You probably don’t need to lie about the economy either – the most pessimistic predictions for the budget deficit peg it to 4.9% of GDP, which is equivalent to 1994 not 1945.

This attitude is rather more surprising, considering that the fall in crime rate could well be due to a Tory policy that was followed through to a great extent by Labour: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4353433.ece

Western European countries have significantly lower crime rates, but they also lock up many more criminals per crime committed than we do: http://www.civitas.org.uk/data/prisonTooMany.php

So if we want to make the crime rate fall faster, all we have to do is imprison for longer more criminals that are likely to offend again. Of course, attention to the sheer amount of total crime in Britain is a slightly problematic course to take as there are a great many areas and people in this country for whom crime is barely ever a feature of their lives. For others, especially those on low incomes in inner-city areas, it is a near constant menace. So the pattern of crime victimisation has to be taken as seriously (perhaps more) than the overall crime rate – and that applies to both the left and the right on this issue.

Thanks John but my reference to WW2 came from here – a report in Saturday’s Guardian:

“Figures published yesterday showed the budget deficit lurched to a much worse than expected £9.3bn last month, bringing the shortfall for the first three months of the fiscal year to the worst level since second world war

The ONS said June’s £9.3bn public sector net borrowing figure was the worst since monthly records began in 1993. With previous monthly figures being revised upwards, the quarterly figure was the highest since the second world war”

So that wasn’t a lie. The full quote you’ve presented a little selectively though was:

“A deterioration at this rate repeated over the rest of the year would result in net borrowing totalling £72.6bn – almost £30bn more than the forecast set out by Alistair Darling in the Budget earlier this year, and sweeping the budget deficit to the equivalent of 4.9% of GDP. This would be the highest level since 1994–95, when taxes were raised. But back then, we were coming out of a recession. Today we are just going into one”

I can understand why you left that last sentence out but it’s kind of pivotal to the overall discussion no…?

Well Boris Johnson has actually already won an election and he still can’t stop himself from hyping up the fear of crime on an almost daily basis. Old electioneering habits die hard it seems. Even in government.

Nick Cowen,

“if we want to make the crime rate fall faster, all we have to do is imprison for longer more criminals that are likely to offend again.”

That’s just nuts – you’re contradicting your own argument!

If you want the crime rate to fall or fall faster what we need to do is catch the people who are committing the crimes.

What we don’t want to do is keep writing more laws and creating more crimes and adding more powers so that the criminal justice system can fill up the prisons to their capacity. What we also don’t want to do is build inequality into the system through a new form of prejudice against those who may be more ‘likely’ to repeat offend – which would be impossible to measure or regulate.

Prison isn’t a punishment, geddit??

Hmm. I don’t like massive assertions made as unsourced asides, which is very much what the Guardian WWII comment is, especially when they’re made by someone who’s willing to claim that £73bn in 2008 is /more/ than £54bn in 1993/4. The National Statistics site doesn’t seem to go back further than 1946 with PSBR data – I’ve emailed the journalist in question asking him for a source, but I’m sceptical it will really prove what the article is claiming.

Thomas – I agree with everything that you just said (apart from the implication that the number of prison places is somehow static). I dislike legislative creep as well. All I am suggesting is that we imprison serious and repeat offenders. We have imprisoned around 20,000 more since Labour came to power and the benefits are apparent in the new crime figures. If we imprisoned more, the strategy would work even better.

It doesn’t matter whether prison is a punishment or not. Even if all it does is keep convicted criminals away from the public for the duration of their sentence, it is still obviously going to lower the rate of re-offending.

I wouldn’t classify myself as a Tory blogger – more opposed to New Labour. Certainly the ‘left’ has strong web presence (blog sites), but look a disparate lot. However the ‘right’ , apart from the likes of Civitas, Adam Smith institute, et al (should we include the BNP) are nowhere to found?
Crime – BCS (Bloody Creative Statistics)
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/peter_barnett/blog/2008/07/17/crime__bcs_bloody_creative_statistics
New Labour -Crime Smoke and Mirrors
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/peter_barnett/blog/2008/07/01/new_labour_crime_smoke_and_mirrors

If the crime figures had shown crime rising, then the tory bloggers would have been hailing them as accurate condemnations of labour. It is this that is the annoying thing – they have no interest in an honest discussion of crime, they merely use it for party political points – as if horrible crimes and moral panics aren’t going to occur under a tory government.

I’d be interested in whatever responsed you get John but I think my point holds. On crime there’s a disparity between what people feel and the reality – a disparity the news media are at least partly responsible for and which they certainly exploit to sell paper. Likewise with the more manic reactions from Tory bloggers.

The economy is different because the stats and public experience are more aligned – hence a more fruitful (and I’d argue) fair area of criticism for Tories…..

Nick, glad to hear it.

The point about prison places is that sentencing guidelines exist in in parallel with their numbers, so we have had large numbers of relatively minor offenders taking up places for committing crimes like serious traffic offenses (I’ll forget contentious issues policy areas like drugs offenses, as that’s a discussion for another time) and the prison population expands to fill the capacity – it doesn’t reflect the level or seriousness of criminality at large.

Many of the crimes could easily and better be dealt with differently, such as with greater use of probation services, rehabilitation and counselling. However government funding doesn’t enable this flexibility and these services are stretched to the bone or not properly developed to provide effective levels of service to make their existence worthwhile – one professional in the field has suggested to me that this is partly due to an ideological predisposition of specific individual decision-makers.

Anyway, I agree that the public protection role of prisons is vital in limiting the impact of habitual or inveterate (sorry, unreformed) criminals – especially violent offenders – but that only occurs during the period they are locked up and there is a wealth of conflicting evidence as to how this changes behaviour upon the individuals release which implies that in many cases the consequence can be negative (especially considering the link between imprisonment and mental health problems).

For every Broadmoor, Whitemoor or Dartmoor, there are prisons, YOIs and remand centres which fill the gap policy-makers feel too cowed by the threat of Daily Mail headlines to fill with adequate and individually-tailored solutions. It is one consequence of the drastic reduction in court reporting that media coverage and public reaction is so detatched from reality.

On a side note, considering the discussions about the BBC service remit and license fee, if there is a public service case to be made for the BBC Parliament channel, why not for a Court channel – obviously the commercial model provided by the eponymous US cable channel could be subverted, while there is also a huge appetite for all the salacious, gory and gruesome details of the rich, famous and notorious presented in the right way. Almost every day there is a case trial at the high court, which provides immense theatre for which an almost-complete rogues gallery of our nations personality has been on show through the years. Perhaps we should be brought closer to the fates of our fellow citizens to enable us to better understand them and have greater compassino for the issues at stake – as well as to provide scrutiny over the system.

I think what they mean on the budget deficit is that in cash terms the Q1 (of financial year) deficit was the largest since the second world war. But that can be misleading – in cash terms the economy is probably twice the size it was in 1994 -5 (2.5% growth and 2.5% inflation). For instance I think January’s SURPLUS was the largest since 1946 as well. The data starts then, btw.

But that’s not particularly interesting – retail spending in May was the largest since the second world war.

The Q1 08 rate is about 6.5% of GDP. The full-year estimate of £70bn would be about 5% of GDP. The budget defict in 1993 was 7.9% of GDP. So it’s not the largest since the second world war in the usual way of expressing it (1993 must have had a quarter larger as a % of GDP)

In fact the headline could have been:

“Budget deficit biggest in British history”

as UK GDP in 1945 was about £10bn.

This why I don’t read Right wing bloggers. As I said yesterday, they are just like The Daily Torygraph, or the Mail, and I don’t read them either.

Seeing as the Tory media is scaring the shit out of everyone before the next election, the crime figures will not fit with their narrative, hence the reaction of the Tory bloggsphere.

Crime levels may have stabilised in the past few years but they they have been unnacceptably high since the mid-nineties. A serious reduction would require conservative political will which is something that a Cameron government would lack, as was the case with the Major government which refused to break with the 1960s orthodoxies on criminal justice and policing methods. Instead they chose an approach which was much easier on their fragile liberal consciences, but which always solves nothing: curbing the liberties of everybody.

“A serious reduction would require conservative political will which is something that a Cameron government would lack”

Please cite a country where ‘conservative political will’ has led to a significant reduction in crime. Note: if you cite the US or ‘broken windows’ this proves you have no idea what you’re talking about.

Thanks all… in particular Matthew for clearing up the Guardian quote (I think!)

Sally @ 14 – don’t tar all right-of-centre bloggers with the same Guido / Dale brush, there are some of us more willing to engage…!

Has crime not fallen substantially in the US? Certainly it has – by 70% – in NYC.

I’m pretty sure crime figures would reduce if the Police reverted to type and started promoting Freemasonry, racism, sexism, homophobia, beating confessions out of suspects, congratulating rapists, doughnut-eating, sitting on their fat arses etc again.

Though such conservative methods don’t do much to reduce the actual rate of crimes committed, I’m convinced the comedian @15 would be more than happy to enlighten us all by providing a fully accurate overview of criminality in the UK for every decade going back to the civil war to prove it.

No? Well what’s he/she (sounds like a he) doing going round like an idiot making general prescriptions based on ideology then?

Of course murder was non-existent when 200+ people a year were being hung at Tyburn every year. Of course before Jack the Ripper came to the eastend the peelers had every borough in their pocket and every misdemeanour was provided swift execution of justice to the betterment of all. Of course it’s this generation of under 12s are the first who’ve begun organising themselves into gangs because of differential representation in the House of Commons since they were born. So let’s bring back capital punishment, reduce the policeforce by 90% and employ semi-literate constables who wouldn’t be able to waste their time filling in endless paperwork accounting for their use of sanctioned force even if it was really needed.

Yay – that’ll keep the dirty mob in their place; that’ll answer all complaints against those upstanding boys in blue, who we should all be treated like royalty – won’t it? At least then those hard working sons of baronets and earls wouldn’t have to worry about the threat to their income that might be the result of indecision over how long to keep prisoners before they are executed – won’t it?

Err, no, it won’t.

If conservatives really want to live in a conservative country then they should move to Saudi Arabia and try it out for a while.

cjcjc – Crime has fallen in NYC, not sure about the 70%. There is no evidence at all that hang-em-flog-em laws have been the cause, though (states which imposed 3-strikes laws saw no difference in crime rate-of-change from those which didn’t).

If you were reluctant (up to last autumn, obviously) to let Mr Broon take credit for 10 years of economic growth, you should be equally reluctant to let Mr Guiliani take credit for 10 years of favourable demographic trends…

Sorry I was wrong.

Since 1990 NYC crime is down 77%!

Crime in London is higher.

They are obviously doing something right.

The ‘Crime in London is higher’ meme appeared in the Sun back in May, and I’m damned if I’m going to accept that without hard evidence. Particularly for murder (mind you, London is far from the murder capital of the UK, for that matter). A lot of it comes down to how you define ‘New York’ and ‘London’, for instance. However, a quick peruse here – http://tacomaconfidential.typepad.com/the_murder_book_2008/ – is rather eye-opening.

Bringing up the New York example is a bit like saying ‘hey, this alcoholic’s cut down from 10 bottles of meths a day to just 2, he’s just the chap to send into schools to warn them of the perils of one too many Bacardi Breezers’. Different country, different rules – there’s a limit to what you can learn from overseas examples. As I’ve said elsewhere, Baghdad is safer than it was, but I’m not sure London would benefit from the Army supplying and paying the gangs and getting them to police their own walled-off enclaves, while occasionally blasting the hell out of any that steps out of line.

Whenever violent crime other than murder falls in the UK, right-wingers point out that crime statistics are unreliable and the best proxy for violent crime is the murder rate. Whenever you point out the murder rate in the US, right-wingers point out that while that may be high, the other crime stats are low.

This primarily reflects the fact that they’re lying bastards.

cjcc,

Sorry I was wrong.

Since 1990 NYC crime is down 77%!

Crime in London is higher.

They are obviously doing something right.

I am sure we argued about this earlier this year. You attributed it to zero tolerance. I looked at the evidence and concluded it might have something to do with New York’s higher number of police officers per capita. You didn’t respond.

Whenever you point out the murder rate in the US, right-wingers point out that while that may be high, the other crime stats are low.

This primarily reflects the fact that they’re lying bastards.

heh.

I’m sure it is due to higher police numbers as well as better approach – we need both here.

If anyone’s ideological blinkers means they don’t want to consider solutions which have cut crime by 77% in a comporable city well that’s up to them.

Yes NYC has a higher murder rate although all other violent crimes are lower.
But the main point is the scale of the decline, across the board, not the comparative levels.

I am just about prepared to believe that violent crime has fallen from 1995.
But it certainly is higher than 1990.
While NYC is down 77% from 1990.

The point is, I’m not willing to believe NYC’s violent crime rate has actually fallen by 77%, any more than I’d be willing to believe the same claim about London. I don’t know whether NYC crime stats are survey-based or police-reporting-based; I don’t know whether in either case the methodology has changed; and if it has I don’t know how or how significantly.

In the absence of an impartial report providing context on the figures in the style of the ones published in England and Wales, It’s just a meaningless headline figure. And yes, there probably is such a report; I haven’t read it; please post a link and a précis if you have…

ukliberty & cjcjc,

re: influence of more police officers and zero tolerance on crime figures.

These are only two facets of a multi-pronged approach, albeit the two most politicised facets reflecting their position at the coalface of the fight against crime.

There are a huge number of factors which play into criminality which reflect different historical circumstances and the way attitudes have changed as the political sphere has evolved. We could, for example, talk about the different legacies of racism and how segregation has lead to different policing policies in different parts of town, as a response to different spatial crime profiles. We could talk about how science has influenced criminal opportunity by the development of a raft of new countermeasures and prevention measures, such as to make car theft more difficult and the ubiquitous presence of private ’security’ forces. We could talk about how changes in civic planning and architecture influences what happens where…

Frankly if you want to repeat your liberal-libertarian debate by proxy, why not try to account for non-immediate factors too, unless, of course, that might challenge both your narrow perspectives of how ideology affects the debate.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/cscity.pdf

give you the stats

reported not survey basis

I know we all reject anecdote but I have been a regular visitor to NYC since the early 80’s (at least six times per year)…otherwise I have lived in London all my (40) years.

You can hardly walk a step in NYC without seeing a policman – they are everywhere – any time of the day or night.
The contrast in that regard with London is really striking.

I don’t feel safer in NYC, as I live in a very safe part of zone one in London, but the relative change has been extraordinary.

NYC has been doing and continues to do something very right.

PS I’ll report back on the “objective report”

cjcjc,

Yes, but still it’s only a part of the bigger picture, and like I said above, crime complaints is not the same thing as crime, therefore there is only a correlation between any statistics we might quote.

Actual police numbers also reflect crime perceptions much more closely than they do levels of crime – primarily because they are responsive.

So, you are entirely correct in stating the impression one might take correpsonds with one starting position on the matter, be it environmentally or philosophically, where one asks and then answers ‘what is the natural rate?’

In contrast it is also entirely correct to question what effective measures can be used and how their effect is different in different circumstances.

thomas,

These are only two facets of a multi-pronged approach, albeit the two most politicised facets reflecting their position at the coalface of the fight against crime.

I didn’t say more policemen was the only factor – I’m pretty certain I made it clear that “it had something to do with it”. Try re-reading what I wrote and don’t assume so much about what people aren’t aware of.

ukliberty, well you’re right insofar as you’ve interpreted your own words, but the original conditional tense ‘it might have’ is less clear than ‘it had’ which you use in #34.

I guess that’s a problem of the medium and how it lacks intonation, so maybe we are all at fault for being stuck within the limitations of the blog, which infers that politicians are equally all at fault for the way they conduct debate in public through various media…

The other “anecdotal” issue I might mention is to do with perception/fear of crime.

Unlike Londoners, New Yorkers (and the New York press) have no doubt whatsoever that crime in their city has fallen substantially over the past 10-15 years. No doubt at all.

Via Matthew Turner, Danny Finkelstein has made the same point as you Liam.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/daniel_finkelstein/article4380637.ece

Spotted that Sunny – Danny of course makes the point with considerably more panache and wit than I but I guess that’s why he’s writing in the Times and I….

Yes – good article.

“At that time, the extraordinary success of New York’s crimefighters was a new story, and not one that people in this country knew anything about. Phrases such as “zero-tolerance policing” and “broken windows theory” – describing New York’s crackdown on even minor crime – were unknown in this country outside, well, little think-tanks. ”

(Though according to john b his use of those phrases apparently proves he has no idea what he is talking about!)

The “right” has (kind of) won the argument, but governments have not followed through…now all we need are the police numbers and the prison places.

Liam – are you really up posting at 5am or are you not in the UK?!

I have a two-hour commute to work each morning cjcjc so I’m afraid I am up and posting at 5am!

This is an interesting review of the 1990’s NYC experience.
Crime has fallen much further since then of course.

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/cr_22.pdf

From the conclusion:

“On QOL [quality-of-life] enforcement, all
four groups [Asians, Blacks, Hispanics,
Whites] equally approved of the “broken
windows” notion of urban decay (4.0 on a
1–5 scale), and continued to score above 3
on a 1–5 scale endorsing NYPD QOL enforcement.

Moreover, it is not just that all ethnic groups
broadly support quality of life enforcement,
Hispanics, African-Americans, and Asians,
actually support it more strongly than do
Whites.
. . . When analyzed by ethic group, all four
groups strongly supported QOL enforcement.
On the 0–20 scale, Whites’ level of
support (14.6) for QOL enforcement was actually
exceeded by people of color—Hispanics
(15.2), Blacks (15.3), and Asians
(15.5). The likely reason for this is that . . .
problems are more troublesome in non-
White neighborhoods.”

The “borken windows” approach is of course shorthand for a more complex series of measures, the most powerful of which appears to be timely data analysis and rapid response to emerging problems combined with local commander accountability for local crime rates.

I could laugh, but the ‘broken windows’ approach is nothing special, that’s part of the original mandate for policing and why they were set up in the first place.

It was centralisation which took that ability away from local communities when their long-tenured and trusted bobbies were taken away and in doing so removed any actual on-the-spot accountability.

Back in the day (until the mid-eighties) my local primary school recieved a weekly assembly from our Mr Walters, and he knew to be waiting across from the local pub around chucking out time to keep an eye on the regulars – communication, data analysis and rapid response!