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.
Both can be true, if car theft is growing from a low base because Range Rovers are now incredibly easy to nick.
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.
Overall crime levels are substantially down over the decades:
This is an international phenomenon so not particularly related to UK policies.
Obviously there are temporal trends, and street thefts of mobile phones are a recent phenomenon, but there was no golden age a few decades ago of low crime, just different crimes, at least in my lifetime. Being out in London or Brum at night when I was young was quite hairy at times.
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.
Both can be true, if car theft is growing from a low base because Range Rovers are now incredibly easy to nick.
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.
Overall crime levels are substantially down over the decades:
This is an international phenomenon so not particularly related to UK policies.
Obviously there are temporal trends, and street thefts of mobile phones are a recent phenomenon, but there was no golden age a few decades ago of low crime, just different crimes, at least in my lifetime. Being out in London or Brum at night when I was young was quite hairy at times.
Police detection rates are also through the floor as well though for low level crimes. Which makes the public feel helpless. There are areas of the country where the plod are solving basically zero cases of burglary.
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 .
An HC2 is the standard certificate that gives you free health care if you are non on a standard means-tested benefit (if you are on UC and earn less than a certain amount you don't need one). So it doesn't of itself give preferential 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 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.
There's also the fact that actual thefts of vehicles are more likely to be actually reported to the police than is theft from a vehicle. Crime stats are almost impossible to pin down exactly just by googling. And perceptions of crime are even more difficult to correlate with actual crime over time.
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.
Both can be true, if car theft is growing from a low base because Range Rovers are now incredibly easy to nick.
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.
Overall crime levels are substantially down over the decades:
This is an international phenomenon so not particularly related to UK policies.
Obviously there are temporal trends, and street thefts of mobile phones are a recent phenomenon, but there was no golden age a few decades ago of low crime, just different crimes, at least in my lifetime. Being out in London or Brum at night when I was young was quite hairy at times.
What is the longer term. I think when people talk about a "golden age" they don't mean 1981, they mean the 50s-60s is my guess, if not earlier.
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 .
An HC2 is the standard certificate that gives you free health care if you are non on a standard means-tested benefit (if you are on UC and earn less than a certain amount you don't need one). So it doesn't of itself give preferential treatment.
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.
The former Bishop of Stepney, John Sentamu, famously spoke about often he was stopped.
The only black member of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, which found that the metropolitan police was institutionally racist, yesterday said he felt demeaned after an officer stopped and searched his car.
John Sentamu, the Anglican Bishop of Stepney, was made to get out of his vehicle in the rain after being stopped near St Paul's cathedral.
He said it was the eighth time in eight years that he had been questioned by police exercising their stop and search powers, which research has shown is directed disproportionately at black people.
The incident is another setback for the police, who are trying to prove they have learned the lessons of the Lawrence inquiry.
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
That's a lot at friend of a friend level when we have less than 20 a day for the entire country.
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.
Both can be true, if car theft is growing from a low base because Range Rovers are now incredibly easy to nick.
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.
Overall crime levels are substantially down over the decades:
This is an international phenomenon so not particularly related to UK policies.
Obviously there are temporal trends, and street thefts of mobile phones are a recent phenomenon, but there was no golden age a few decades ago of low crime, just different crimes, at least in my lifetime. Being out in London or Brum at night when I was young was quite hairy at times.
What is the longer term. I think when people talk about a "golden age" they don't mean 1981, they mean the 50s-60s is my guess, if not earlier.
Or even earlier, though they may well be underestimating crimes like child abuse, domestic violence and pub fights which all used to be considered part of normal life.
Peaky Blinders is a modern show, but based on real events in the Twenties etc
We certainly want to get 300, we are a long way from that!!!
And no Stokes to save us. And only nine wickets to lose, absent Woakes
Why can’t they just get Woakes in with a runner. Is he dead? If not, get him in
Bethell has got something of the Stokes about him....he has got that magic x-factor.
I have my bags packed for my exile to Tory Home....
Waves goodbye....
I hope everyone has been betting on the hubris.
Earlier question, Woakes has done his shoulder, a runner would be no use to him even if still allowed.
Both shoulders? No. So push him out there. In fact they should push him out there even if he’s dead, like El CID
Inject his upright corpse with plastinating liquids, glue a bat to his cadaverous hand, put wheels under his shoes then slowly roll him out onto the crease. Make sure his bat is twenty eight inches wide and say he needs it for medical reasons so it’s literally impossible to hit the wicket
What’s wrong with that? I defy anyone to find the specific rules disallowing this
GB News is officially Britain's number one news channel - marking an historic milestone in British broadcasting.
The People’s Channel triumphed across key time slots in July, winning the ratings race across Breakfast, mornings, weekday prime-time, and the coveted Sunday morning political slot.
This marks the first time the BBC News Channel has been overtaken by GB News for an entire month, a landmark achievement which comes just a month after GB News’ celebrated its fourth birthday.
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
That's a lot at friend of a friend level when we have less than 20 a day for the entire country.
One was Thursday morning - the other a few months back. Going back 18 years a neighbour walked across the A1M at 4am and stood in the road until a lorry ran over him.
20 a day is 7300 a year or 10 in every constituency every year. Remember suicide is the number 1 cause of death for men below 50
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
And that's why I don't read the Spectator.
It looks like the sun is over the yardarm in Portugal. Hic, cheers!
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
Travel by and large didn't happen at all. People walked. And not very far from where they lived. They didn't "know" about much of the rest of the world, and feared it.
When they did move, they either moved in large groups usually with a leader - with force - or migrated into a total vacuum, like the Angles, Saxons and Jutes into post Roman Britain and the Goths/Huns into Rome.
But, if a State was there to oppose them or repulse them they did; they didn't, look up the Human Rights Act 1286 and send a messenger to call up Sire Jolion Maweham at ye old inneth of court to adjudicate a case for them.
GB News is officially Britain's number one news channel - marking an historic milestone in British broadcasting.
The People’s Channel triumphed across key time slots in July, winning the ratings race across Breakfast, mornings, weekday prime-time, and the coveted Sunday morning political slot.
This marks the first time the BBC News Channel has been overtaken by GB News for an entire month, a landmark achievement which comes just a month after GB News’ celebrated its fourth birthday.
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.
Both can be true, if car theft is growing from a low base because Range Rovers are now incredibly easy to nick.
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.
Overall crime levels are substantially down over the decades:
This is an international phenomenon so not particularly related to UK policies.
Obviously there are temporal trends, and street thefts of mobile phones are a recent phenomenon, but there was no golden age a few decades ago of low crime, just different crimes, at least in my lifetime. Being out in London or Brum at night when I was young was quite hairy at times.
What is the longer term. I think when people talk about a "golden age" they don't mean 1981, they mean the 50s-60s is my guess, if not earlier.
Do people today remember the '60s? If you were, say, 15 in 1965, then you'd be 75 today. Most people weren't born until after the 1960s.
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.
Both can be true, if car theft is growing from a low base because Range Rovers are now incredibly easy to nick.
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.
Overall crime levels are substantially down over the decades:
This is an international phenomenon so not particularly related to UK policies.
Obviously there are temporal trends, and street thefts of mobile phones are a recent phenomenon, but there was no golden age a few decades ago of low crime, just different crimes, at least in my lifetime. Being out in London or Brum at night when I was young was quite hairy at times.
What is the longer term. I think when people talk about a "golden age" they don't mean 1981, they mean the 50s-60s is my guess, if not earlier.
Do people today remember the '60s? If you were, say, 15 in 1965, then you'd be 75 today. Most people weren't born until after the 1960s.
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
Travel by and large didn't happen at all. People walked. And not very far from where they lived. They didn't "know" about much of the rest of the world, and feared it.
When they did move, they either moved in large groups usually with a leader - with force - or migrated into a total vacuum, like the Angles, Saxons and Jutes into post Roman Britain and the Goths/Huns into Rome.
But, if a State was there to oppose them or repulse them they did; they didn't, look up the Human Rights Act 1286 and send a messenger to call up Sire Jolion Maweham at ye old inneth of court to adjudicate a case for them.
They used force.
Um you started with sinking boats and now you are talking about people traveling over land.
Exactly what type of migration are you talking about?
We certainly want to get 300, we are a long way from that!!!
And no Stokes to save us. And only nine wickets to lose, absent Woakes
Why can’t they just get Woakes in with a runner. Is he dead? If not, get him in
Bethell has got something of the Stokes about him....he has got that magic x-factor.
I have my bags packed for my exile to Tory Home....
Waves goodbye....
I hope everyone has been betting on the hubris.
Earlier question, Woakes has done his shoulder, a runner would be no use to him even if still allowed.
Both shoulders? No. So push him out there. In fact they should push him out there even if he’s dead, like El CID
Inject his upright corpse with plastinating liquids, glue a bat to his cadaverous hand, put wheels under his shoes then slowly roll him out onto the crease. Make sure his bat is twenty eight inches wide and say he needs it for medical reasons so it’s literally impossible to hit the wicket
What’s wrong with that? I defy anyone to find the specific rules disallowing this
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
Travel by and large didn't happen at all. People walked. And not very far from where they lived. They didn't "know" about much of the rest of the world, and feared it.
When they did move, they either moved in large groups usually with a leader - with force - or migrated into a total vacuum, like the Angles, Saxons and Jutes into post Roman Britain and the Goths/Huns into Rome.
But, if a State was there to oppose them or repulse them they did; they didn't, look up the Human Rights Act 1286 and send a messenger to call up Sire Jolion Maweham at ye old inneth of court to adjudicate a case for them.
They used force.
There have long been long-range trading networks. The Amesbury archer, buried near Stonehenge around 2300BCE grew up in the western Alps.
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
Travel by and large didn't happen at all. People walked. And not very far from where they lived. They didn't "know" about much of the rest of the world, and feared it.
When they did move, they either moved in large groups usually with a leader - with force - or migrated into a total vacuum, like the Angles, Saxons and Jutes into post Roman Britain and the Goths/Huns into Rome.
But, if a State was there to oppose them or repulse them they did; they didn't, look up the Human Rights Act 1286 and send a messenger to call up Sire Jolion Maweham at ye old inneth of court to adjudicate a case for them.
They used force.
I think that is rather simplistic. There's pretty good evidence of significant resistance to the Angles and Saxons by the Britons, but also a willingness to inter-marry, adopt Anglo-Saxon language and lifestyles. Similarly with the Vikings, both fierce battles, but also widespread peaceful settlement by Viking farmers. So a complex mix of conquest, resistance, collaboration and assimilation. Pretty much the same with the Romans before and the Normans afterwards.
Anthony in 1998: 795 James in 2008: 5,170 Alexander in 2021: 1,830 Mary in 2023: 145
I met a fair number of people born in the mid 1960s called Jason. A name with not much traction before that date. I am assuming they were all named after the Blue Peter cat.😉
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?
Who else would you choose to write an article on Jeans advertising other than a travel writer!
That'll give them a laugh at Groucho's.
You could ask John Hegarty to do a forward for you
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
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
That's a lot at friend of a friend level when we have less than 20 a day for the entire country.
One was Thursday morning - the other a few months back. Going back 18 years a neighbour walked across the A1M at 4am and stood in the road until a lorry ran over him.
20 a day is 7300 a year or 10 in every constituency every year. Remember suicide is the number 1 cause of death for men below 50
Without reference to the factuality (I genuinely don't know), I need to point out that "suicide is the number 1 cause of death for men below 50" has to be viewed in the light that if it wasn't, that would mean that something else is killing them and that would be bad.
Anthony in 1998: 795 James in 2008: 5,170 Alexander in 2021: 1,830 Mary in 2023: 145
I met a fair number of people born in the mid 1960s called Jason. A name with not much traction before that date. I am assuming they were all named after the Blue Peter cat.😉
GB News is officially Britain's number one news channel - marking an historic milestone in British broadcasting.
The People’s Channel triumphed across key time slots in July, winning the ratings race across Breakfast, mornings, weekday prime-time, and the coveted Sunday morning political slot.
This marks the first time the BBC News Channel has been overtaken by GB News for an entire month, a landmark achievement which comes just a month after GB News’ celebrated its fourth birthday.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
There are also offences of causing death by careless driving and causing serious injury by dangerous or careless driving which did not exist even as recently as 2005.
Back then it was only causing death by dangerous driving, dangerous driving, careless driving or causing death by careless driving while under the influence of drink or drugs
Yes - however those in the past would usually have been charged with a different offence - eg careless. So it may not be fewer charged offences, but different offences.
(We are still missing "causing injury by careless / dangerous", as "serious injury" starts at "broken bones" approximately. So the injury less than that is down to civil action, though I think Courts in England may have discretion to order compensation, as they do to impose driving bans, but it would be very rarely used.)
Yes but careless driving only carries a fine and penalty points and a driving ban as the maximum sentence as a summary offence.
Whereas careless driving causing death or serious injury are either way offences now with maximum sentences of a prison sentence and community service also an option.
Injuries not classed as serious are as you say dealt with in the civil courts anyway
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.
Both can be true, if car theft is growing from a low base because Range Rovers are now incredibly easy to nick.
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.
Overall crime levels are substantially down over the decades:
This is an international phenomenon so not particularly related to UK policies.
Obviously there are temporal trends, and street thefts of mobile phones are a recent phenomenon, but there was no golden age a few decades ago of low crime, just different crimes, at least in my lifetime. Being out in London or Brum at night when I was young was quite hairy at times.
What is the longer term. I think when people talk about a "golden age" they don't mean 1981, they mean the 50s-60s is my guess, if not earlier.
Do people today remember the '60s? If you were, say, 15 in 1965, then you'd be 75 today. Most people weren't born until after the 1960s.
Median age is around 40, so 50% born on/after 1985 and 50% before 1985. So yes, it appears that "Most people weren't born until after the 1960s"
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
That's a lot at friend of a friend level when we have less than 20 a day for the entire country.
One was Thursday morning - the other a few months back. Going back 18 years a neighbour walked across the A1M at 4am and stood in the road until a lorry ran over him.
20 a day is 7300 a year or 10 in every constituency every year. Remember suicide is the number 1 cause of death for men below 50
Without reference to the factuality (I genuinely don't know), I need to point out that "suicide is the number 1 cause of death for men below 50" has to be viewed in the light that if it wasn't, that would mean that something else is killing them and that would be bad.
Obviously it would be good if it was because the number of suicides had decreased and other things were equal!
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
That's a lot at friend of a friend level when we have less than 20 a day for the entire country.
One was Thursday morning - the other a few months back. Going back 18 years a neighbour walked across the A1M at 4am and stood in the road until a lorry ran over him.
20 a day is 7300 a year or 10 in every constituency every year. Remember suicide is the number 1 cause of death for men below 50
Without reference to the factuality (I genuinely don't know), I need to point out that "suicide is the number 1 cause of death for men below 50" has to be viewed in the light that if it wasn't, that would mean that something else is killing them and that would be bad.
Obviously it would be good if it was because the number of suicides had decreased and other things were equal!
GB News is officially Britain's number one news channel - marking an historic milestone in British broadcasting.
The People’s Channel triumphed across key time slots in July, winning the ratings race across Breakfast, mornings, weekday prime-time, and the coveted Sunday morning political slot.
This marks the first time the BBC News Channel has been overtaken by GB News for an entire month, a landmark achievement which comes just a month after GB News’ celebrated its fourth birthday.
GB News is officially Britain's number one news channel - marking an historic milestone in British broadcasting.
The People’s Channel triumphed across key time slots in July, winning the ratings race across Breakfast, mornings, weekday prime-time, and the coveted Sunday morning political slot.
This marks the first time the BBC News Channel has been overtaken by GB News for an entire month, a landmark achievement which comes just a month after GB News’ celebrated its fourth birthday.
I see the Toon have told Liverpool to go F themselves. Good.
What happens if Isak tells the Toon to go F themselves? Isn't he currently training in Spain rather than being involved with the team?
One hell of a breach of contract claim.
The thing is it never really works out for the club. The player just does the bare minimum to meet the contract obligations.
Yes, that's what Mahrez did to Leicester.
Its not 100% of cases, but in the vast majority once the player has decided they want to leave (either themselves or their agent filling their heads), its very difficult to reverse course and everybody make nice. The player hold incredible power these days.
GB News is officially Britain's number one news channel - marking an historic milestone in British broadcasting.
The People’s Channel triumphed across key time slots in July, winning the ratings race across Breakfast, mornings, weekday prime-time, and the coveted Sunday morning political slot.
This marks the first time the BBC News Channel has been overtaken by GB News for an entire month, a landmark achievement which comes just a month after GB News’ celebrated its fourth birthday.
GB News is officially Britain's number one news channel - marking an historic milestone in British broadcasting.
The People’s Channel triumphed across key time slots in July, winning the ratings race across Breakfast, mornings, weekday prime-time, and the coveted Sunday morning political slot.
This marks the first time the BBC News Channel has been overtaken by GB News for an entire month, a landmark achievement which comes just a month after GB News’ celebrated its fourth birthday.
Anthony in 1998: 795 James in 2008: 5,170 Alexander in 2021: 1,830 Mary in 2023: 145
I met a fair number of people born in the mid 1960s called Jason. A name with not much traction before that date. I am assuming they were all named after the Blue Peter cat.😉
GB News is officially Britain's number one news channel - marking an historic milestone in British broadcasting.
The People’s Channel triumphed across key time slots in July, winning the ratings race across Breakfast, mornings, weekday prime-time, and the coveted Sunday morning political slot.
This marks the first time the BBC News Channel has been overtaken by GB News for an entire month, a landmark achievement which comes just a month after GB News’ celebrated its fourth birthday.
That's fantastic news not least as it's gonna stick in so many gullets on here!😂
Well that's the main thing. I suspect OfCom allow all the FoxNewseque skewed bias because it upsets all the right people.
Why don’t some left wingers set up a tv news channel?* Maybe Tortoise or Novarra should? There is the viewership for it isn’t there?
* No jokes about the BBC already having that covered please.
Oh God, that would be as dreary as GBNews except instead of Farage we'd have Corbyn droning on all evening.
Evening line-up of Dianne Abbott, George Galloway, Jezza, throw in conspiracy theory nutter former diplomat as alternative the Coast guy. Could also have some special series rather the John Cleese, have Gerry Adams or whoever is the leader of Hamas or Hezbollah this week.
I am liking the sound of this already in the way that Cartman loves NPR.
GB News is officially Britain's number one news channel - marking an historic milestone in British broadcasting.
The People’s Channel triumphed across key time slots in July, winning the ratings race across Breakfast, mornings, weekday prime-time, and the coveted Sunday morning political slot.
This marks the first time the BBC News Channel has been overtaken by GB News for an entire month, a landmark achievement which comes just a month after GB News’ celebrated its fourth birthday.
That's fantastic news not least as it's gonna stick in so many gullets on here!😂
On the other hand, just over a hundred thousand people watching a show is a relatively small "Look Out and Down Your Region Where You Are Tonight, Today" type programme.
And both Sky News and BBC News have, for different reasons, given up in practice, even if pictures are still flying through the air for now.
More seriously only a wally would set up a OTA tv news channel. There is no money in it, there never has been. The viewership is absolutely tiny. The likes of Novara Media, Owen Jones, etc, are smart to instead do the YouTube game.
However, I was surprised to find that TLDR News isn't making money. I presumed they would be quids in.
“Trump’s name is in the Epstein Files but Kash Patel had FBI agents go through them and black out his name” is the kind of statement that will surely put out this fire
More seriously only a wally would set up a OTA tv news channel. There is no money in it, there never has been. The viewership is absolutely tiny. The likes of Novara Media, Owen Jones, etc, are smart to instead do the YouTube game.
However, I was surprised to find that TLDR News isn't making money. I presumed they would be quids in.
It is if you're doing it as a way to make money. Sky News was largely a loss-leading respectability play by Murdoch. Why GB News's backers are doing it is another 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.
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
That's a lot at friend of a friend level when we have less than 20 a day for the entire country.
One was Thursday morning - the other a few months back. Going back 18 years a neighbour walked across the A1M at 4am and stood in the road until a lorry ran over him.
20 a day is 7300 a year or 10 in every constituency every year. Remember suicide is the number 1 cause of death for men below 50
Without reference to the factuality (I genuinely don't know), I need to point out that "suicide is the number 1 cause of death for men below 50" has to be viewed in the light that if it wasn't, that would mean that something else is killing them and that would be bad.
Obviously it would be good if it was because the number of suicides had decreased and other things were equal!
What would you prefer under-50s to die of?
Dachshunds?
Did you know there are at least 3 cases of people being killed by dachshunds.
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
That's a lot at friend of a friend level when we have less than 20 a day for the entire country.
One was Thursday morning - the other a few months back. Going back 18 years a neighbour walked across the A1M at 4am and stood in the road until a lorry ran over him.
20 a day is 7300 a year or 10 in every constituency every year. Remember suicide is the number 1 cause of death for men below 50
Without reference to the factuality (I genuinely don't know), I need to point out that "suicide is the number 1 cause of death for men below 50" has to be viewed in the light that if it wasn't, that would mean that something else is killing them and that would be bad.
Obviously it would be good if it was because the number of suicides had decreased and other things were equal!
What would you prefer under-50s to die of?
Dachshunds?
Did you know there are at least 3 cases of people being killed by dachshunds.
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
Only after being forced into desperation by the English parliament and KCII upholding and extending the Navigation Acts, not to mention vetoing foreign investment in the scheme.
PS - You were also fooled by the same fraudster leading to the South Sea Bubble episode..
This July jobs report is preliminary, but even so it is not good news:
U.S. employers have pulled back sharply on hiring this summer, as they grapple with uncertainty fueled by the Trump administration policies.
The economy added 73,000 jobs in July, and hiring in May and June was downgraded by a quarter of a million jobs fewer than previously reported, according to Labor Department data released Friday.
More seriously only a wally would set up a OTA tv news channel. There is no money in it, there never has been. The viewership is absolutely tiny. The likes of Novara Media, Owen Jones, etc, are smart to instead do the YouTube game.
However, I was surprised to find that TLDR News isn't making money. I presumed they would be quids in.
Neon signs, microphones and desks don't come cheap, and YouTube is refocussing on short-form content, so a lot of the sites are struggling/going under. Some of my faves (here, here) are basically begging now.
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.
Both can be true, if car theft is growing from a low base because Range Rovers are now incredibly easy to nick.
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.
Overall crime levels are substantially down over the decades:
This is an international phenomenon so not particularly related to UK policies.
Obviously there are temporal trends, and street thefts of mobile phones are a recent phenomenon, but there was no golden age a few decades ago of low crime, just different crimes, at least in my lifetime. Being out in London or Brum at night when I was young was quite hairy at times.
What is the longer term. I think when people talk about a "golden age" they don't mean 1981, they mean the 50s-60s is my guess, if not earlier.
Do people today remember the '60s? If you were, say, 15 in 1965, then you'd be 75 today. Most people weren't born until after the 1960s.
I don't think that is an issue with eg Reform voters. None were alive when the globe was painted red but it's still a golden age for 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
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.
Both can be true, if car theft is growing from a low base because Range Rovers are now incredibly easy to nick.
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.
Overall crime levels are substantially down over the decades:
This is an international phenomenon so not particularly related to UK policies.
Obviously there are temporal trends, and street thefts of mobile phones are a recent phenomenon, but there was no golden age a few decades ago of low crime, just different crimes, at least in my lifetime. Being out in London or Brum at night when I was young was quite hairy at times.
What is the longer term. I think when people talk about a "golden age" they don't mean 1981, they mean the 50s-60s is my guess, if not earlier.
Do people today remember the '60s? If you were, say, 15 in 1965, then you'd be 75 today. Most people weren't born until after the 1960s.
I don't think that is an issue with eg Reform voters. None were alive when the globe was painted red but it's still a golden age for them.
PINK, my man! PINK! The wokest Empire the world ever knew!
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
Travel by and large didn't happen at all. People walked. And not very far from where they lived. They didn't "know" about much of the rest of the world, and feared it.
When they did move, they either moved in large groups usually with a leader - with force - or migrated into a total vacuum, like the Angles, Saxons and Jutes into post Roman Britain and the Goths/Huns into Rome.
But, if a State was there to oppose them or repulse them they did; they didn't, look up the Human Rights Act 1286 and send a messenger to call up Sire Jolion Maweham at ye old inneth of court to adjudicate a case for them.
They used force.
Um you started with sinking boats and now you are talking about people traveling over land.
Exactly what type of migration are you talking about?
Um, no. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes all got here by boat, mate. They didn't walk.
The trouble is that you, @bondegezou@Foxy and your ilk are so determined to show that 'open borders' is the norm and something we've always had - to win your political point in the present - that you lose all sense of reality.
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
Travel by and large didn't happen at all. People walked. And not very far from where they lived. They didn't "know" about much of the rest of the world, and feared it.
When they did move, they either moved in large groups usually with a leader - with force - or migrated into a total vacuum, like the Angles, Saxons and Jutes into post Roman Britain and the Goths/Huns into Rome.
But, if a State was there to oppose them or repulse them they did; they didn't, look up the Human Rights Act 1286 and send a messenger to call up Sire Jolion Maweham at ye old inneth of court to adjudicate a case for them.
They used force.
I think that is rather simplistic. There's pretty good evidence of significant resistance to the Angles and Saxons by the Britons, but also a willingness to inter-marry, adopt Anglo-Saxon language and lifestyles. Similarly with the Vikings, both fierce battles, but also widespread peaceful settlement by Viking farmers. So a complex mix of conquest, resistance, collaboration and assimilation. Pretty much the same with the Romans before and the Normans afterwards.
So, uncontrolled, mass immigration results in a "conquest, resistance, collaboration and assimilation".
I'm not sure this is quite the 'gotcha' point you think it is.
GB News is officially Britain's number one news channel - marking an historic milestone in British broadcasting.
The People’s Channel triumphed across key time slots in July, winning the ratings race across Breakfast, mornings, weekday prime-time, and the coveted Sunday morning political slot.
This marks the first time the BBC News Channel has been overtaken by GB News for an entire month, a landmark achievement which comes just a month after GB News’ celebrated its fourth birthday.
That's fantastic news not least as it's gonna stick in so many gullets on here!😂
Well that's the main thing. I suspect OfCom allow all the FoxNewseque skewed bias because it upsets all the right people.
Why don’t some left wingers set up a tv news channel?* Maybe Tortoise or Novarra should? There is the viewership for it isn’t there?
* No jokes about the BBC already having that covered please.
Oh God, that would be as dreary as GBNews except instead of Farage we'd have Corbyn droning on all evening.
Evening line-up of Dianne Abbott, George Galloway, Jezza, throw in conspiracy theory nutter former diplomat as alternative the Coast guy. Could also have some special series rather the John Cleese, have Gerry Adams or whoever is the leader of Hamas or Hezbollah this week.
I am liking the sound of this already in the way that Cartman loves NPR.
Excellent article by the estimable John Burns Murdoch at the FT. An actual attempt to answer the paradox of why most of us feel crime is surging whereas the actual stats say serious crime - eg murder - is falling (and it is falling across the world)
Are the people stupid? Are @kinabalu and @NickPalmer et al correct to laugh at hoi polloi worrying about criminality?
No, the people are not stupid. Crimes of DISORDER - shoplifting, theft, phone theft, dog bites, dangerous driving, and others - are absolutely soaring. The breakdown of civility is real
It is also much more personal, now. Murders are generally done by murderous types in murderous places - away from the public gaze. Crimes of Disorder happen everywhere to everyone
I think there is also a great deal of recently bias - e.g. theft from the person is up significantly in the last two years, but still significantly lower than 20 years ago.
Also social media - in my patch violent crime is a small percentage of what it once was, but most people think it has increased massively. That's because the videos of those crimes now end up on facebook, and so his last point about crime close to home now applies to the whole city, rather than just your street.
The number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads continues to fall too, thanks to measures like 20mph limits, but dashcams are everywhere and the videos get thousands of views.
Yes. Social media definitely plays a part
I had to turn off Notifications on my Nextdoor app because it gave the genuinely disturbing impression that Camden is a 24/7 hellhole of anarchy, burglary and random machete attacks. Which it isn’t, despite some edginess
However the rise in disorder IS real (I would add in rapes and sexual assaults)
J B Murdoch is an exemplary journalist. He actually pursues stories, via data, and digs up real trends. He doesn’t have an agenda - he follows the numbers and presents them with clarity
There’s something about NextDoor that turns people into paranoid curtain twitchers convinced that the new postie is casing their house for future burglary.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
1) Crime as a whole & especially violent crime against the person is down dramatically over the past decades & that’s something we should celebrate. People claiming that the UK as a whole is a violent basket case are completely wrong.
2) Other crimes can be rising & not getting the attention they should because of pressure on police time which has (often for political reasons) been focused on other things. Shoplifting & fraud are both up significantly according to the crime surveys - the former is at record levels on the published figures, never mind the stuff that shops don’t even bother to report because they’ve given up on anything being done. Phone theft in the street is a common experience in some parts of the country.
Telling people that their experience of (2) is wrong because of (1) is wildly unhelpful & just radicalises people into the arms of far-right nationalists.
Stephen Bush in the FT writes about JBM's piece saying:
As John observes, rightly, the main thing going on is that voters (in the US as well as the UK) are responding to a real phenomenon, which is that violent crime has fallen, but antisocial behaviour and so-called “petty” crime, from shoplifting to careless driving, have increased [...]
Illegal trading practices have become much more prevalent too as cuts have reduced the local authority staff focused on trading standards to “critically low” levels
He goes on to argue:
But the political reality is that when Labour has been successful it has in part done so by turning crime into a public services issue — in different ways, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all turned crime into an opportunity to go “wow, the public services are a mess!” In government, Blair had a very clear sense of what he wanted to do to reduce crime and how to talk about it.
Really, when Labour speaks about crime what they have actually been doing is talking about public spending. Now, when Nigel Farage talks about crime he is doing something similar, except what he is really talking about is immigration.
Low level crime, high immigration (especially small boats), and inflation all have one thing in common. They make people feel that things are out of control, and the government is powerless.
A recession, and increased unemployment, OTOH, does not have such an effect upon people.
What really annoys me, and I suspect millions of other voters, is that the government are now less good at what I would consider their prime responsibilities - like making sure our borders are secure, preventing crime (in many cases by keeping criminals off the streets), and that people who work or receive benefits have the right to do so - whilst at the same time getting involved in more and more of everyone's lives. Whether it is the idiotic online safety malarkey, or the feeding of children at schools, or insisting you need various types of ID to fulfil tasks that never required these.
And an awful lot of those things go back to the Tory party saying shop lifting isn’t important enough for the police to deal with and similar with the boats where processing asylum cases was deprioritized because it meant they could reduce processing costs (as welfare and housing costs are in a different departments budget)
Absolutely mad politics wasn't it!
The minor crimes thing was a classic modern policy - liberal thought says that petty criminals are not best served by prison and there was a brief that shop lifters were practically victims by themselves. This then aligns with it being cheaper to decriminalise crime below a threshold value. So it becomes a consensus policy.
Rather like the idea that cars are bad and roads promote cars, aligned with not building more roads - this became policy under New Labour.
We know that induced traffic flow is a phenomenon, but indeed there is no sensible reason why we should let motor vehicles into all the roads and streets as a matter of dogma .
Here at the moment, a Reform Councillor is speculating about reopening Rufford Ford (twat) and bringing back the Yoochoobers (and the performative ASB they generate). We have a number of country lanes and single tracks which have been closed over the years, sometimes except for access, and generally they are great.
The most recent one helped create a safe active travel route from Chesterfield to the Chesterfield Royal Hospital, so we get to make people healthier by exercise whilst accessing blood tests etc.
My lived experience (councillors closed 3 roads near me) is that 'active travel' creates more queues on main roads, whilst doing little to actually promote cycling or walking.
The only advantage of them, I can see, is that the public outcry such closures provoke often reveals the true colours - and blindspots - of many individuals from eg the cycling brigade
That's interesting, and I'll reply later on or tomorrow - I need a constitutional before it gets too dark.
Comments
I have my bags packed for my exile to Tory Home....
This is an international phenomenon so not particularly related to UK policies.
Obviously there are temporal trends, and street thefts of mobile phones are a recent phenomenon, but there was no golden age a few decades ago of low crime, just different crimes, at least in my lifetime. Being out in London or Brum at night when I was young was quite hairy at times.
Crime stats are almost impossible to pin down exactly just by googling. And perceptions of crime are even more difficult to correlate with actual crime over time.
I am never really sure of my ground on this.
Earlier question, Woakes has done his shoulder, a runner would be no use to him even if still allowed.
The only black member of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, which found that the metropolitan police was institutionally racist, yesterday said he felt demeaned after an officer stopped and searched his car.
John Sentamu, the Anglican Bishop of Stepney, was made to get out of his vehicle in the rain after being stopped near St Paul's cathedral.
He said it was the eighth time in eight years that he had been questioned by police exercising their stop and search powers, which research has shown is directed disproportionately at black people.
The incident is another setback for the police, who are trying to prove they have learned the lessons of the Lawrence inquiry.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/jan/24/race.world
Why did they prohibit runners? They were fun. Mad but fun
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/cricket/market/1.246068292
Peaky Blinders is a modern show, but based on real events in the Twenties etc
Inject his upright corpse with plastinating liquids, glue a bat to his cadaverous hand, put wheels under his shoes then slowly roll him out onto the crease. Make sure his bat is twenty eight inches wide and say he needs it for medical reasons so it’s literally impossible to hit the wicket
What’s wrong with that? I defy anyone to find the specific rules disallowing this
GB News is officially Britain's number one news channel - marking an historic milestone in British broadcasting.
The People’s Channel triumphed across key time slots in July, winning the ratings race across Breakfast, mornings, weekday prime-time, and the coveted Sunday morning political slot.
This marks the first time the BBC News Channel has been overtaken by GB News for an entire month, a landmark achievement which comes just a month after GB News’ celebrated its fourth birthday.
Ben Briscoe, GB News’ Head of Programming, commented: “This is a seismic moment, not just for us, but for British broadcasting.
https://www.gbnews.com/news/gb-news-britain-number-one-news-channel
20 a day is 7300 a year or 10 in every constituency every year. Remember suicide is the number 1 cause of death for men below 50
When they did move, they either moved in large groups usually with a leader - with force - or migrated into a total vacuum, like the Angles, Saxons and Jutes into post Roman Britain and the Goths/Huns into Rome.
But, if a State was there to oppose them or repulse them they did; they didn't, look up the Human Rights Act 1286 and send a messenger to call up Sire Jolion Maweham at ye old inneth of court to adjudicate a case for them.
They used force.
Exactly what type of migration are you talking about?
What was that about Smith
Out for 8
215 for 6
He nearly mucked up penalty selection opportunities in Switzerland on Sunday too.
That'll give them a laugh at Groucho's.
You could ask John Hegarty to do a forward for you
Dow and S&P down ~1% and Nasdaq down ~1.5%.
Possibly some more declines in Aug then maybe some further increases in Q4 DYOR
Whereas careless driving causing death or serious injury are either way offences now with maximum sentences of a prison sentence and community service also an option.
Injuries not classed as serious are as you say dealt with in the civil courts anyway
Besides, it’s world cup year. It doesn’t suit Isak to not play all year and lose all match fitness.
* No jokes about the BBC already having that covered please.
https://www.ft.com/content/e64f4ef0-0f98-4a8b-8840-459fd6f2dc28
It wasn't meant to be comedy?
Oh.
I am liking the sound of this already in the way that Cartman loves NPR.
And both Sky News and BBC News have, for different reasons, given up in practice, even if pictures are still flying through the air for now.
However, I was surprised to find that TLDR News isn't making money. I presumed they would be quids in.
“Trump’s name is in the Epstein Files but Kash Patel had FBI agents go through them and black out his name” is the kind of statement that will surely put out this fire
https://bsky.app/profile/kevinmkruse.bsky.social/post/3lvdw73t7uc2t
NEW THREAD
Did you know there are at least 3 cases of people being killed by dachshunds.
PS - You were also fooled by the same fraudster leading to the South Sea Bubble episode..
And the May and June revisions are extremely troubling.
The trouble is that you, @bondegezou @Foxy and your ilk are so determined to show that 'open borders' is the norm and something we've always had - to win your political point in the present - that you lose all sense of reality.
I'm not sure this is quite the 'gotcha' point you think it is.