Related to the topic: Recently, I saw an article claiming that the rise in popularity of a name in the US was often followed by a rise in the popularity of similar names. So, for example, after "Jason" became popular, so did "Mason".
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
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.
I think it was much more about austerity cuts in police and council funding than about seeing shoplifters as victims.
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.
The problem with the religious version of “no new roads” is that you get stuff like not dualing the A1.
Or understanding (the way the Dutch do) that you can’t punish people onto the “right” form of transport. It’s about providing for all of them. And, critically, make changing between modes as part of the same journey, easier.
For example, some years ago, there was a proposal to run the car carriers on the Channel Tunnel to various destinations in France. The evidence was that it would reduce CO2 by x, reduce miles driven, reduce accidents (tired people marathon driving etc). It was killed by “cars bad” policy makers. So people continue to marathon drive to/from the Chunnel.
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.
I think it was much more about austerity cuts in police and council funding than about seeing shoplifters as victims.
The point is the alignment. Just as being liberal on immigration aligns with sweatshop businesses wanting cheap labour.
Is this not simply because David is the best name ever? My father was called David, my son is called David, my son in law Dave, 2 of my best friends are David, it’s pretty much ubiquitous.
I once worked with a team of four women, three of them named Julie.
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"?
Microaggressions.
And no, I'm not giving examples.
Well, okay. Examples would be handy.
If I may give another anecdote about 'minor' behaviours, and why they matter. When I was about twenty, I visited an old schoolfriend of mine in Northampton. Aside from the crime of living in Northampton, he was a civil, well-behaved person, and his family were relatively well-off. He was also half-Pakistani, and obviously had heritage from that part of the world.
We stayed out until the early hours, then walked back to his parents' house, just outside the town. On the way, the police stopped us and asked us what we were doing. They were polite and civil to us, although they seemed more interested in him than me. When they left, I stated that I found it amusing and good that the police were so helpful.
He was seething, as he and his brothers were routinely stopped by the police. From my point of view, being stopped once was fine. From his, being stopped many times felt like harassment.
And I fear that's where your ranking of behaviours into "1 or 2" falls down. Yes, they might be minor individually. But when they happen frequently, or even all the time, then it becomes very different. At least, if it happens to you.
(And yes, the police might also have been chatting to white lads out at that time of night. He didn't think so, and said it didn't happen to friends of his. Over the years I've been out walking in all sorts of places, at all sorts of time of night, and never once been stopped by the police.)
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.
I think it was much more about austerity cuts in police and council funding than about seeing shoplifters as victims.
The point is the alignment. Just as being liberal on immigration aligns with sweatshop businesses wanting cheap labour.
The party that cut funding to the police, courts and councils was the Conservatives. Also, the party that massively increased immigration was the Conservatives. This stuff about "alignment" is just you trying to pin things you don't like on your political opponents.
Isaac and Ezra at 37 and 38. Is this from African Christians, who often favour Old Testament names?
I see Leon is sinking fast, only scraping in at 100.
It has always amused me when I meet a black man named Enoch.
The DT only say in the small print that that is for England and Wales only. Of course, Gordon and Keir would be less often used than for the UK as a whole.
London rags just assume England is the UK
Due to assymetric devolution, an awful lot of stuff is just England and Wales
yes but for UK, London is the centre of the universe and outside that and the home counties is beyond beyond
"BBC faces mounting calls to pull MasterChef series"
I wonder just how rubbish the woman who has asked to be edited out was. I doubt her morals would have led to the same request had she gone far in the competition (and, we can assume she didn't go far, as editing her out wouldn't have worked).
From the linked story:- Responding to those claims, Banijay said: "We have no record of Sarah raising concerns with producers at the time of filming, however when raised during the formal investigation process, we thoroughly assessed her claims including reviewing relevant programme rushes with Sarah.
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.
+1 until recently travel was expensive, time consuming and risky - those who did it were usually welcomed because there wasn’t many of them.
And that’s the difficulty here - we are trying to apply old rules in a world where given a bit of money most people can get anywhere within 48 hours
Another very large part of our defence policy might have to be rethought.
This technology has the potential to obsolete ballistic missile subs within about a decade I would guess. Which really isn't the sort of timescale on which we plan for our nuclear deterrent.
AI and autonomous swarms to detect subsurface threats and protect critical infrastructure. https://helsing.ai/lura
Station a few thousand of these offshore from sub bases, and tag teams in the deep ocean, and the subs would no longer be undetectable.
It's German, but China could fairly easily duplicate this.
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.
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
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.
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.
But the rail projects aren't remotely comparable.
Let Heathrow have RAF Northolt.
The runway is about half the length of Heathrow's two strips. Is there room to extend it - and where would you remove the RAF operations to ?
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!
In the short term, it was excellent politics. The logic was to get a lock on all pensioners and near-pensioners. They vote a lot, there has been a bulge of them in recent years. So, exempt them from austerity, indulge their NIMBY instincts, push the bills for infrastructure beyond their time horizon.
The wins of the 2010s wouldn't have happened otherwise. It's deepened our problems now, but hey ho.
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"?
Microaggressions.
And no, I'm not giving examples.
Well, okay. Examples would be handy.
If I may give another anecdote about 'minor' behaviours, and why they matter. When I was about twenty, I visited an old schoolfriend of mine in Northampton. Aside from the crime of living in Northampton, he was a civil, well-behaved person, and his family were relatively well-off. He was also half-Pakistani, and obviously had heritage from that part of the world.
We stayed out until the early hours, then walked back to his parents' house, just outside the town. On the way, the police stopped us and asked us what we were doing. They were polite and civil to us, although they seemed more interested in him than me. When they left, I stated that I found it amusing and good that the police were so helpful.
He was seething, as he and his brothers were routinely stopped by the police. From my point of view, being stopped once was fine. From his, being stopped many times felt like harassment.
And I fear that's where your ranking of behaviours into "1 or 2" falls down. Yes, they might be minor individually. But when they happen frequently, or even all the time, then it becomes very different. At least, if it happens to you.
(And yes, the police might also have been chatting to white lads out at that time of night. He didn't think so, and said it didn't happen to friends of his. Over the years I've been out walking in all sorts of places, at all sorts of time of night, and never once been stopped by the police.)
When I was young friends of mine with motorbikes used to get stopped all the time (the issue being young with a bike only). One got stopped twice within a few minutes. When the second policeman asked him questions he suggested he ask his colleague just down the road. It didn't go down well.
In 70 years I have only been stopped 3 times, all for driving stuff. In all cases I was at fault. In all cases I was allowed on my way without penalty.
Cleveland Police officer appears in court charged with child sex offences
A Cleveland Police officer has appeared in court charged with child sex offences.
PC Nathan Henderson, 30, who has been suspended by the force, appeared briefly at Newton Aycliffe Magistrates’ Court in County Durham on Wednesday (30 July).
He faces 11 counts of engaging in sexual activity with a child and one count of perverting the course of justice.
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
Following the recent conversations, I looked out of the taxi window as we headed back from the theatre to the hotel. I reckon one in four or five of the people on the street, at about ten o'clock on a Saturday night in the West End, had their mobile phones visibly out.
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!
In the short term, it was excellent politics. The logic was to get a lock on all pensioners and near-pensioners. They vote a lot, there has been a bulge of them in recent years. So, exempt them from austerity, indulge their NIMBY instincts, push the bills for infrastructure beyond their time horizon.
The wins of the 2010s wouldn't have happened otherwise. It's deepened our problems now, but hey ho.
It was a case of “apres moi, le deluge.” The Conservatives had no interest in recruiting new generations of voters, so now they poll about 7% with the under 40’s.
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.
You're arguing with a member of NU10K, Mort. He will defend the establishment with idiotic phrases like "there's no benefit fraud" when the benefits bill is larger than ever and more people receive disability benefits than in the last 30 years.
Is this not simply because David is the best name ever? My father was called David, my son is called David, my son in law Dave, 2 of my best friends are David, it’s pretty much ubiquitous.
I once worked with a team of four women, three of them named Julie.
When I was a student, there were a lot of lads called Andy. One of them decided to adopt the name Henry so that he would stand out.
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
Following the recent conversations, I looked out of the taxi window as we headed back from the theatre to the hotel. I reckon one in four or five of the people on the street, at about ten o'clock on a Saturday night in the West End, had their mobile phones visibly out.
The rest having had their phones snatched already?
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!
In the short term, it was excellent politics. The logic was to get a lock on all pensioners and near-pensioners. They vote a lot, there has been a bulge of them in recent years. So, exempt them from austerity, indulge their NIMBY instincts, push the bills for infrastructure beyond their time horizon.
The wins of the 2010s wouldn't have happened otherwise. It's deepened our problems now, but hey ho.
See also Hunt’s NI tax cuts which has placed Reeves in her current impossible situation due to stupid election promises
I assume its severe and the Ashes is in November so not that much time. Summer's nearly over folks, get ready for the blanket by the fire and a decent brandy.
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.
You're arguing with a member of NU10K, Mort. He will defend the establishment with idiotic phrases like "there's no benefit fraud" when the benefits bill is larger than ever and more people receive disability benefits than in the last 30 years.
The problem with disability is that there is an awful lot more people on mental health disability than before and while I can see why that’s the case, I can’t see how to fix it.
Btw I’ve had 2 late 20’s friends telling me about close friend suicides in the past month
Big downward revisions in nonfarm payroll for May and June.
May was revised from 144K to 19K June was revised from 133K to 14k
From memory, they have been consistently wrong for several years now, and had to had major revisions. Are people from the ONS working their on secondment?
I assume its severe and the Ashes is in November so not that much time. Summer's nearly over folks, get ready for the blanket by the fire and a decent brandy.
Not only is the Ashes in November but on 2nd November a Tory leadership challenge becomes possible.
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
Following the recent conversations, I looked out of the taxi window as we headed back from the theatre to the hotel. I reckon one in four or five of the people on the street, at about ten o'clock on a Saturday night in the West End, had their mobile phones visibly out.
More worried how so many utter morons don’t seem to be able to walk along a street without looking at their phone. They aren’t able to just give 30 mins or less of their life without reading it or typing even though it means other people having to swerve out of their way, yes thanks very much you rude fuck, rather than smack into them and potentially cause them a brain haemorrhage as they hit the pavement with the back of their skull.
If you really, really need to check a message, send one or make a call, maybe check a map, move over to the side, stand still and do it. If necessary face into the wall to try and protect your phone from snatching but stop sodding looking at it whilst you are walking along. And no, you don’t need to make a call on speaker holding the phone in front of your mouth whilst walking either. Headphones, phone in pocket, all safe and easy.
Its only 3 months until England arrive in the prison colony, Stokes is injured for at least 2 of those. Squeaky bum time.
Stokes can be just a batsman (and superb inspiring captain) so I'm less worried about him. Balance of the team is better with him bowling but he doesn't need to.
I'm not convinced Woakes would have travelled anyway.
Big downward revisions in nonfarm payroll for May and June.
May was revised from 144K to 19K June was revised from 133K to 14k
From memory, they have been consistently wrong for several years now, and had to had major revisions. Are people from the ONS working their on secondment?
The US does seem to like to have figures announced as early as possible which means they can’t be that (or at all) accurate given the scale of those corrections
But it’s hardly surprising given that today is August 1st and the announced the figures for July at 8am EST this morning (74,000 expectation was 110,000 and that 74,000 is probably too high).
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
Following the recent conversations, I looked out of the taxi window as we headed back from the theatre to the hotel. I reckon one in four or five of the people on the street, at about ten o'clock on a Saturday night in the West End, had their mobile phones visibly out.
More worried how so many utter morons don’t seem to be able to walk along a street without looking at their phone. They aren’t able to just give 30 mins or less of their life without reading it or typing even though it means other people having to swerve out of their way, yes thanks very much you rude fuck, rather than smack into them and potentially cause them a brain haemorrhage as they hit the pavement with the back of their skull.
If you really, really need to check a message, send one or make a call, maybe check a map, move over to the side, stand still and do it. If necessary face into the wall to try and protect your phone from snatching but stop sodding looking at it whilst you are walking along. And no, you don’t need to make a call on speaker holding the phone in front of your mouth whilst walking either. Headphones, phone in pocket, all safe and easy.
But what if I need to reply to something on PoliticalBetting.com!?!?!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
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.
In pre-modern times, if there was a level of unwanted immigration - at this level - then this is absolutely what would have happened. As any basic reading of history would show. And, if you wanted to expel people, you did.
You seem to live in a bubble in your head where some open-borders fantasy existed in the past.
If it was a problem, the government would have taken action along the lines I suggested. If it wasn't a problem, because it was in such small numbers no-one cared, or because people emigrating was the bigger phenomena, then it wouldn't. And it wasn't managed legalistically until very recently because if it was a problem en-mass force was used instead .
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
in my feeds the mocking of Sweeney is being done by attractive ppl of different skintones, rather than the social justice warriors. ymmv
In mine, there's been zero mention of the woman, except this.
Since Monday, Fox News has spent 85 minutes covering an American Eagle commercial featuring Sydney Sweeney, devoting over 20 segments to it. In the same time period, Fox spent just 3 minutes discussing the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. https://x.com/mmfa/status/1950983950114979843
But I can see why Leon might think it's worthy of an article. (It's probably not.)
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.
You're arguing with a member of NU10K, Mort. He will defend the establishment with idiotic phrases like "there's no benefit fraud" when the benefits bill is larger than ever and more people receive disability benefits than in the last 30 years.
The problem with disability is that there is an awful lot more people on mental health disability than before and while I can see why that’s the case, I can’t see how to fix it.
Btw I’ve had 2 late 20’s friends telling me about close friend suicides in the past month
No longer make it permissible to claim disability benefits for mental health conditions. Open up mental asylums instead. 19/20 on disability benefits for mental health will decide that they can work rather than end up in the loony bin and te 1/20 who actually have issues will get proper support.
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.
+1 until recently travel was expensive, time consuming and risky - those who did it were usually welcomed because there wasn’t many of them.
And that’s the difficulty here - we are trying to apply old rules in a world where given a bit of money most people can get anywhere within 48 hours
The point is that if it were not, and immigration was happening en-mass on boats, the governments at the time would have had absolutely no compunction whatever in using force to stop them.
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
This is what happened to me, twice, the first one missed the phone and nearly got run over by a truck - then fled on his bike. The 2nd did it with supreme skill in moments, just whizzed past and grabbed it one handed
If I had caught either of them I would have tried to beat them to near-death (they were both scrawny lads, I am pretty sure I would have won despite my advanced years). I am sure plenty of able bodied males, when robbed, get that same surge of crazy, red-mist testosterone
So these thieves are risking it when they rob adult men
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
in my feeds the mocking of Sweeney is being done by attractive ppl of different skintones, rather than the social justice warriors. ymmv
In mine, there's been zero mention of the woman, except this.
Since Monday, Fox News has spent 85 minutes covering an American Eagle commercial featuring Sydney Sweeney, devoting over 20 segments to it. In the same time period, Fox spent just 3 minutes discussing the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. https://x.com/mmfa/status/1950983950114979843
But I can see why Leon might think it's worthy of an article. (It's probably not.)
Why the fuck would you presume you know anything about this industry? And what articles drive clicks, and earn money?
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
This is what happened to me, twice, the first one missed the phone and nearly got run over by a truck - then fled on his bike. The 2nd did it with supreme skill in moments, just whizzed past and grabbed it one handed
If I had caught either of them I would have tried to beat them to near-death (they were both scrawny lads, I am pretty sure I would have won despite my advanced years). I am sure plenty of able bodied males, when robbed, get that same surge of crazy, red-mist testosterone
So these thieves are risking it when they rob adult men
Your latter point is why women are more commonly targeted for phone theft than men. It's also why so many people on pb question whether it's real or not.
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
Maybe you could argue that she's one of the few celebrities who just does their job and doesn't have to engage in culture war shenanigans with little quotes about how horrible and monstrous we all are. Her success, in advertising at least, shows that there's a market for that.
Cynically I'd think that any outrage about a mundane jeans advert where the model says they have great jeans is, in itself, manufactured for clicks, but the laughable part is that that cynicism is doubtful.
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
This is what happened to me, twice, the first one missed the phone and nearly got run over by a truck - then fled on his bike. The 2nd did it with supreme skill in moments, just whizzed past and grabbed it one handed
If I had caught either of them I would have tried to beat them to near-death (they were both scrawny lads, I am pretty sure I would have won despite my advanced years). I am sure plenty of able bodied males, when robbed, get that same surge of crazy, red-mist testosterone
So these thieves are risking it when they rob adult men
Your latter point is why women are more commonly targeted for phone theft than men. It's also why so many people on pb question whether it's real or not.
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
in my feeds the mocking of Sweeney is being done by attractive ppl of different skintones, rather than the social justice warriors. ymmv
In mine, there's been zero mention of the woman, except this.
Since Monday, Fox News has spent 85 minutes covering an American Eagle commercial featuring Sydney Sweeney, devoting over 20 segments to it. In the same time period, Fox spent just 3 minutes discussing the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. https://x.com/mmfa/status/1950983950114979843
But I can see why Leon might think it's worthy of an article. (It's probably not.)
Why the fuck would you presume you know anything about this industry? And what articles drive clicks, and earn money?
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:
Just listened again, and they did not kill him; they cut off his calves with a sword whilst alive, and broiled and ate them. It's an "account of his life", before he was hanged.
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
Maybe you could argue that she's one of the few celebrities who just does their job and doesn't have to engage in culture war shenanigans with little quotes about how horrible and monstrous we all are. Her success, in advertising at least, shows that there's a market for that.
Cynically I'd think that any outrage about a mundane jeans advert where the model says they have great jeans is, in itself, manufactured for clicks, but the laughable part is that that cynicism is doubtful.
She leans into her sex appeal and is unapologetic about it. Loads of Hollywood celebs would have already been public flogging themselves over the hurt they had caused to marginalized communities (while of course still banking the $1 million cheque).
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
in my feeds the mocking of Sweeney is being done by attractive ppl of different skintones, rather than the social justice warriors. ymmv
In mine, there's been zero mention of the woman, except this.
Since Monday, Fox News has spent 85 minutes covering an American Eagle commercial featuring Sydney Sweeney, devoting over 20 segments to it. In the same time period, Fox spent just 3 minutes discussing the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. https://x.com/mmfa/status/1950983950114979843
But I can see why Leon might think it's worthy of an article. (It's probably not.)
Why the fuck would you presume you know anything about this industry? And what articles drive clicks, and earn money?
We have different understandings of "worth".
Well, in this context my understanding is 1000 times more relevant than yours
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
in my feeds the mocking of Sweeney is being done by attractive ppl of different skintones, rather than the social justice warriors. ymmv
In mine, there's been zero mention of the woman, except this.
Since Monday, Fox News has spent 85 minutes covering an American Eagle commercial featuring Sydney Sweeney, devoting over 20 segments to it. In the same time period, Fox spent just 3 minutes discussing the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. https://x.com/mmfa/status/1950983950114979843
But I can see why Leon might think it's worthy of an article. (It's probably not.)
Why the fuck would you presume you know anything about this industry? And what articles drive clicks, and earn money?
You make a valid point. So why do you pontificate with apparent supreme knowledge on a huge range of stuff you nothing about, all the 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.
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.
+1 until recently travel was expensive, time consuming and risky - those who did it were usually welcomed because there wasn’t many of them.
And that’s the difficulty here - we are trying to apply old rules in a world where given a bit of money most people can get anywhere within 48 hours
The point is that if it were not, and immigration was happening en-mass on boats, the governments at the time would have had absolutely no compunction whatever in using force to stop them.
Remember travel was expensive - going back to the period you are talking about the only people on a ship heading to America (say as that’s the obvious example) were either Government sponsored or at the very least massive private ventures with tacit approval.
It’s worth remembering why Scotland merged into the United Kingdom - mainly due to Scotland being bankrupted by a plan to colonize Panama
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
in my feeds the mocking of Sweeney is being done by attractive ppl of different skintones, rather than the social justice warriors. ymmv
In mine, there's been zero mention of the woman, except this.
Since Monday, Fox News has spent 85 minutes covering an American Eagle commercial featuring Sydney Sweeney, devoting over 20 segments to it. In the same time period, Fox spent just 3 minutes discussing the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. https://x.com/mmfa/status/1950983950114979843
But I can see why Leon might think it's worthy of an article. (It's probably not.)
Why the fuck would you presume you know anything about this industry? And what articles drive clicks, and earn money?
We have different understandings of "worth".
Well, in this context my understanding is 1000 times more relevant than yours
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
in my feeds the mocking of Sweeney is being done by attractive ppl of different skintones, rather than the social justice warriors. ymmv
In mine, there's been zero mention of the woman, except this.
Since Monday, Fox News has spent 85 minutes covering an American Eagle commercial featuring Sydney Sweeney, devoting over 20 segments to it. In the same time period, Fox spent just 3 minutes discussing the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. https://x.com/mmfa/status/1950983950114979843
But I can see why Leon might think it's worthy of an article. (It's probably not.)
Why the fuck would you presume you know anything about this industry? And what articles drive clicks, and earn money?
You make a valid point. So why do you pontificate with apparent supreme knowledge on a huge range of stuff you nothing about, all the time.
The irony of some of the stuff you come out with!
Because I know loads about everything. Next question
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
in my feeds the mocking of Sweeney is being done by attractive ppl of different skintones, rather than the social justice warriors. ymmv
In mine, there's been zero mention of the woman, except this.
Since Monday, Fox News has spent 85 minutes covering an American Eagle commercial featuring Sydney Sweeney, devoting over 20 segments to it. In the same time period, Fox spent just 3 minutes discussing the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. https://x.com/mmfa/status/1950983950114979843
But I can see why Leon might think it's worthy of an article. (It's probably not.)
Why the fuck would you presume you know anything about this industry? And what articles drive clicks, and earn money?
You make a valid point. So why do you pontificate with apparent supreme knowledge on a huge range of stuff you nothing about, all the time.
The irony of some of the stuff you come out with!
Because I know loads about everything. Next question
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!
In the short term, it was excellent politics. The logic was to get a lock on all pensioners and near-pensioners. They vote a lot, there has been a bulge of them in recent years. So, exempt them from austerity, indulge their NIMBY instincts, push the bills for infrastructure beyond their time horizon.
The wins of the 2010s wouldn't have happened otherwise. It's deepened our problems now, but hey ho.
See also Hunt’s NI tax cuts which has placed Reeves in her current impossible situation due to stupid election promises
You mean Hunt's tax rise?
Freezing thresholds and cutting the tax rate was a net tax rise.
Doesn't stop you repeating this myth that Hunt cut taxes, no matter the fact you know it isn't true.
Reeves predicament is because we spend too much money, which has nothing to do with Hunt's tax cut rise.
31 tickets have suddenly become available for Sunday at the Oval on the official ticket re-sale site. Not sure whether that's because of the weather or the match situation.
It gets worse. And worse. The government is essentially trolling the British people, daring them to do anything
“Almost one million NHS “free passes” have been given out to asylum seekers in the last five years.
“The HC2 certificates give low-income residents the right to freebies not afforded to most of the public, including free prescriptions, dental care, eye tests, wigs, and discounts for glasses, contact lenses, and travelling to and from appointments.
“But new data released by the NHS Business Services Authority under freedom of information laws, reveal that the majority – 59 per cent – of the 1.56 million issued across the UK in the last five years, 920,199 were awarded to asylum seekers.”
Telegraph
Remember when @bondegezou kept assuring us that asylum seekers get no favourable NHS treatment at all
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
in my feeds the mocking of Sweeney is being done by attractive ppl of different skintones, rather than the social justice warriors. ymmv
In mine, there's been zero mention of the woman, except this.
Since Monday, Fox News has spent 85 minutes covering an American Eagle commercial featuring Sydney Sweeney, devoting over 20 segments to it. In the same time period, Fox spent just 3 minutes discussing the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. https://x.com/mmfa/status/1950983950114979843
But I can see why Leon might think it's worthy of an article. (It's probably not.)
Why the fuck would you presume you know anything about this industry? And what articles drive clicks, and earn money?
You make a valid point. So why do you pontificate with apparent supreme knowledge on a huge range of stuff you nothing about, all the time.
The irony of some of the stuff you come out with!
Because I know loads about everything. Next question
You think you do. Lots of Reddit stuff, no doubt.
Well I knew more about the strong possibility of a lab leak than you, and you claim to be some kind of scientist
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
This is what happened to me, twice, the first one missed the phone and nearly got run over by a truck - then fled on his bike. The 2nd did it with supreme skill in moments, just whizzed past and grabbed it one handed
If I had caught either of them I would have tried to beat them to near-death (they were both scrawny lads, I am pretty sure I would have won despite my advanced years). I am sure plenty of able bodied males, when robbed, get that same surge of crazy, red-mist testosterone
So these thieves are risking it when they rob adult men
Your latter point is why women are more commonly targeted for phone theft than men. It's also why so many people on pb question whether it's real or not.
A friend of mine had his phone grabbed from his hand, near King's Cross Station about 3 years ago. He tried to hold onto it, but in the tussle was thrown off balance and fell. As a result he fractured his shoulder, and had to be off work for over six months and even now has impaired movement of that arm. This has been life changing for a young surgeon.
It was a pretty crappy 4 year old phone, but thieves don't see that it is worthless until after they have it in their hands.
This sort of crime has increased, replacing a lot of other crimes that have dramatically dropped (nicking cars and burglary for example). In large part it is down to the proliferation of unlicensed electric mopeds ridden at speed through pedestrian areas, and the fact that nearly everyone has expensive portable electronics in their hands when out and about.
I only get my phone out in London on the street if in a doorway with my back to a wall, and having scanned the immediate locality. I haven't heard of anyone being robbed this way outside London and similar cities like Paris and Rome.
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
in my feeds the mocking of Sweeney is being done by attractive ppl of different skintones, rather than the social justice warriors. ymmv
In mine, there's been zero mention of the woman, except this.
Since Monday, Fox News has spent 85 minutes covering an American Eagle commercial featuring Sydney Sweeney, devoting over 20 segments to it. In the same time period, Fox spent just 3 minutes discussing the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. https://x.com/mmfa/status/1950983950114979843
But I can see why Leon might think it's worthy of an article. (It's probably not.)
Why the fuck would you presume you know anything about this industry? And what articles drive clicks, and earn money?
You make a valid point. So why do you pontificate with apparent supreme knowledge on a huge range of stuff you nothing about, all the time.
The irony of some of the stuff you come out with!
Because I know loads about everything. Next question
No, that's your daughter, who is keen to broaden her mind and learn everything about everything. It's so very common for children to try and compensate for the faults or weaknesses of their parents.
It gets worse. And worse. The government is essentially trolling the British people, daring them to do anything
“Almost one million NHS “free passes” have been given out to asylum seekers in the last five years.
“The HC2 certificates give low-income residents the right to freebies not afforded to most of the public, including free prescriptions, dental care, eye tests, wigs, and discounts for glasses, contact lenses, and travelling to and from appointments.
“But new data released by the NHS Business Services Authority under freedom of information laws, reveal that the majority – 59 per cent – of the 1.56 million issued across the UK in the last five years, 920,199 were awarded to asylum seekers.”
Telegraph
Remember when @bondegezou kept assuring us that asylum seekers get no favourable NHS treatment at all
I'll be honest, if I had to guess how many asylum seekers there were in total in this country, it would have been much lower than a million. All the reports normally are in the tens of thousands the figures quoted, not millions.
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
in my feeds the mocking of Sweeney is being done by attractive ppl of different skintones, rather than the social justice warriors. ymmv
In mine, there's been zero mention of the woman, except this.
Since Monday, Fox News has spent 85 minutes covering an American Eagle commercial featuring Sydney Sweeney, devoting over 20 segments to it. In the same time period, Fox spent just 3 minutes discussing the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. https://x.com/mmfa/status/1950983950114979843
But I can see why Leon might think it's worthy of an article. (It's probably not.)
Why the fuck would you presume you know anything about this industry? And what articles drive clicks, and earn money?
You make a valid point. So why do you pontificate with apparent supreme knowledge on a huge range of stuff you nothing about, all the time.
The irony of some of the stuff you come out with!
Because I know loads about everything. Next question
Well that's clearly not true because there have been umpteen times when you have come out with stuff here that you have just found out about only to be surprised that many of us knew already eg toxic effect of dog flea treatment in rivers, mice community experiments, etc.
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
This is what happened to me, twice, the first one missed the phone and nearly got run over by a truck - then fled on his bike. The 2nd did it with supreme skill in moments, just whizzed past and grabbed it one handed
If I had caught either of them I would have tried to beat them to near-death (they were both scrawny lads, I am pretty sure I would have won despite my advanced years). I am sure plenty of able bodied males, when robbed, get that same surge of crazy, red-mist testosterone
So these thieves are risking it when they rob adult men
Your latter point is why women are more commonly targeted for phone theft than men. It's also why so many people on pb question whether it's real or not.
A friend of mine had his phone grabbed from his hand, near King's Cross Station about 3 years ago. He tried to hold onto it, but in the tussle was thrown off balance and fell. As a result he fractured his shoulder, and had to be off work for over six months and even now has impaired movement of that arm. This has been life changing for a young surgeon.
It was a pretty crappy 4 year old phone, but thieves don't see that it is worthless until after they have it in their hands.
This sort of crime has increased, replacing a lot of other crimes that have dramatically dropped (nicking cars and burglary for example). In large part it is down to the proliferation of unlicensed electric mopeds ridden at speed through pedestrian areas, and the fact that nearly everyone has expensive portable electronics in their hands when out and about.
I only get my phone out in London on the street if in a doorway with my back to a wall, and having scanned the immediate locality. I haven't heard of anyone being robbed this way outside London and similar cities like Paris and Rome.
Car theft is well up.....keyless entry made it very easy. And even cars with a bit more security, its all electronics based, the tech is available from China via the internet.
One incredible loophole that I can't believe exists, if you legally take your car out the country, you are technically supposed to surrender the V5, but nobody checks. So you can sell it on. Its appears they are also very relaxed on checking for written off cars. And then you can turn a hot motor into a "legit" one.
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
This is what happened to me, twice, the first one missed the phone and nearly got run over by a truck - then fled on his bike. The 2nd did it with supreme skill in moments, just whizzed past and grabbed it one handed
If I had caught either of them I would have tried to beat them to near-death (they were both scrawny lads, I am pretty sure I would have won despite my advanced years). I am sure plenty of able bodied males, when robbed, get that same surge of crazy, red-mist testosterone
So these thieves are risking it when they rob adult men
Your latter point is why women are more commonly targeted for phone theft than men. It's also why so many people on pb question whether it's real or not.
A friend of mine had his phone grabbed from his hand, near King's Cross Station about 3 years ago. He tried to hold onto it, but in the tussle was thrown off balance and fell. As a result he fractured his shoulder, and had to be off work for over six months and even now has impaired movement of that arm. This has been life changing for a young surgeon.
It was a pretty crappy 4 year old phone, but thieves don't see that it is worthless until after they have it in their hands.
This sort of crime has increased, replacing a lot of other crimes that have dramatically dropped (nicking cars and burglary for example). In large part it is down to the proliferation of unlicensed electric mopeds ridden at speed through pedestrian areas, and the fact that nearly everyone has expensive portable electronics in their hands when out and about.
I only get my phone out in London on the street if in a doorway with my back to a wall, and having scanned the immediate locality. I haven't heard of anyone being robbed this way outside London and similar cities like Paris and Rome.
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
in my feeds the mocking of Sweeney is being done by attractive ppl of different skintones, rather than the social justice warriors. ymmv
In mine, there's been zero mention of the woman, except this.
Since Monday, Fox News has spent 85 minutes covering an American Eagle commercial featuring Sydney Sweeney, devoting over 20 segments to it. In the same time period, Fox spent just 3 minutes discussing the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. https://x.com/mmfa/status/1950983950114979843
But I can see why Leon might think it's worthy of an article. (It's probably not.)
Why the fuck would you presume you know anything about this industry? And what articles drive clicks, and earn money?
You make a valid point. So why do you pontificate with apparent supreme knowledge on a huge range of stuff you nothing about, all the time.
The irony of some of the stuff you come out with!
Because I know loads about everything. Next question
Well that's clearly not true because there have been umpteen times when you have come out with stuff here that you have just found out about only to be surprised that many of us knew already eg toxic effect of dog flea treatment in rivers, mice community experiments, etc.
Who can forget the great ‘what’s a burner phone’ moment?
It gets worse. And worse. The government is essentially trolling the British people, daring them to do anything
“Almost one million NHS “free passes” have been given out to asylum seekers in the last five years.
“The HC2 certificates give low-income residents the right to freebies not afforded to most of the public, including free prescriptions, dental care, eye tests, wigs, and discounts for glasses, contact lenses, and travelling to and from appointments.
“But new data released by the NHS Business Services Authority under freedom of information laws, reveal that the majority – 59 per cent – of the 1.56 million issued across the UK in the last five years, 920,199 were awarded to asylum seekers.”
Telegraph
Remember when @bondegezou kept assuring us that asylum seekers get no favourable NHS treatment at all
I'll be honest, if I had to guess how many asylum seekers there were in total in this country, it would have been much lower than a million. All the reports normally are in the tens of thousands the figures quoted, not millions.
That surprises me.
I imagine they are counting individual passes for different aspects of NHS treatment - dental work, ophthalmology, etc
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
in my feeds the mocking of Sweeney is being done by attractive ppl of different skintones, rather than the social justice warriors. ymmv
In mine, there's been zero mention of the woman, except this.
Since Monday, Fox News has spent 85 minutes covering an American Eagle commercial featuring Sydney Sweeney, devoting over 20 segments to it. In the same time period, Fox spent just 3 minutes discussing the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. https://x.com/mmfa/status/1950983950114979843
But I can see why Leon might think it's worthy of an article. (It's probably not.)
Why the fuck would you presume you know anything about this industry? And what articles drive clicks, and earn money?
You make a valid point. So why do you pontificate with apparent supreme knowledge on a huge range of stuff you nothing about, all the time.
The irony of some of the stuff you come out with!
Because I know loads about everything. Next question
You think you do. Lots of Reddit stuff, no doubt.
Well I knew more about the strong possibility of a lab leak than you, and you claim to be some kind of scientist
Just laughable
By which you mean you've read lots of stuff that confirms your beliefs and nothing that doesn't?
I'd never claim to be a better writer than someone who does it for a living. I would wonder about a random on the internet who claims to be a better scientist that someone with a 30 year track record and a job at a top ten UK uni...
It gets worse. And worse. The government is essentially trolling the British people, daring them to do anything
“Almost one million NHS “free passes” have been given out to asylum seekers in the last five years.
“The HC2 certificates give low-income residents the right to freebies not afforded to most of the public, including free prescriptions, dental care, eye tests, wigs, and discounts for glasses, contact lenses, and travelling to and from appointments.
“But new data released by the NHS Business Services Authority under freedom of information laws, reveal that the majority – 59 per cent – of the 1.56 million issued across the UK in the last five years, 920,199 were awarded to asylum seekers.”
Telegraph
Remember when @bondegezou kept assuring us that asylum seekers get no favourable NHS treatment at all
I'll be honest, if I had to guess how many asylum seekers there were in total in this country, it would have been much lower than a million. All the reports normally are in the tens of thousands the figures quoted, not millions.
That surprises me.
Yes - its the conflation of mass immigration and a recent surge of channel crossing asylum seekers.
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
in my feeds the mocking of Sweeney is being done by attractive ppl of different skintones, rather than the social justice warriors. ymmv
In mine, there's been zero mention of the woman, except this.
Since Monday, Fox News has spent 85 minutes covering an American Eagle commercial featuring Sydney Sweeney, devoting over 20 segments to it. In the same time period, Fox spent just 3 minutes discussing the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. https://x.com/mmfa/status/1950983950114979843
But I can see why Leon might think it's worthy of an article. (It's probably not.)
Why the fuck would you presume you know anything about this industry? And what articles drive clicks, and earn money?
You make a valid point. So why do you pontificate with apparent supreme knowledge on a huge range of stuff you nothing about, all the time.
The irony of some of the stuff you come out with!
Because I know loads about everything. Next question
You think you do. Lots of Reddit stuff, no doubt.
Well I knew more about the strong possibility of a lab leak than you, and you claim to be some kind of scientist
Just laughable
By which you mean you've read lots of stuff that confirms your beliefs and nothing that doesn't?
I'd never claim to be a better writer than someone who does it for a living. I would wonder about a random on the internet who claims to be a better scientist that someone with a 30 year track record and a job at a top ten UK uni...
It took you about three years to even admit lab leak was possible. A clownshow
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
This is what happened to me, twice, the first one missed the phone and nearly got run over by a truck - then fled on his bike. The 2nd did it with supreme skill in moments, just whizzed past and grabbed it one handed
If I had caught either of them I would have tried to beat them to near-death (they were both scrawny lads, I am pretty sure I would have won despite my advanced years). I am sure plenty of able bodied males, when robbed, get that same surge of crazy, red-mist testosterone
So these thieves are risking it when they rob adult men
Your latter point is why women are more commonly targeted for phone theft than men. It's also why so many people on pb question whether it's real or not.
A friend of mine had his phone grabbed from his hand, near King's Cross Station about 3 years ago. He tried to hold onto it, but in the tussle was thrown off balance and fell. As a result he fractured his shoulder, and had to be off work for over six months and even now has impaired movement of that arm. This has been life changing for a young surgeon.
It was a pretty crappy 4 year old phone, but thieves don't see that it is worthless until after they have it in their hands.
This sort of crime has increased, replacing a lot of other crimes that have dramatically dropped (nicking cars and burglary for example). In large part it is down to the proliferation of unlicensed electric mopeds ridden at speed through pedestrian areas, and the fact that nearly everyone has expensive portable electronics in their hands when out and about.
I only get my phone out in London on the street if in a doorway with my back to a wall, and having scanned the immediate locality. I haven't heard of anyone being robbed this way outside London and similar cities like Paris and Rome.
A few months ago I had a small rucksack stolen on the tube in London. It contained a radio, a jumper, and an old-fashioned mobile phone, so perhaps they were disappointed. I went back and checked in some bins in case they'd dumped it but couldn't find it. But just having something stolen is a pretty awful experience, no matter what it is.
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
This is what happened to me, twice, the first one missed the phone and nearly got run over by a truck - then fled on his bike. The 2nd did it with supreme skill in moments, just whizzed past and grabbed it one handed
If I had caught either of them I would have tried to beat them to near-death (they were both scrawny lads, I am pretty sure I would have won despite my advanced years). I am sure plenty of able bodied males, when robbed, get that same surge of crazy, red-mist testosterone
So these thieves are risking it when they rob adult men
Your latter point is why women are more commonly targeted for phone theft than men. It's also why so many people on pb question whether it's real or not.
A friend of mine had his phone grabbed from his hand, near King's Cross Station about 3 years ago. He tried to hold onto it, but in the tussle was thrown off balance and fell. As a result he fractured his shoulder, and had to be off work for over six months and even now has impaired movement of that arm. This has been life changing for a young surgeon.
It was a pretty crappy 4 year old phone, but thieves don't see that it is worthless until after they have it in their hands.
This sort of crime has increased, replacing a lot of other crimes that have dramatically dropped (nicking cars and burglary for example). In large part it is down to the proliferation of unlicensed electric mopeds ridden at speed through pedestrian areas, and the fact that nearly everyone has expensive portable electronics in their hands when out and about.
I only get my phone out in London on the street if in a doorway with my back to a wall, and having scanned the immediate locality. I haven't heard of anyone being robbed this way outside London and similar cities like Paris and Rome.
Car theft is well up.....keyless entry made it very easy. And even cars with a bit more security, its all electronics based, the tech is available from China via the internet.
One incredible loophole that I can't believe exists, if you legally take your car out the country, you are technically supposed to surrender the V5, but nobody checks. So you can sell it on. Its appears they are also very relaxed on checking for written off cars. And then you can turn a hot motor into a "legit" one.
I meant thriving from motor vehicles. Remember how car stereos used to have a removable front to make nicking them impossible? That was normal in the nineties, and in the eighties I had a few car stereos nicked.
It gets worse. And worse. The government is essentially trolling the British people, daring them to do anything
“Almost one million NHS “free passes” have been given out to asylum seekers in the last five years.
“The HC2 certificates give low-income residents the right to freebies not afforded to most of the public, including free prescriptions, dental care, eye tests, wigs, and discounts for glasses, contact lenses, and travelling to and from appointments.
“But new data released by the NHS Business Services Authority under freedom of information laws, reveal that the majority – 59 per cent – of the 1.56 million issued across the UK in the last five years, 920,199 were awarded to asylum seekers.”
Telegraph
Remember when @bondegezou kept assuring us that asylum seekers get no favourable NHS treatment at all
I'll be honest, if I had to guess how many asylum seekers there were in total in this country, it would have been much lower than a million. All the reports normally are in the tens of thousands the figures quoted, not millions.
That surprises me.
There are not nearly a million asylum seekers in the country. As of June 2024, the number of asylum seekers in the UK was 224,700. But people come in and out of that number, so the total number of asylum seekers in the UK over the last 5 years will be higher. However, even that seems unlikely to explain that figure. It looks as though that figure might represent multiple certificates per person? HC2 certificates have to be renewed, but I don't know how often.
If you are on low income, you get these things for free. Asylum seekers are definitely on low income. They are treated like others entitled to NHS treatment.
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
This is what happened to me, twice, the first one missed the phone and nearly got run over by a truck - then fled on his bike. The 2nd did it with supreme skill in moments, just whizzed past and grabbed it one handed
If I had caught either of them I would have tried to beat them to near-death (they were both scrawny lads, I am pretty sure I would have won despite my advanced years). I am sure plenty of able bodied males, when robbed, get that same surge of crazy, red-mist testosterone
So these thieves are risking it when they rob adult men
Your latter point is why women are more commonly targeted for phone theft than men. It's also why so many people on pb question whether it's real or not.
A friend of mine had his phone grabbed from his hand, near King's Cross Station about 3 years ago. He tried to hold onto it, but in the tussle was thrown off balance and fell. As a result he fractured his shoulder, and had to be off work for over six months and even now has impaired movement of that arm. This has been life changing for a young surgeon.
It was a pretty crappy 4 year old phone, but thieves don't see that it is worthless until after they have it in their hands.
This sort of crime has increased, replacing a lot of other crimes that have dramatically dropped (nicking cars and burglary for example). In large part it is down to the proliferation of unlicensed electric mopeds ridden at speed through pedestrian areas, and the fact that nearly everyone has expensive portable electronics in their hands when out and about.
I only get my phone out in London on the street if in a doorway with my back to a wall, and having scanned the immediate locality. I haven't heard of anyone being robbed this way outside London and similar cities like Paris and Rome.
Car theft is well up.....keyless entry made it very easy. And even cars with a bit more security, its all electronics based, the tech is available from China via the internet.
One incredible loophole that I can't believe exists, if you legally take your car out the country, you are technically supposed to surrender the V5, but nobody checks. So you can sell it on. Its appears they are also very relaxed on checking for written off cars. And then you can turn a hot motor into a "legit" one.
I meant thriving from motor vehicles. Remember how car stereos used to have a removable front to make nicking them impossible? That was normal in the nineties, and in the eighties I had a few car stereos nicked.
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
This is what happened to me, twice, the first one missed the phone and nearly got run over by a truck - then fled on his bike. The 2nd did it with supreme skill in moments, just whizzed past and grabbed it one handed
If I had caught either of them I would have tried to beat them to near-death (they were both scrawny lads, I am pretty sure I would have won despite my advanced years). I am sure plenty of able bodied males, when robbed, get that same surge of crazy, red-mist testosterone
So these thieves are risking it when they rob adult men
Your latter point is why women are more commonly targeted for phone theft than men. It's also why so many people on pb question whether it's real or not.
A friend of mine had his phone grabbed from his hand, near King's Cross Station about 3 years ago. He tried to hold onto it, but in the tussle was thrown off balance and fell. As a result he fractured his shoulder, and had to be off work for over six months and even now has impaired movement of that arm. This has been life changing for a young surgeon.
It was a pretty crappy 4 year old phone, but thieves don't see that it is worthless until after they have it in their hands.
This sort of crime has increased, replacing a lot of other crimes that have dramatically dropped (nicking cars and burglary for example). In large part it is down to the proliferation of unlicensed electric mopeds ridden at speed through pedestrian areas, and the fact that nearly everyone has expensive portable electronics in their hands when out and about.
I only get my phone out in London on the street if in a doorway with my back to a wall, and having scanned the immediate locality. I haven't heard of anyone being robbed this way outside London and similar cities like Paris and Rome.
A few months ago I had a small rucksack stolen on the tube in London. It contained a radio, a jumper, and an old-fashioned mobile phone, so perhaps they were disappointed. I went back and checked in some bins in case they'd dumped it but couldn't find it. But just having something stolen is a pretty awful experience, no matter what it is.
Back in the early nineties I was burgled a couple of times. The sense of violation is real, and for a long time afterwards I would be anxious returning home that it would happen again.
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
in my feeds the mocking of Sweeney is being done by attractive ppl of different skintones, rather than the social justice warriors. ymmv
In mine, there's been zero mention of the woman, except this.
Since Monday, Fox News has spent 85 minutes covering an American Eagle commercial featuring Sydney Sweeney, devoting over 20 segments to it. In the same time period, Fox spent just 3 minutes discussing the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. https://x.com/mmfa/status/1950983950114979843
But I can see why Leon might think it's worthy of an article. (It's probably not.)
Why the fuck would you presume you know anything about this industry? And what articles drive clicks, and earn money?
You make a valid point. So why do you pontificate with apparent supreme knowledge on a huge range of stuff you nothing about, all the time.
The irony of some of the stuff you come out with!
Because I know loads about everything. Next question
You think you do. Lots of Reddit stuff, no doubt.
Well I knew more about the strong possibility of a lab leak than you, and you claim to be some kind of scientist
Just laughable
By which you mean you've read lots of stuff that confirms your beliefs and nothing that doesn't?
I'd never claim to be a better writer than someone who does it for a living. I would wonder about a random on the internet who claims to be a better scientist that someone with a 30 year track record and a job at a top ten UK uni...
It took you about three years to even admit lab leak was possible. A clownshow
Also, universities are doomed
First comment is untrue - I've always believed it possible, but favoured the wet market, and still do, to be honest.
Universities are not doomed. There will be change - there always is. You, as an arts graduate and seem to regard Uni as nothing more than 3 or 4 years of drink, drugs and lounging about. That's not the modern university and any STEM graduate would swiftly inform you of your mistake.
It gets worse. And worse. The government is essentially trolling the British people, daring them to do anything
“Almost one million NHS “free passes” have been given out to asylum seekers in the last five years.
“The HC2 certificates give low-income residents the right to freebies not afforded to most of the public, including free prescriptions, dental care, eye tests, wigs, and discounts for glasses, contact lenses, and travelling to and from appointments.
“But new data released by the NHS Business Services Authority under freedom of information laws, reveal that the majority – 59 per cent – of the 1.56 million issued across the UK in the last five years, 920,199 were awarded to asylum seekers.”
Telegraph
Remember when @bondegezou kept assuring us that asylum seekers get no favourable NHS treatment at all
I'll be honest, if I had to guess how many asylum seekers there were in total in this country, it would have been much lower than a million. All the reports normally are in the tens of thousands the figures quoted, not millions.
That surprises me.
That data is "over the last five years". At any one time, there are around 100k in the system, on S95 support, I believe ? This from .gov - ..at the end of March 2025, there were 106,771 individuals in receipt of asylum support...
I'd be curious as to how many actually receive (eg) dental care, since it's almost impossible to find a NHS dentist in many of the areas they tend to be housed. The certificate grants free treatment. I haven't seen evidence whether or not it gives any form of preferential access to treatment .
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
This is what happened to me, twice, the first one missed the phone and nearly got run over by a truck - then fled on his bike. The 2nd did it with supreme skill in moments, just whizzed past and grabbed it one handed
If I had caught either of them I would have tried to beat them to near-death (they were both scrawny lads, I am pretty sure I would have won despite my advanced years). I am sure plenty of able bodied males, when robbed, get that same surge of crazy, red-mist testosterone
So these thieves are risking it when they rob adult men
Your latter point is why women are more commonly targeted for phone theft than men. It's also why so many people on pb question whether it's real or not.
A friend of mine had his phone grabbed from his hand, near King's Cross Station about 3 years ago. He tried to hold onto it, but in the tussle was thrown off balance and fell. As a result he fractured his shoulder, and had to be off work for over six months and even now has impaired movement of that arm. This has been life changing for a young surgeon.
It was a pretty crappy 4 year old phone, but thieves don't see that it is worthless until after they have it in their hands.
This sort of crime has increased, replacing a lot of other crimes that have dramatically dropped (nicking cars and burglary for example). In large part it is down to the proliferation of unlicensed electric mopeds ridden at speed through pedestrian areas, and the fact that nearly everyone has expensive portable electronics in their hands when out and about.
I only get my phone out in London on the street if in a doorway with my back to a wall, and having scanned the immediate locality. I haven't heard of anyone being robbed this way outside London and similar cities like Paris and Rome.
Car theft is well up.....keyless entry made it very easy. And even cars with a bit more security, its all electronics based, the tech is available from China via the internet.
One incredible loophole that I can't believe exists, if you legally take your car out the country, you are technically supposed to surrender the V5, but nobody checks. So you can sell it on. Its appears they are also very relaxed on checking for written off cars. And then you can turn a hot motor into a "legit" one.
I meant thriving from motor vehicles. Remember how car stereos used to have a removable front to make nicking them impossible? That was normal in the nineties, and in the eighties I had a few car stereos nicked.
No you didn’t mean “thieving from cars”. You wrote “nicking cars”
No one writes that when they actually mean “people getting into cars to steal stuff”
You’re embarrassed that you made another crassly illinformed statement
Lower your dignity. We all say foolish stuff, even if you do it more than most
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
This is what happened to me, twice, the first one missed the phone and nearly got run over by a truck - then fled on his bike. The 2nd did it with supreme skill in moments, just whizzed past and grabbed it one handed
If I had caught either of them I would have tried to beat them to near-death (they were both scrawny lads, I am pretty sure I would have won despite my advanced years). I am sure plenty of able bodied males, when robbed, get that same surge of crazy, red-mist testosterone
So these thieves are risking it when they rob adult men
No they aren't. They've whisked the phone and are off on their e-bikes by the time the person knows what has happened. The last one I saw, was at the Eaton Square end of Sloane Square and they did it to a rugger bugger who gave chase for 1.4 yards before he realised that he wasn't catching anyone any time soon.
In fact there was some older bloke and his wife (both charming, just had an agreeable supper at Colbert, no doubt) and he (the older bloke) sort of set off after this e-bike. Performative as it might have been, I was moved to tell him not to be so stupid and the last thing anyone wanted but least of all him and his wife, was for him to catch up and engage with the guy.
Reminds me when I was living in Kennington, in one of those charming squares, and was burgled overnight. I came downstairs and the door slammed which was the thief leaving and the police, when they came (this was some while ago...), said that any burglar that operates overnight is expecting to be caught by the inhabitants and are prepared accordingly.
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.
In pre-modern times, if there was a level of unwanted immigration - at this level - then this is absolutely what would have happened. As any basic reading of history would show. And, if you wanted to expel people, you did.
You seem to live in a bubble in your head where some open-borders fantasy existed in the past.
If it was a problem, the government would have taken action along the lines I suggested. If it wasn't a problem, because it was in such small numbers no-one cared, or because people emigrating was the bigger phenomena, then it wouldn't. And it wasn't managed legalistically until very recently because if it was a problem en-mass force was used instead .
But consider how much smuggling of alcohol and tobacco there was in olden times. Until pretty recently, the surveillance tools to track small boats landing on remote shorelines didn't really exist.
Had 100 boat people a day landed, I doubt that the British State would have known. There certainly wouldn't have been the means for the public to know.
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
This is what happened to me, twice, the first one missed the phone and nearly got run over by a truck - then fled on his bike. The 2nd did it with supreme skill in moments, just whizzed past and grabbed it one handed
If I had caught either of them I would have tried to beat them to near-death (they were both scrawny lads, I am pretty sure I would have won despite my advanced years). I am sure plenty of able bodied males, when robbed, get that same surge of crazy, red-mist testosterone
So these thieves are risking it when they rob adult men
Your latter point is why women are more commonly targeted for phone theft than men. It's also why so many people on pb question whether it's real or not.
A friend of mine had his phone grabbed from his hand, near King's Cross Station about 3 years ago. He tried to hold onto it, but in the tussle was thrown off balance and fell. As a result he fractured his shoulder, and had to be off work for over six months and even now has impaired movement of that arm. This has been life changing for a young surgeon.
It was a pretty crappy 4 year old phone, but thieves don't see that it is worthless until after they have it in their hands.
This sort of crime has increased, replacing a lot of other crimes that have dramatically dropped (nicking cars and burglary for example). In large part it is down to the proliferation of unlicensed electric mopeds ridden at speed through pedestrian areas, and the fact that nearly everyone has expensive portable electronics in their hands when out and about.
I only get my phone out in London on the street if in a doorway with my back to a wall, and having scanned the immediate locality. I haven't heard of anyone being robbed this way outside London and similar cities like Paris and Rome.
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.
In pre-modern times, if there was a level of unwanted immigration - at this level - then this is absolutely what would have happened. As any basic reading of history would show. And, if you wanted to expel people, you did.
You seem to live in a bubble in your head where some open-borders fantasy existed in the past.
If it was a problem, the government would have taken action along the lines I suggested. If it wasn't a problem, because it was in such small numbers no-one cared, or because people emigrating was the bigger phenomena, then it wouldn't. And it wasn't managed legalistically until very recently because if it was a problem en-mass force was used instead .
But consider how much smuggling of alcohol and tobacco there was in olden times. Until pretty recently, the surveillance tools to track small boats landing on remote shorelines didn't really exist.
(Snip)
As an aside, AIUI much of what is now the South West Coast Path originated as local paths to allow excisemen to look down into all the little harbours and inlets to look for wrongdoing, and to travel quickly between them. Perhaps @Leon knows more.
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
This is what happened to me, twice, the first one missed the phone and nearly got run over by a truck - then fled on his bike. The 2nd did it with supreme skill in moments, just whizzed past and grabbed it one handed
If I had caught either of them I would have tried to beat them to near-death (they were both scrawny lads, I am pretty sure I would have won despite my advanced years). I am sure plenty of able bodied males, when robbed, get that same surge of crazy, red-mist testosterone
So these thieves are risking it when they rob adult men
Your latter point is why women are more commonly targeted for phone theft than men. It's also why so many people on pb question whether it's real or not.
A friend of mine had his phone grabbed from his hand, near King's Cross Station about 3 years ago. He tried to hold onto it, but in the tussle was thrown off balance and fell. As a result he fractured his shoulder, and had to be off work for over six months and even now has impaired movement of that arm. This has been life changing for a young surgeon.
It was a pretty crappy 4 year old phone, but thieves don't see that it is worthless until after they have it in their hands.
This sort of crime has increased, replacing a lot of other crimes that have dramatically dropped (nicking cars and burglary for example). In large part it is down to the proliferation of unlicensed electric mopeds ridden at speed through pedestrian areas, and the fact that nearly everyone has expensive portable electronics in their hands when out and about.
I only get my phone out in London on the street if in a doorway with my back to a wall, and having scanned the immediate locality. I haven't heard of anyone being robbed this way outside London and similar cities like Paris and Rome.
Car theft is well up.....keyless entry made it very easy. And even cars with a bit more security, its all electronics based, the tech is available from China via the internet.
One incredible loophole that I can't believe exists, if you legally take your car out the country, you are technically supposed to surrender the V5, but nobody checks. So you can sell it on. Its appears they are also very relaxed on checking for written off cars. And then you can turn a hot motor into a "legit" one.
I meant thriving from motor vehicles. Remember how car stereos used to have a removable front to make nicking them impossible? That was normal in the nineties, and in the eighties I had a few car stereos nicked.
No you didn’t mean “thieving from cars”. You wrote “nicking cars”
No one writes that when they actually mean “people getting into cars to steal stuff”
You’re embarrassed that you made another crassly illinformed statement
Lower your dignity. We all say foolish stuff, even if you do it more than most
The national crime statistics report "vehicle offences", which is where Foxy's mistake came from. The rate of that total has indeed dropped a lot over the last decade.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/crimeinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2025#theft-offences ..The police recorded 1.8 million theft offences in YE March 2025, no change compared with the previous year. However, there was a 20% increase in shoplifting (to 530,643 offences) and a 15% increase in theft from the person (to 151,220 offences). There have been sharp rises in these offences since the pandemic. Both shoplifting and theft from the person offences are at their highest level since current police recording practices began in YE March 2003.
Police recorded vehicle offences decreased by 8% (to 350,070 offences) during the same period. Police recorded burglary, which includes both residential and non-residential burglaries, also fell by 8% to 245,284 offences..
When I spoke about living and succeeding with dyslexia so many people wrote in with stories of why they hide it. Reading this Telegraph article shows why.
The other week, I did not have my phone snatched by a balaclava-clad cyclist... but I almost did. I was walking to the tube station on my morning commute and this cyclist swooped down and went for my phone. But, to be frank, he was pretty incompetent at it and failed to make off with said phone. He cycled away disconsolately.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
This is what happened to me, twice, the first one missed the phone and nearly got run over by a truck - then fled on his bike. The 2nd did it with supreme skill in moments, just whizzed past and grabbed it one handed
If I had caught either of them I would have tried to beat them to near-death (they were both scrawny lads, I am pretty sure I would have won despite my advanced years). I am sure plenty of able bodied males, when robbed, get that same surge of crazy, red-mist testosterone
So these thieves are risking it when they rob adult men
Your latter point is why women are more commonly targeted for phone theft than men. It's also why so many people on pb question whether it's real or not.
A friend of mine had his phone grabbed from his hand, near King's Cross Station about 3 years ago. He tried to hold onto it, but in the tussle was thrown off balance and fell. As a result he fractured his shoulder, and had to be off work for over six months and even now has impaired movement of that arm. This has been life changing for a young surgeon.
It was a pretty crappy 4 year old phone, but thieves don't see that it is worthless until after they have it in their hands.
This sort of crime has increased, replacing a lot of other crimes that have dramatically dropped (nicking cars and burglary for example). In large part it is down to the proliferation of unlicensed electric mopeds ridden at speed through pedestrian areas, and the fact that nearly everyone has expensive portable electronics in their hands when out and about.
I only get my phone out in London on the street if in a doorway with my back to a wall, and having scanned the immediate locality. I haven't heard of anyone being robbed this way outside London and similar cities like Paris and Rome.
Car theft is well up.....keyless entry made it very easy. And even cars with a bit more security, its all electronics based, the tech is available from China via the internet.
One incredible loophole that I can't believe exists, if you legally take your car out the country, you are technically supposed to surrender the V5, but nobody checks. So you can sell it on. Its appears they are also very relaxed on checking for written off cars. And then you can turn a hot motor into a "legit" one.
I meant thriving from motor vehicles. Remember how car stereos used to have a removable front to make nicking them impossible? That was normal in the nineties, and in the eighties I had a few car stereos nicked.
No you didn’t mean “thieving from cars”. You wrote “nicking cars”
No one writes that when they actually mean “people getting into cars to steal stuff”
You’re embarrassed that you made another crassly illinformed statement
Lower your dignity. We all say foolish stuff, even if you do it more than most
The national crime statistics report "vehicle offences", which is where Foxy's mistake came from. The rate of that total has indeed dropped a lot over the last decade.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/crimeinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2025#theft-offences ..The police recorded 1.8 million theft offences in YE March 2025, no change compared with the previous year. However, there was a 20% increase in shoplifting (to 530,643 offences) and a 15% increase in theft from the person (to 151,220 offences). There have been sharp rises in these offences since the pandemic. Both shoplifting and theft from the person offences are at their highest level since current police recording practices began in YE March 2003.
Police recorded vehicle offences decreased by 8% (to 350,070 offences) during the same period. Police recorded burglary, which includes both residential and non-residential burglaries, also fell by 8% to 245,284 offences..
And to be fair to Leon, the survey (not recorded crimes) shows a 56% increase in the last 10 years of actual thefts of vehicles.
But it also shows a decrease of 85% since 1993. So it's a growth from a very low base. We are in the unusual position of the two of them both being correct.
Comments
Or understanding (the way the Dutch do) that you can’t punish people onto the “right” form of transport. It’s about providing for all of them. And, critically, make changing between modes as part of the same journey, easier.
For example, some years ago, there was a proposal to run the car carriers on the Channel Tunnel to various destinations in France. The evidence was that it would reduce CO2 by x, reduce miles driven, reduce accidents (tired people marathon driving etc). It was killed by “cars bad” policy makers. So people continue to marathon drive to/from the Chunnel.
Today, major pharmaceutical manufacturers received a pointed letter from the Trump administration.
That letter explained that they will soon be provided with a new way to sell drugs:
Direct to patients, without middlemen, at low prices, absent the influence of PBMs.
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1951021005167796320
If I may give another anecdote about 'minor' behaviours, and why they matter. When I was about twenty, I visited an old schoolfriend of mine in Northampton. Aside from the crime of living in Northampton, he was a civil, well-behaved person, and his family were relatively well-off. He was also half-Pakistani, and obviously had heritage from that part of the world.
We stayed out until the early hours, then walked back to his parents' house, just outside the town. On the way, the police stopped us and asked us what we were doing. They were polite and civil to us, although they seemed more interested in him than me. When they left, I stated that I found it amusing and good that the police were so helpful.
He was seething, as he and his brothers were routinely stopped by the police. From my point of view, being stopped once was fine. From his, being stopped many times felt like harassment.
And I fear that's where your ranking of behaviours into "1 or 2" falls down. Yes, they might be minor individually. But when they happen frequently, or even all the time, then it becomes very different. At least, if it happens to you.
(And yes, the police might also have been chatting to white lads out at that time of night. He didn't think so, and said it didn't happen to friends of his. Over the years I've been out walking in all sorts of places, at all sorts of time of night, and never once been stopped by the police.)
Its only 3 months until England arrive in the prison colony, Stokes is injured for at least 2 of those. Squeaky bum time.
Responding to those claims, Banijay said: "We have no record of Sarah raising concerns with producers at the time of filming, however when raised during the formal investigation process, we thoroughly assessed her claims including reviewing relevant programme rushes with Sarah.
"These do not support her version of events regarding inappropriate comments or actions by Gregg Wallace which Sarah has acknowledged."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwye4840zdgo
And that’s the difficulty here - we are trying to apply old rules in a world where given a bit of money most people can get anywhere within 48 hours
This technology has the potential to obsolete ballistic missile subs within about a decade I would guess.
Which really isn't the sort of timescale on which we plan for our nuclear deterrent.
AI and autonomous swarms to detect subsurface threats and protect critical infrastructure.
https://helsing.ai/lura
Station a few thousand of these offshore from sub bases, and tag teams in the deep ocean, and the subs would no longer be undetectable.
It's German, but China could fairly easily duplicate this.
I was surprised, took me a few seconds to even work out what had happened. It's never happened to me before and north Camden is generally an idyllic, crime-free land. I didn't think much of it, but a friend later said I should report it. I was sceptical there was any point, but I found the online police reporting system and filled in the form. A policeman rang me up the same day to ask lots of questions. I couldn't tell him much and he was honest that there wasn't much they could do about this particular attempted crime, but he was keen to record what I could tell him and was clear that they would use this as a data point. It was a helpful and prompt response for what seemed to me a minor matter.
So, that's my anecdote, my lived experience. The police do care, even about the petty stuff. At least this one time.
Is there room to extend it - and where would you remove the RAF operations to ?
The wins of the 2010s wouldn't have happened otherwise. It's deepened our problems now, but hey ho.
In 70 years I have only been stopped 3 times, all for driving stuff. In all cases I was at fault. In all cases I was allowed on my way without penalty.
Cleveland Police officer appears in court charged with child sex offences
A Cleveland Police officer has appeared in court charged with child sex offences.
PC Nathan Henderson, 30, who has been suspended by the force, appeared briefly at Newton Aycliffe Magistrates’ Court in County Durham on Wednesday (30 July).
He faces 11 counts of engaging in sexual activity with a child and one count of perverting the course of justice.
Lots of Sarahs in the female cohort.
Btw I’ve had 2 late 20’s friends telling me about close friend suicides in the past month
Big downward revisions in nonfarm payroll for May and June.
May was revised from 144K to 19K
June was revised from 133K to 14k
From memory, they have been consistently wrong for several years now, and had to had major revisions. Are people from the ONS working their on secondment?
If you really, really need to check a message, send one or make a call, maybe check a map, move over to the side, stand still and do it. If necessary face into the wall to try and protect your phone from snatching but stop sodding looking at it whilst you are walking along. And no, you don’t need to make a call on speaker holding the phone in front of your mouth whilst walking either. Headphones, phone in pocket, all safe and easy.
I'm not convinced Woakes would have travelled anyway.
But it’s hardly surprising given that today is August 1st and the announced the figures for July at 8am EST this morning (74,000 expectation was 110,000 and that 74,000 is probably too high).
You seem to live in a bubble in your head where some open-borders fantasy existed in the past.
If it was a problem, the government would have taken action along the lines I suggested. If it wasn't a problem, because it was in such small numbers no-one cared, or because people emigrating was the bigger phenomena, then it wouldn't. And it wasn't managed legalistically until very recently because if it was a problem en-mass force was used instead .
Since Monday, Fox News has spent 85 minutes covering an American Eagle commercial featuring Sydney Sweeney, devoting over 20 segments to it. In the same time period, Fox spent just 3 minutes discussing the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
https://x.com/mmfa/status/1950983950114979843
But I can see why Leon might think it's worthy of an article.
(It's probably not.)
If I had caught either of them I would have tried to beat them to near-death (they were both scrawny lads, I am pretty sure I would have won despite my advanced years). I am sure plenty of able bodied males, when robbed, get that same surge of crazy, red-mist testosterone
So these thieves are risking it when they rob adult men
Cynically I'd think that any outrage about a mundane jeans advert where the model says they have great jeans is, in itself, manufactured for clicks, but the laughable part is that that cynicism is doubtful.
Just listened again, and they did not kill him; they cut off his calves with a sword whilst alive, and broiled and ate them. It's an "account of his life", before he was hanged.
Allegedly.
About 13:30 on the link.
The irony of some of the stuff you come out with!
"The Future of Health - Chris Whitty
Gresham College"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOr2pmf61pg
It’s worth remembering why Scotland merged into the United Kingdom - mainly due to Scotland being bankrupted by a plan to colonize Panama
Freezing thresholds and cutting the tax rate was a net tax rise.
Doesn't stop you repeating this myth that Hunt cut taxes, no matter the fact you know it isn't true.
Reeves predicament is because we spend too much money, which has nothing to do with Hunt's tax cut rise.
https://ticketexchange.surreycricket.com/selection/event/date?productId=10228881861131
“Almost one million NHS “free passes” have been given out to asylum seekers in the last five years.
“The HC2 certificates give low-income residents the right to freebies not afforded to most of the public, including free prescriptions, dental care, eye tests, wigs, and discounts for glasses, contact lenses, and travelling to and from appointments.
“But new data released by the NHS Business Services Authority under freedom of information laws, reveal that the majority – 59 per cent – of the 1.56 million issued across the UK in the last five years, 920,199 were awarded to asylum seekers.”
Telegraph
Remember when @bondegezou kept assuring us that asylum seekers get no favourable NHS treatment at all
Just laughable
It was a pretty crappy 4 year old phone, but thieves don't see that it is worthless until after they have it in their hands.
This sort of crime has increased, replacing a lot of other crimes that have dramatically dropped (nicking cars and burglary for example). In large part it is down to the proliferation of unlicensed electric mopeds ridden at speed through pedestrian areas, and the fact that nearly everyone has expensive portable electronics in their hands when out and about.
I only get my phone out in London on the street if in a doorway with my back to a wall, and having scanned the immediate locality. I haven't heard of anyone being robbed this way outside London and similar cities like Paris and Rome.
That surprises me.
One incredible loophole that I can't believe exists, if you legally take your car out the country, you are technically supposed to surrender the V5, but nobody checks. So you can sell it on. Its appears they are also very relaxed on checking for written off cars. And then you can turn a hot motor into a "legit" one.
“Vehicle theft in the UK has increased by 75% in the past decade, according to the Royal United Services Institute”
https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/projects/combatting-vehicle-theft-uk-strategies-against-organised-crime
I'd never claim to be a better writer than someone who does it for a living. I would wonder about a random on the internet who claims to be a better scientist that someone with a 30 year track record and a job at a top ten UK uni...
Also, universities are doomed
If you are on low income, you get these things for free. Asylum seekers are definitely on low income. They are treated like others entitled to NHS treatment.
Universities are not doomed. There will be change - there always is. You, as an arts graduate and seem to regard Uni as nothing more than 3 or 4 years of drink, drugs and lounging about. That's not the modern university and any STEM graduate would swiftly inform you of your mistake.
At any one time, there are around 100k in the system, on S95 support, I believe ?
This from .gov - ..at the end of March 2025, there were 106,771 individuals in receipt of asylum support...
I'd be curious as to how many actually receive (eg) dental care, since it's almost impossible to find a NHS dentist in many of the areas they tend to be housed.
The certificate grants free treatment. I haven't seen evidence whether or not it gives any form of preferential access to treatment .
No one writes that when they actually mean “people getting into cars to steal stuff”
You’re embarrassed that you made another crassly illinformed statement
Lower your dignity. We all say foolish stuff, even if you do it more than most
In fact there was some older bloke and his wife (both charming, just had an agreeable supper at Colbert, no doubt) and he (the older bloke) sort of set off after this e-bike. Performative as it might have been, I was moved to tell him not to be so stupid and the last thing anyone wanted but least of all him and his wife, was for him to catch up and engage with the guy.
Reminds me when I was living in Kennington, in one of those charming squares, and was burgled overnight. I came downstairs and the door slammed which was the thief leaving and the police, when they came (this was some while ago...), said that any burglar that operates overnight is expecting to be caught by the inhabitants and are prepared accordingly.
What would England take now? I'd settle for 300 from here.
Had 100 boat people a day landed, I doubt that the British State would have known. There certainly wouldn't have been the means for the public to know.
But this is another case of you only relying on the crime survey when it suits you. Vehicle-related theft is down 28% in the last 10 years.
The rate of that total has indeed dropped a lot over the last decade.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/crimeinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2025#theft-offences
..The police recorded 1.8 million theft offences in YE March 2025, no change compared with the previous year. However, there was a 20% increase in shoplifting (to 530,643 offences) and a 15% increase in theft from the person (to 151,220 offences). There have been sharp rises in these offences since the pandemic. Both shoplifting and theft from the person offences are at their highest level since current police recording practices began in YE March 2003.
Police recorded vehicle offences decreased by 8% (to 350,070 offences) during the same period. Police recorded burglary, which includes both residential and non-residential burglaries, also fell by 8% to 245,284 offences..
Series on the line!!
We certainly want to get 300, we are a long way from that!!!
When I spoke about living and succeeding with dyslexia so many people wrote in with stories of why they hide it. Reading this Telegraph article shows why.
https://x.com/peterkyle/status/1951268735903232221
You don't get to smear people as Jimmy Savile apologists one day and the next go but the media wrote a unfair article about me.
Why can’t they just get Woakes in with a runner. Is he dead? If not, get him in
But it also shows a decrease of 85% since 1993. So it's a growth from a very low base. We are in the unusual position of the two of them both being correct.