in particular is basically flat, and not higher than 2011, 2008.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
Rape is way up. And the idea this is just “better reporting” or “new methods of recording” is insulting. Lefties said the same thing about the huge rise in rapes in Sweden until the evidence otherwise became overwhelming
It wasn’t a statistical anomaly. The rise was real and the rise was largely due to immigration
The crime survey that you are using to support your other conclusions does not support this one.
The data tells us that racism and sexism are lower now than in previous decades but we're constantly told that what matters is lived experience not facts.
Tolerance has dropped?
On a scale of 1-10 people now react to sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2 out of 10 like it's an 11 - sort of where 'micro-aggression' comes from.
40 years ago they might react to an 8 or 9 out of 10, like it was a 5 or 6, because it was resignedly accepted, even though deeply offensive.
So it sounds like its got worse. The 1-2 out being dialled up to 10 or 11 is a problem: it leads to statements like, "Britain is a deeply racist society, and institutionally racist", which simply isn't true and has serious political and social implications.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
There's a slight problem isn't there with people who say we should go by the statistics, not perception. This is the exact opposite of what the same people say when it comes to lots of other things when they use the phrase "lived experience" to trump everything else. So racism is lower today than it was in the 1970s but that doesn't matter because the lived experience of some people today is that it's worse than then.
I can't think of anyone who thinks racism is generally worse today than in the 1970s. The point is usually that racism hasn't gone away or been solved. So, the situation might be better than in the 1970s, but it's still bad.
Also, I don't think the people who "say we should go by the statistics, not perception" are "the same people" who "use the phrase "lived experience" to trump everything else".
I think that for racism, it’s moved from “it’s everywhere and we need to fight for change” to “there’s lots of racism still, but there are ways and processes to fight it and we need to fight it loudly”.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
What really annoys me, and I suspect millions of other voters, is that the government are now less good at what I would consider their prime responsibilities - like making sure our borders are secure, preventing crime (in many cases by keeping criminals off the streets), and that people who work or receive benefits have the right to do so - whilst at the same time getting involved in more and more of everyone's lives. Whether it is the idiotic online safety malarkey, or the feeding of children at schools, or insisting you need various types of ID to fulfil tasks that never required these.
And an awful lot of those things go back to the Tory party saying shop lifting isn’t important enough for the police to deal with and similar with the boats where processing asylum cases was deprioritized because it meant they could reduce processing costs (as welfare and housing costs are in a different departments budget)
The Conservatives simply did not consider criminal justice or defence to be priorities, which is extraordinary really.
Protecting the lifestyles and property values of the better off retired, on the other hand, was about the only priority.
The more I think about it: Osborne.
He was the 'thinker' behind all of this, and a deeply cynical one, and Cameron did the non-executive chairmanship, salesmanship and "show".
Anyway I have a really uncontroversial article to write for Basalt Bliss magazine (US edition) on the theme
“Is the whole Sydney Sweeney thing simply envy from women worldwide who can’t admit they really want to be slim, blue eyed blondes?”
Shouldn’t annoy anyone. Opinions welcome
The problem is that women have been pushed the “body positivity” line/lie for a few years so they have got away with being a bit fat and ugly and felt “fabulous”. Nobody was brave enough to tell them it’s bollocks and then the rise of Sidney Sweeney who is good looking and built the way the vast majority of men like the look of a lot has dispelled the lie women had been told. It’s there smack bang in front of women again suddenly, men don’t like fatties, Christ even women fancy Sweeney. It’s just a reversion to normal.
Women from the 70s, 80s and 90s are back, people really want Farrah Fawcett, Linda Carter or Kelly Le Brock in their primes not Lizzo or Lola Young.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
Without being delicate about it, in pre-modern times the boats would have been sunk (and the casualties accepted to stop them and deter others) and/or those who landed would have been arrested and dropped by force back on the continent whether the state liked it or not.
What cuts across it all today is a huge web of domestic and international law, and the channel is too narrow for "neutral" waters that might offer other options, so it's either French or British - in practice British since the French won't do anything and are only interested in extortion.
pre-modern times the boats would have been sunk (and the casualties accepted to stop them and deter others)
King Alfred as a violent, anti-immigrant bigot, organising attacks on small boats and their occupants.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
I just don't think there is much evidence for the increase in sexual assaults. It's bumping around quite a lot; there might be an upwards trend from 2014 to now, but it's not clear and we'd need a statistician to test it. Rape in particular is basically flat, and not higher than 2011, 2008.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
Rape is way up. And the idea this is just “better reporting” or “new methods of recording” is insulting. Lefties said the same thing about the huge rise in rapes in Sweden until the evidence otherwise became overwhelming
It wasn’t a statistical anomaly. The rise was real and the rise was largely due to immigration
The crime survey that you are using to support your other conclusions does not support this one.
The data tells us that racism and sexism are lower now than in previous decades but we're constantly told that what matters is lived experience not facts.
Tolerance has dropped?
On a scale of 1-10 people now react to sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2 out of 10 like it's an 11 - sort of where 'micro-aggression' comes from.
40 years ago they might react to an 8 or 9 out of 10, like it was a 5 or 6, because it was resignedly accepted, even though deeply offensive.
So it sounds like its got worse. The 1-2 out being dialled up to 10 or 11 is a problem: it leads to statements like, "Britain is a deeply racist society, and institutionally racist", which simply isn't true and has serious political and social implications.
That's quite an interesting comment. What are these "sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2"?
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
I just don't think there is much evidence for the increase in sexual assaults. It's bumping around quite a lot; there might be an upwards trend from 2014 to now, but it's not clear and we'd need a statistician to test it. Rape in particular is basically flat, and not higher than 2011, 2008.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
Rape is way up. And the idea this is just “better reporting” or “new methods of recording” is insulting. Lefties said the same thing about the huge rise in rapes in Sweden until the evidence otherwise became overwhelming
It wasn’t a statistical anomaly. The rise was real and the rise was largely due to immigration
The crime survey that you are using to support your other conclusions does not support this one.
The data tells us that racism and sexism are lower now than in previous decades but we're constantly told that what matters is lived experience not facts.
Tolerance has dropped?
On a scale of 1-10 people now react to sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2 out of 10 like it's an 11 - sort of where 'micro-aggression' comes from.
40 years ago they might react to an 8 or 9 out of 10, like it was a 5 or 6, because it was resignedly accepted, even though deeply offensive.
So it sounds like its got worse. The 1-2 out being dialled up to 10 or 11 is a problem: it leads to statements like, "Britain is a deeply racist society, and institutionally racist", which simply isn't true and has serious political and social implications.
That's quite an interesting comment. What are these "sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2"?
Anyway I have a really uncontroversial article to write for Basalt Bliss magazine (US edition) on the theme
“Is the whole Sydney Sweeney thing simply envy from women worldwide who can’t admit they really want to be slim, blue eyed blondes?”
Shouldn’t annoy anyone. Opinions welcome
The problem is that women have been pushed the “body positivity” line/lie for a few years so they have got away with being a bit fat and ugly and felt “fabulous”. Nobody was brave enough to tell them it’s bollocks and then the rise of Sidney Sweeney who is good looking and built the way the vast majority of men like the look of a lot has dispelled the lie women had been told. It’s there smack bang in front of women again suddenly, men don’t like fatties, Christ even women fancy Sweeney. It’s just a reversion to normal.
Women from the 70s, 80s and 90s are back, people really want Farrah Fawcett, Linda Carter or Kelly Le Brock in their primes not Lizzo or Lola Young.
Deffo something in that, but I think I can be way more controversial, if I get the right line. Editor clearly wants the clicks
Sydney Sweeney is undoubtedly hot, however. She’s also quite petite. 5 foot 3. Perfect
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
I just don't think there is much evidence for the increase in sexual assaults. It's bumping around quite a lot; there might be an upwards trend from 2014 to now, but it's not clear and we'd need a statistician to test it. Rape in particular is basically flat, and not higher than 2011, 2008.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
Rape is way up. And the idea this is just “better reporting” or “new methods of recording” is insulting. Lefties said the same thing about the huge rise in rapes in Sweden until the evidence otherwise became overwhelming
It wasn’t a statistical anomaly. The rise was real and the rise was largely due to immigration
The crime survey that you are using to support your other conclusions does not support this one.
The data tells us that racism and sexism are lower now than in previous decades but we're constantly told that what matters is lived experience not facts.
Tolerance has dropped?
On a scale of 1-10 people now react to sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2 out of 10 like it's an 11 - sort of where 'micro-aggression' comes from.
40 years ago they might react to an 8 or 9 out of 10, like it was a 5 or 6, because it was resignedly accepted, even though deeply offensive.
So it sounds like its got worse. The 1-2 out being dialled up to 10 or 11 is a problem: it leads to statements like, "Britain is a deeply racist society, and institutionally racist", which simply isn't true and has serious political and social implications.
That's quite an interesting comment. What are these "sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2"?
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
I just don't think there is much evidence for the increase in sexual assaults. It's bumping around quite a lot; there might be an upwards trend from 2014 to now, but it's not clear and we'd need a statistician to test it. Rape in particular is basically flat, and not higher than 2011, 2008.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
Rape is way up. And the idea this is just “better reporting” or “new methods of recording” is insulting. Lefties said the same thing about the huge rise in rapes in Sweden until the evidence otherwise became overwhelming
It wasn’t a statistical anomaly. The rise was real and the rise was largely due to immigration
The crime survey that you are using to support your other conclusions does not support this one.
The data tells us that racism and sexism are lower now than in previous decades but we're constantly told that what matters is lived experience not facts.
Tolerance has dropped?
On a scale of 1-10 people now react to sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2 out of 10 like it's an 11 - sort of where 'micro-aggression' comes from.
40 years ago they might react to an 8 or 9 out of 10, like it was a 5 or 6, because it was resignedly accepted, even though deeply offensive.
So it sounds like its got worse. The 1-2 out being dialled up to 10 or 11 is a problem: it leads to statements like, "Britain is a deeply racist society, and institutionally racist", which simply isn't true and has serious political and social implications.
That's quite an interesting comment. What are these "sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2"?
In some cases holding doors open...
Really? I do that all the time, for men and women. I've never heard any complaints. Is it really a thing?
India take a wicket cutting the run rate down to just over 7 and avoiding the fastest opening 100 run partnership in history.
93-1 after 13 overs. Unbelievable.
Great stuff
I’m trying to work out what language the Indian team speak amongst themselves. English? Hindi? My guess is English - the Indian lingua franca. I wonder if it’s an issue
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
I just don't think there is much evidence for the increase in sexual assaults. It's bumping around quite a lot; there might be an upwards trend from 2014 to now, but it's not clear and we'd need a statistician to test it. Rape in particular is basically flat, and not higher than 2011, 2008.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
Rape is way up. And the idea this is just “better reporting” or “new methods of recording” is insulting. Lefties said the same thing about the huge rise in rapes in Sweden until the evidence otherwise became overwhelming
It wasn’t a statistical anomaly. The rise was real and the rise was largely due to immigration
The crime survey that you are using to support your other conclusions does not support this one.
The data tells us that racism and sexism are lower now than in previous decades but we're constantly told that what matters is lived experience not facts.
Tolerance has dropped?
On a scale of 1-10 people now react to sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2 out of 10 like it's an 11 - sort of where 'micro-aggression' comes from.
40 years ago they might react to an 8 or 9 out of 10, like it was a 5 or 6, because it was resignedly accepted, even though deeply offensive.
So it sounds like its got worse. The 1-2 out being dialled up to 10 or 11 is a problem: it leads to statements like, "Britain is a deeply racist society, and institutionally racist", which simply isn't true and has serious political and social implications.
That's quite an interesting comment. What are these "sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2"?
In some cases holding doors open...
Really? I do that all the time, for men and women. I've never heard any complaints. Is it really a thing?
Only among extreme feminists, but it has happened.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
There's a slight problem isn't there with people who say we should go by the statistics, not perception. This is the exact opposite of what the same people say when it comes to lots of other things when they use the phrase "lived experience" to trump everything else. So racism is lower today than it was in the 1970s but that doesn't matter because the lived experience of some people today is that it's worse than then.
I can't think of anyone who thinks racism is generally worse today than in the 1970s. The point is usually that racism hasn't gone away or been solved. So, the situation might be better than in the 1970s, but it's still bad.
Also, I don't think the people who "say we should go by the statistics, not perception" are "the same people" who "use the phrase "lived experience" to trump everything else".
Mrs J has been in the UK for about 25 years. In that time, she has suffered no real obvious racist comments, despite being olive skinned and Turkish. On the other hand, her English is impeccable and generally unaccented, and her clothing western. She fits in. Also, we associate with lots of other middle-class immigrants from around the world, both socially and professionaly.
On the first night of a trip to Germany fifteen or so years ago, she suffered verbal racist abuse whilst we were checking into a motel.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
I just don't think there is much evidence for the increase in sexual assaults. It's bumping around quite a lot; there might be an upwards trend from 2014 to now, but it's not clear and we'd need a statistician to test it. Rape in particular is basically flat, and not higher than 2011, 2008.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
Rape is way up. And the idea this is just “better reporting” or “new methods of recording” is insulting. Lefties said the same thing about the huge rise in rapes in Sweden until the evidence otherwise became overwhelming
It wasn’t a statistical anomaly. The rise was real and the rise was largely due to immigration
The crime survey that you are using to support your other conclusions does not support this one.
The data tells us that racism and sexism are lower now than in previous decades but we're constantly told that what matters is lived experience not facts.
Tolerance has dropped?
On a scale of 1-10 people now react to sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2 out of 10 like it's an 11 - sort of where 'micro-aggression' comes from.
40 years ago they might react to an 8 or 9 out of 10, like it was a 5 or 6, because it was resignedly accepted, even though deeply offensive.
So it sounds like its got worse. The 1-2 out being dialled up to 10 or 11 is a problem: it leads to statements like, "Britain is a deeply racist society, and institutionally racist", which simply isn't true and has serious political and social implications.
That's quite an interesting comment. What are these "sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2"?
In some cases holding doors open...
Really? I do that all the time, for men and women. I've never heard any complaints. Is it really a thing?
Only among extreme feminists, but it has happened.
Yes, but many things *happen*. Does it happen frequently enough to be actually worth mentioning as though it is common?
A couple of years ago I got wolf-whistled whilst out running. I'm not going to assume that the single case means that women routinely wolf-whistle at men.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
Without being delicate about it, in pre-modern times the boats would have been sunk (and the casualties accepted to stop them and deter others) and/or those who landed would have been arrested and dropped by force back on the continent whether the state liked it or not.
What cuts across it all today is a huge web of domestic and international law, and the channel is too narrow for "neutral" waters that might offer other options, so it's either French or British - in practice British since the French won't do anything and are only interested in extortion.
pre-modern times the boats would have been sunk (and the casualties accepted to stop them and deter others)
King Alfred as a violent, anti-immigrant bigot, organising attacks on small boats and their occupants.
Up until the invention, and the making of, inflatable boats getting a suitable boat to cross the Channel wasn’t that easy.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
I just don't think there is much evidence for the increase in sexual assaults. It's bumping around quite a lot; there might be an upwards trend from 2014 to now, but it's not clear and we'd need a statistician to test it. Rape in particular is basically flat, and not higher than 2011, 2008.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
Rape is way up. And the idea this is just “better reporting” or “new methods of recording” is insulting. Lefties said the same thing about the huge rise in rapes in Sweden until the evidence otherwise became overwhelming
It wasn’t a statistical anomaly. The rise was real and the rise was largely due to immigration
The crime survey that you are using to support your other conclusions does not support this one.
The data tells us that racism and sexism are lower now than in previous decades but we're constantly told that what matters is lived experience not facts.
Tolerance has dropped?
On a scale of 1-10 people now react to sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2 out of 10 like it's an 11 - sort of where 'micro-aggression' comes from.
40 years ago they might react to an 8 or 9 out of 10, like it was a 5 or 6, because it was resignedly accepted, even though deeply offensive.
So it sounds like its got worse. The 1-2 out being dialled up to 10 or 11 is a problem: it leads to statements like, "Britain is a deeply racist society, and institutionally racist", which simply isn't true and has serious political and social implications.
That's quite an interesting comment. What are these "sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2"?
What an incredible session. If we'd got India out and reduced the deficit to just 115 with 9 wickets remaining by the end of day 2 that'd normally be a good day, let alone a good session.
Received this morning - it looks like Govt are starting to think about mobility aids classifications, and related questions. It's a nice cheap win, that should be popular.
Triggered I think by long term well-argued lobbying, HoC Walking and Cycling APPG reports, and the blowback when the police don't understand wheelchairs and lock them in their vehicle pound for weeks (they would not do it to prosthetic legs, and it is analogous!). This will I think be crossing over into battery safety, e-scooters, and a number of other areas.
(One of the stances of organisations I am involved with, for example, is that anyone disabled using a mobility aid at walking speed - say up to 4-5mph - should legally be a pedestrian. at present it is massively complicated. An example of confusion is a sit down scooter, or a rollator where you sit down; they need to work out what it is.)
I do have an email for feedback and questions. If anyone wants to get involved, I'll PM it.
You may be aware that we have been exploring and investigating the “invalid carriage” regulations alongside developing micromobility policy.
We initially started on this journey when we recognised the same new battery and motor technologies that have created a range of new micromobility vehicles present a significant opportunity to improve disabled people’s independence.
The current regulations are nearly 40 years old and do not account for the devices people need to use, which is why I am pleased to inform you that the government will formally be reviewing the law on powered mobility aids. This will involve an in-depth investigation of the existing legal framework, as well as the opportunities and the risks of using new technology safely and responsibly, considering the needs of all disabled people.
We are committed to ensuring this policy is reviewed and designed with disabled people, not for them. We hope to continue and improve our collaborative working with you, and thorough consultation will be a central part of that process.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
What really annoys me, and I suspect millions of other voters, is that the government are now less good at what I would consider their prime responsibilities - like making sure our borders are secure, preventing crime (in many cases by keeping criminals off the streets), and that people who work or receive benefits have the right to do so - whilst at the same time getting involved in more and more of everyone's lives. Whether it is the idiotic online safety malarkey, or the feeding of children at schools, or insisting you need various types of ID to fulfil tasks that never required these.
And an awful lot of those things go back to the Tory party saying shop lifting isn’t important enough for the police to deal with and similar with the boats where processing asylum cases was deprioritized because it meant they could reduce processing costs (as welfare and housing costs are in a different departments budget)
Newcastle United have rejected Liverpool’s £120 million bid for Alexander Isak.
They do need to balance waiting for as much money for him as possible and the risk of delaying and losing the opportunity to use the money on Sesko as Man Utd pinch him and any other players. This sale, of it happens, can be their Coutinho money moment which reinvigorated Liverpool.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
What really annoys me, and I suspect millions of other voters, is that the government are now less good at what I would consider their prime responsibilities - like making sure our borders are secure, preventing crime (in many cases by keeping criminals off the streets), and that people who work or receive benefits have the right to do so - whilst at the same time getting involved in more and more of everyone's lives. Whether it is the idiotic online safety malarkey, or the feeding of children at schools, or insisting you need various types of ID to fulfil tasks that never required these.
And an awful lot of those things go back to the Tory party saying shop lifting isn’t important enough for the police to deal with and similar with the boats where processing asylum cases was deprioritized because it meant they could reduce processing costs (as welfare and housing costs are in a different departments budget)
Absolutely mad politics wasn't it!
The minor crimes thing was a classic modern policy - liberal thought says that petty criminals are not best served by prison and there was a brief that shop lifters were practically victims by themselves. This then aligns with it being cheaper to decriminalise crime below a threshold value. So it becomes a consensus policy.
Rather like the idea that cars are bad and roads promote cars, aligned with not building more roads - this became policy under New Labour.
Newcastle United have rejected Liverpool’s £120 million bid for Alexander Isak.
They do need to balance waiting for as much money for him as possible and the risk of delaying and losing the opportunity to use the money on Sesko as Man Utd pinch him and any other players. This sale, of it happens, can be their Coutinho money moment which reinvigorated Liverpool.
I am really disappointed by Liverpool this transfer window, as we’re not going to be able to sing my favourite chant of last season, to the tune of Gala’s Freed From Desire.
‘The Reds have got no money, but we’re going to win the league.’
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
What really annoys me, and I suspect millions of other voters, is that the government are now less good at what I would consider their prime responsibilities - like making sure our borders are secure, preventing crime (in many cases by keeping criminals off the streets), and that people who work or receive benefits have the right to do so - whilst at the same time getting involved in more and more of everyone's lives. Whether it is the idiotic online safety malarkey, or the feeding of children at schools, or insisting you need various types of ID to fulfil tasks that never required these.
Are these things that the government are now less good at, or are they things that media/social media/foreign actors on social media are presenting as the government being less good at? For example, you mention benefit fraud. I don't see any evidence that benefit fraud is particularly up or down on where it was previously. Benefit fraud is not a major problem: it costs the country much less than tax evasion. As we've been discussing, serious crimes are down, although petty crimes are up.
And, are these a government's prime responsibilities? I would say the government's prime responsibilities are more around keeping the economy on track, protecting our health, maintaining good international relations, and protecting us from bad business practices. I'm not saying you're right or I'm right, but rather that we all have different priorities and we have democratic elections to sort that out.
So, yes, I think millions of other voters do agree with you, but millions more don't. The question is, perhaps, which group is larger at the next general election?
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
I just don't think there is much evidence for the increase in sexual assaults. It's bumping around quite a lot; there might be an upwards trend from 2014 to now, but it's not clear and we'd need a statistician to test it. Rape in particular is basically flat, and not higher than 2011, 2008.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
Rape is way up. And the idea this is just “better reporting” or “new methods of recording” is insulting. Lefties said the same thing about the huge rise in rapes in Sweden until the evidence otherwise became overwhelming
It wasn’t a statistical anomaly. The rise was real and the rise was largely due to immigration
The crime survey that you are using to support your other conclusions does not support this one.
The data tells us that racism and sexism are lower now than in previous decades but we're constantly told that what matters is lived experience not facts.
Tolerance has dropped?
On a scale of 1-10 people now react to sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2 out of 10 like it's an 11 - sort of where 'micro-aggression' comes from.
40 years ago they might react to an 8 or 9 out of 10, like it was a 5 or 6, because it was resignedly accepted, even though deeply offensive.
So it sounds like its got worse. The 1-2 out being dialled up to 10 or 11 is a problem: it leads to statements like, "Britain is a deeply racist society, and institutionally racist", which simply isn't true and has serious political and social implications.
That's quite an interesting comment. What are these "sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2"?
In some cases holding doors open...
Really? I do that all the time, for men and women. I've never heard any complaints. Is it really a thing?
Only among extreme feminists, but it has happened.
Yes, but many things *happen*. Does it happen frequently enough to be actually worth mentioning as though it is common?
A couple of years ago I got wolf-whistled whilst out running. I'm not going to assume that the single case means that women routinely wolf-whistle at men.
Camden is not a hellhole, having lived there for several years (although in a more upmarket area than PB's answer to Ernest Hemingway); but Nextdoor IS a hellhole, always and everywhere.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
What really annoys me, and I suspect millions of other voters, is that the government are now less good at what I would consider their prime responsibilities - like making sure our borders are secure, preventing crime (in many cases by keeping criminals off the streets), and that people who work or receive benefits have the right to do so - whilst at the same time getting involved in more and more of everyone's lives. Whether it is the idiotic online safety malarkey, or the feeding of children at schools, or insisting you need various types of ID to fulfil tasks that never required these.
Defending borders, controlling crime, maintaining the value of the currency are the ancient responsibilities of governments, and governments that fail in those respects are usually in trouble.
Feeding the populace is a more ancient responsibility of government than two of those, and governments that fail at that are always in trouble.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
Without being delicate about it, in pre-modern times the boats would have been sunk (and the casualties accepted to stop them and deter others) and/or those who landed would have been arrested and dropped by force back on the continent whether the state liked it or not.
What cuts across it all today is a huge web of domestic and international law, and the channel is too narrow for "neutral" waters that might offer other options, so it's either French or British - in practice British since the French won't do anything and are only interested in extortion.
pre-modern times the boats would have been sunk (and the casualties accepted to stop them and deter others)
King Alfred as a violent, anti-immigrant bigot, organising attacks on small boats and their occupants.
Up until the invention, and the making of, inflatable boats getting a suitable boat to cross the Channel wasn’t that easy.
The Revenue fought literal battles against smugglers, who were very organised criminals over the centuries.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
What really annoys me, and I suspect millions of other voters, is that the government are now less good at what I would consider their prime responsibilities - like making sure our borders are secure, preventing crime (in many cases by keeping criminals off the streets), and that people who work or receive benefits have the right to do so - whilst at the same time getting involved in more and more of everyone's lives. Whether it is the idiotic online safety malarkey, or the feeding of children at schools, or insisting you need various types of ID to fulfil tasks that never required these.
Are these things that the government are now less good at, or are they things that media/social media/foreign actors on social media are presenting as the government being less good at? For example, you mention benefit fraud. I don't see any evidence that benefit fraud is particularly up or down on where it was previously. Benefit fraud is not a major problem: it costs the country much less than tax evasion. As we've been discussing, serious crimes are down, although petty crimes are up.
And, are these a government's prime responsibilities? I would say the government's prime responsibilities are more around keeping the economy on track, protecting our health, maintaining good international relations, and protecting us from bad business practices. I'm not saying you're right or I'm right, but rather that we all have different priorities and we have democratic elections to sort that out.
So, yes, I think millions of other voters do agree with you, but millions more don't. The question is, perhaps, which group is larger at the next general election?
Starmer's Labour are about as popular as Sunak's tories, which gives us a clue that the current priorities are wrong, electorally.
You'd think this would make the politicos realise that the NU10k agenda is utterly useless as an electoral guiding light.
If they don't, Nige probably will - and I suspect it'll be more impactful on the lanyard classes and their increasingly small centrist Dad support base.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
What really annoys me, and I suspect millions of other voters, is that the government are now less good at what I would consider their prime responsibilities - like making sure our borders are secure, preventing crime (in many cases by keeping criminals off the streets), and that people who work or receive benefits have the right to do so - whilst at the same time getting involved in more and more of everyone's lives. Whether it is the idiotic online safety malarkey, or the feeding of children at schools, or insisting you need various types of ID to fulfil tasks that never required these.
And an awful lot of those things go back to the Tory party saying shop lifting isn’t important enough for the police to deal with and similar with the boats where processing asylum cases was deprioritized because it meant they could reduce processing costs (as welfare and housing costs are in a different departments budget)
Absolutely mad politics wasn't it!
The minor crimes thing was a classic modern policy - liberal thought says that petty criminals are not best served by prison and there was a brief that shop lifters were practically victims by themselves. This then aligns with it being cheaper to decriminalise crime below a threshold value. So it becomes a consensus policy.
Rather like the idea that cars are bad and roads promote cars, aligned with not building more roads - this became policy under New Labour.
We know that induced traffic flow is a phenomenon, but indeed there is no sensible reason why we should let motor vehicles into all the roads and streets as a matter of dogma .
Here at the moment, a Reform Councillor is speculating about reopening Rufford Ford (twat) and bringing back the Yoochoobers (and the performative ASB they generate). We have a number of country lanes and single tracks which have been closed over the years, sometimes except for access, and generally they are great.
The most recent one helped create a safe active travel route from Chesterfield to the Chesterfield Royal Hospital, so we get to make people healthier by exercise whilst accessing blood tests etc.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
What really annoys me, and I suspect millions of other voters, is that the government are now less good at what I would consider their prime responsibilities - like making sure our borders are secure, preventing crime (in many cases by keeping criminals off the streets), and that people who work or receive benefits have the right to do so - whilst at the same time getting involved in more and more of everyone's lives. Whether it is the idiotic online safety malarkey, or the feeding of children at schools, or insisting you need various types of ID to fulfil tasks that never required these.
Are these things that the government are now less good at, or are they things that media/social media/foreign actors on social media are presenting as the government being less good at? For example, you mention benefit fraud. I don't see any evidence that benefit fraud is particularly up or down on where it was previously. Benefit fraud is not a major problem: it costs the country much less than tax evasion. As we've been discussing, serious crimes are down, although petty crimes are up.
And, are these a government's prime responsibilities? I would say the government's prime responsibilities are more around keeping the economy on track, protecting our health, maintaining good international relations, and protecting us from bad business practices. I'm not saying you're right or I'm right, but rather that we all have different priorities and we have democratic elections to sort that out.
So, yes, I think millions of other voters do agree with you, but millions more don't. The question is, perhaps, which group is larger at the next general election?
Starmer's Labour are about as popular as Sunak's tories, which gives us a clue that the current priorities are wrong, electorally.
You'd think this would make the politicos realise that the NU10k agenda is utterly useless as an electoral guiding light.
If they don't, Nige probably will - and I suspect it'll be more impactful on the lanyard classes and their increasingly small centrist Dad support base.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
Without being delicate about it, in pre-modern times the boats would have been sunk (and the casualties accepted to stop them and deter others) and/or those who landed would have been arrested and dropped by force back on the continent whether the state liked it or not.
What cuts across it all today is a huge web of domestic and international law, and the channel is too narrow for "neutral" waters that might offer other options, so it's either French or British - in practice British since the French won't do anything and are only interested in extortion.
pre-modern times the boats would have been sunk (and the casualties accepted to stop them and deter others)
King Alfred as a violent, anti-immigrant bigot, organising attacks on small boats and their occupants.
Up until the invention, and the making of, inflatable boats getting a suitable boat to cross the Channel wasn’t that easy.
The Revenue fought literal battles against smugglers, who were very organised criminals over the centuries.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
What really annoys me, and I suspect millions of other voters, is that the government are now less good at what I would consider their prime responsibilities - like making sure our borders are secure, preventing crime (in many cases by keeping criminals off the streets), and that people who work or receive benefits have the right to do so - whilst at the same time getting involved in more and more of everyone's lives. Whether it is the idiotic online safety malarkey, or the feeding of children at schools, or insisting you need various types of ID to fulfil tasks that never required these.
And an awful lot of those things go back to the Tory party saying shop lifting isn’t important enough for the police to deal with and similar with the boats where processing asylum cases was deprioritized because it meant they could reduce processing costs (as welfare and housing costs are in a different departments budget)
Absolutely mad politics wasn't it!
The minor crimes thing was a classic modern policy - liberal thought says that petty criminals are not best served by prison and there was a brief that shop lifters were practically victims by themselves. This then aligns with it being cheaper to decriminalise crime below a threshold value. So it becomes a consensus policy.
Rather like the idea that cars are bad and roads promote cars, aligned with not building more roads - this became policy under New Labour.
We know that induced traffic flow is a phenomenon, but indeed there is no sensible reason why we should let motor vehicles into all the roads and streets as a matter of dogma .
Here at the moment, a Reform Councillor is speculating about reopening Rufford Ford (twat) and bringing back the Yoochoobers (and the performative ASB they generate). We have a number of country lanes and single tracks which have been closed over the years, sometimes except for access, and generally they are great.
The most recent one helped create a safe active travel route from Chesterfield to the Chesterfield Royal Hospital, so we get to make people healthier by exercise whilst accessing blood tests etc.
My lived experience (councillors closed 3 roads near me) is that 'active travel' creates more queues on main roads, whilst doing little to actually promote cycling or walking.
The only advantage of them, I can see, is that the public outcry such closures provoke often reveals the true colours - and blindspots - of many individuals from eg the cycling brigade
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
Without being delicate about it, in pre-modern times the boats would have been sunk (and the casualties accepted to stop them and deter others) and/or those who landed would have been arrested and dropped by force back on the continent whether the state liked it or not.
What cuts across it all today is a huge web of domestic and international law, and the channel is too narrow for "neutral" waters that might offer other options, so it's either French or British - in practice British since the French won't do anything and are only interested in extortion.
Your first paragraph is the most wrong thing I've seen on PB for weeks (and you've had some stiff competition). In pre-modern times, there was pretty much no immigration control. People moved back and forth all the time. The UK had little in the way of immigration control before the 1793 Alien Act (to stop refugees from the French Revolution). (There's stuff like the 1530 Egyptians Act, but it had little effect.) The 1793 Alien Act was enforced for about 30 years, but then there were no controls from 1836-1905 and the 1905 Aliens Act (which was passed to stop Jewish immigration).
If we take pre-modern to mean pre-1500, if you wanted to take a boat and move to Britain, you did and nobody stopped you.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
Without being delicate about it, in pre-modern times the boats would have been sunk (and the casualties accepted to stop them and deter others) and/or those who landed would have been arrested and dropped by force back on the continent whether the state liked it or not.
What cuts across it all today is a huge web of domestic and international law, and the channel is too narrow for "neutral" waters that might offer other options, so it's either French or British - in practice British since the French won't do anything and are only interested in extortion.
pre-modern times the boats would have been sunk (and the casualties accepted to stop them and deter others)
King Alfred as a violent, anti-immigrant bigot, organising attacks on small boats and their occupants.
Up until the invention, and the making of, inflatable boats getting a suitable boat to cross the Channel wasn’t that easy.
The Revenue fought literal battles against smugglers, who were very organised criminals over the centuries.
Yes - one of the "Voices from the Old Bailey" programmes I relistened to recently involved a smuggler describing how he had killed and eaten a customs officer pour encourager les autres.
Here, good lunchtime listening especially if you are on beef burgers or steak tartare:
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
I just don't think there is much evidence for the increase in sexual assaults. It's bumping around quite a lot; there might be an upwards trend from 2014 to now, but it's not clear and we'd need a statistician to test it. Rape in particular is basically flat, and not higher than 2011, 2008.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
Rape is way up. And the idea this is just “better reporting” or “new methods of recording” is insulting. Lefties said the same thing about the huge rise in rapes in Sweden until the evidence otherwise became overwhelming
It wasn’t a statistical anomaly. The rise was real and the rise was largely due to immigration
The crime survey that you are using to support your other conclusions does not support this one.
The data tells us that racism and sexism are lower now than in previous decades but we're constantly told that what matters is lived experience not facts.
Something can be lower than it was but still higher than it should be. The goal of the civil rights movements of the 1960s weren't just for less racism and sexism, they were for no racism and sexism.
Comments
I think the third runway is a terrible idea myself. Even the airlines don't want it as it will result in a tripling of the charges they pay, which are already the highest in Europe. Much better and cheaper to expand Gatwick, Luton and Stansted.
But the rail projects aren't remotely comparable.
(We are still missing "causing injury by careless / dangerous", as "serious injury" starts at "broken bones" approximately. So the injury less than that is down to civil action, though I think Courts in England may have discretion to order compensation, as they do to impose driving bans, but it would be very rarely used.)
I'm not seeing the hazard to be honest. Not with helmets.
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Hopefully we can bat well and get to around 350 which should make the series win safe.
Go back to my childhood, and there were nice places and nasty places, and you could avoid a lot of trouble by avoiding the nasty places. Now, for whatever reason, that is less effective. Maybe the crims are more mobile, maybe we just don't look out for our neighbours quite as well.
Not difficult to have less crime overall, but more crime affecting people with a voice.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
The resurgence in stealing of cars is definitely down to this. Every measure the car companies put in place, as soon as one person has defeated them, that knowledge spreads like wildfire. In the 80s, some kids works out a weakness in a particular car, the whole country won't know the next day.
Sweating off the bust following a boom via inflation might be morally preferable to doing it via unemployment, but it's hard to win an election afterwards.
As we have seen.
What you're picking up is the police doing a much, much better job at recording and investigating it (as we've explained multiple times before).
They go to the police and say FindMy iPhone tells me my phone is at this address and the police say ‘nah, can’t do anything about it, here’s a crime reference number, claim on your insurance.’
It’s happened to a lot of friends, it irks, especially when you don’t have insurance to claim on.
Canelo is favourite (1.62 bf) but as I say it's difficult to back against Bud. I would back Crawford (2.82 bf). It's going to be a cracker.
I remember our family home was burgled in the 90s, the plod were all over it and caught the scumbags within days and it was found they had done something like 20 homes in a couple of weeks. That doesn't happen now for plebs like we were.
Also, I don't think the people who "say we should go by the statistics, not perception" are "the same people" who "use the phrase "lived experience" to trump everything else".
It wasn’t a statistical anomaly. The rise was real and the rise was largely due to immigration
Protecting the lifestyles and property values of the better off retired, on the other hand, was about the only priority.
Against the costs, you need the benefits for the UK economy. Extra 66 million passengers a year and maintaining Heathrow as a hub and spoke airport is hugely important for the UK economy, worth in the hundreds of billions.
Society has changed in the last few years. Things that were tolerated before are not now. There is a greater culture of not staying silent, but of reporting abuse.
Your thesis is this that the rise in reported rapes in the UK (pace Sweden) is because of immigration. Well prove that with facts.
It's much easier to ban stuff or put in more process without actually changing accountability or risk.
“Is the whole Sydney Sweeney thing simply envy from women worldwide who can’t admit they really want to be slim, blue eyed blondes?”
Shouldn’t annoy anyone. Opinions welcome
What cuts across it all today is a huge web of domestic and international law, and the channel is too narrow for "neutral" waters that might offer other options, so it's either French or British - in practice British since the French won't do anything and are only interested in extortion.
And given that I’m enjoying the cricket chat, I don’t want that
What's your point?
On a scale of 1-10 people now react to sexist and racist behaviours of a 1 or 2 out of 10 like it's an 11 - sort of where 'micro-aggression' comes from.
40 years ago they might react to an 8 or 9 out of 10, like it was a 5 or 6, because it was resignedly accepted, even though deeply offensive.
So it sounds like its got worse. The 1-2 out being dialled up to 10 or 11 is a problem: it leads to statements like, "Britain is a deeply racist society, and institutionally racist", which simply isn't true and has serious political and social implications.
He was the 'thinker' behind all of this, and a deeply cynical one, and Cameron did the non-executive chairmanship, salesmanship and "show".
Women from the 70s, 80s and 90s are back, people really want Farrah Fawcett, Linda Carter or Kelly Le Brock in their primes not Lizzo or Lola Young.
pre-modern times the boats would have been sunk (and the casualties accepted to stop them and deter others)
King Alfred as a violent, anti-immigrant bigot, organising attacks on small boats and their occupants.
Sydney Sweeney is undoubtedly hot, however. She’s also quite petite. 5 foot 3. Perfect
93-1 after 13 overs. Unbelievable.
I’m trying to work out what language the Indian team speak amongst themselves. English? Hindi? My guess is English - the Indian lingua franca. I wonder if it’s an issue
@DPJHodges
Mad cricket from Duckett. But disgraceful reaction from Akash Deep. Placing hands on another player seriously crossing a line."
https://x.com/DPJHodges/status/1951248760018784422
On the first night of a trip to Germany fifteen or so years ago, she suffered verbal racist abuse whilst we were checking into a motel.
I see that very much as a win for the UK.
A couple of years ago I got wolf-whistled whilst out running. I'm not going to assume that the single case means that women routinely wolf-whistle at men.
And no, I'm not giving examples.
What an incredible session. If we'd got India out and reduced the deficit to just 115 with 9 wickets remaining by the end of day 2 that'd normally be a good day, let alone a good session.
Triggered I think by long term well-argued lobbying, HoC Walking and Cycling APPG reports, and the blowback when the police don't understand wheelchairs and lock them in their vehicle pound for weeks (they would not do it to prosthetic legs, and it is analogous!). This will I think be crossing over into battery safety, e-scooters, and a number of other areas.
(One of the stances of organisations I am involved with, for example, is that anyone disabled using a mobility aid at walking speed - say up to 4-5mph - should legally be a pedestrian. at present it is massively complicated. An example of confusion is a sit down scooter, or a rollator where you sit down; they need to work out what it is.)
I do have an email for feedback and questions. If anyone wants to get involved, I'll PM it.
You may be aware that we have been exploring and investigating the “invalid carriage” regulations alongside developing micromobility policy.
We initially started on this journey when we recognised the same new battery and motor technologies that have created a range of new micromobility vehicles present a significant opportunity to improve disabled people’s independence.
The current regulations are nearly 40 years old and do not account for the devices people need to use, which is why I am pleased to inform you that the government will formally be reviewing the law on powered mobility aids. This will involve an in-depth investigation of the existing legal framework, as well as the opportunities and the risks of using new technology safely and responsibly, considering the needs of all disabled people.
We are committed to ensuring this policy is reviewed and designed with disabled people, not for them. We hope to continue and improve our collaborative working with you, and thorough consultation will be a central part of that process.
Rather like the idea that cars are bad and roads promote cars, aligned with not building more roads - this became policy under New Labour.
‘The Reds have got no money, but we’re going to win the league.’
And, are these a government's prime responsibilities? I would say the government's prime responsibilities are more around keeping the economy on track, protecting our health, maintaining good international relations, and protecting us from bad business practices. I'm not saying you're right or I'm right, but rather that we all have different priorities and we have democratic elections to sort that out.
So, yes, I think millions of other voters do agree with you, but millions more don't. The question is, perhaps, which group is larger at the next general election?
See - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawkhurst_Gang and many others
12 mins 30 secs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5QGOHXYQ84
Starmer's Labour are about as popular as Sunak's tories, which gives us a clue that the current priorities are wrong, electorally.
You'd think this would make the politicos realise that the NU10k agenda is utterly useless as an electoral guiding light.
If they don't, Nige probably will - and I suspect it'll be more impactful on the lanyard classes and their increasingly small centrist Dad support base.
Here at the moment, a Reform Councillor is speculating about reopening Rufford Ford (twat) and bringing back the Yoochoobers (and the performative ASB they generate). We have a number of country lanes and single tracks which have been closed over the years, sometimes except for access, and generally they are great.
The most recent one helped create a safe active travel route from Chesterfield to the Chesterfield Royal Hospital, so we get to make people healthier by exercise whilst accessing blood tests etc.
The only advantage of them, I can see, is that the public outcry such closures provoke often reveals the true colours - and blindspots - of many individuals from eg the cycling brigade
If we take pre-modern to mean pre-1500, if you wanted to take a boat and move to Britain, you did and nobody stopped you.
Here, good lunchtime listening especially if you are on beef burgers or steak tartare:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04d4sbs