ANOTHER RAMBLING SERIES OF THOUGHT

I was listening today to a BBC Radio 4 broadcast entitled ‘The Great Crime Mystery” presented by Mark Easton. He notes that:

Over the past thirty years, both violent crime and property crime have fallen by some 80 per cent in England and Wales - a fact also seen in other part of the UK and across Europe. At the peak there were around 20 million incidents of crime a year - today, the figure is closer to 4 million. This includes crimes not captured in official police stats - crimes which have gone unreported by the public, or not recorded by the police - but instead captured by the National Crime Survey.

In his report Easton “explores the gap between perception and reality, unearthing clues as to why our perception is at odds with the statistics, why politicians are reluctant to tell voters that crime is down, and why it is we have an innate bias to believe in the worst and hold a rose-tinted view of the past.”

I have spent 35 years of my working life as a lawyer dealing with crime, and I confess that I have never quite believed statements made by government, police authorities or scholarly pundits that crime was falling. It appears from Mr Easton report and from his diligent research on the statistics and other reports on the scale of crime, that there was a distinct period from 1995 when the crime figures began to fall substantially. This is something that most people find difficult to assess or accept, given the way crimes have been reported in the media. Also, strategic statistics of crimes have been used by politicians to support various views and positions, to gain public support, by playing on the fears and concerns of the public. 


There was an interesting phrase and comment spoken by Mr Bobby Duffy, Director of Policy and Research at Kings College, London. He states, unsurprisingly due to years of evolution, we are a “threat focused species”. In addition, so far as political points of view are concerned,  among Reform UK supporters, despite the real statistics, “56% think that crime has gone up, compared to 25% of Green supporters.” 

He also deals with confirmation bias, in that “we tend to seek out information that confirms our already held views and we try to avoid or disparage information that doesn’t fit with one’s views” . He goes on to note that we do not appear to have a neutral assessment of the facts. One only has to listen to one of Nigel Farage’s tirades about crime, using incomplete and biased so called statistics, to make claims about the increases in crime to increase peoples anxiety.

What does appear to have increased however, over the past few years, are instances of anti-social behaviour, up 46% in the last decade. This includes groups hanging around, litter or dog mess on the streets, homeless people begging and such instances of what is considered a nuisance and can cause anxiety. Some of this behaviour was dealt with by the introduction of ASBO’s in 1998 (Anti-Social Behaviour Order) which were civil orders in the UK used to stop individuals from engaging in behaviour that caused harassment, alarm, or distress to others. This has now been more specifically defined in the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014.

There is an added note that in the current climate, shoplifting is an activity that has been on the increase in recent years, although, generally crime has been in decline. Whether this is symptomatic of the increase in anti-social behaviour and a breakdown of social conventions, or as a result of a sever divide in economic circumstances, or both is a question to be resolved. 

One has to bear in mind the continuous references to disasters and violent activity on media broadcasts and the prolific use of violence and criminal activity in the making of popular films and television dramas. Just how much of an affect this has on social-behaviour is to be considered. Is there a general decline in standards being reflected by the media or promoted by it? Or is it just reporting the particular facts?

There are only two things that people do which are anti-social. They steal and they hit. Some to a greater extent than others. It really does boil down to dishonesty and/or violence. There appears to be an infinite number of ways to be dishonest. The law has a way of defining and collating the different kinds of dishonesty. Simple theft, burglary, deception, receiving stolen goods, robbery - which is just theft with violence or threats of violence - elaborate frauds, embezzlement etc…scams of all sorts. But it all adds up to plain and simple dishonesty. They are all the same thing under different names. They all vary in degrees of the amount of loss and the degree of harm they cause, which is why there are different kinds of sentences imposed by the courts on the perpetrators of dishonesty. 

With violence, there are equally various definitions for the kinds of injuries that are inflicted. It ranges from simple threats, to hitting, to causing slight injury, to causing serious injury, to deliberate killing. We all know what violence is and we all react to violence in different ways. We have no difficulty in recognising violence, be it physical or indeed psychological, as in menace  or stalking, etc..The problem has always been what to do about it. How de we control our own tendencies toward violence? 

We have to recognise that some times our personal behaviour can result in dishonest activity or violence. The person who is drunk and disorderly, the addict in search of a fix, these are all individual human activities that can lead to criminal behaviour, but again it is either dishonesty or violence. It’s what humans do. Very simple, very boring, but deeply troubling and vastly expensive for the collective state to deal with, be it maintaining a police force, a criminal courts system, prisons or maintaining the accident and emergency departments and ambulance service to clean up the mess. The amount of time and money spent on dealing with our citizens’ bad behaviour is vast. 

Just looking a some figures for 2026, the population of the United Kingdom is estimated at 69,931,528 people.  There are approximately some 91,500 people in prison. That’s 0.13% of the population, a tenth of one percent.  There were some 5,283,815 crimes reported in 2026, representing some 7.5% of the population, assuming each offence was committed by a different person. I do not know how many of the 91,500 currently in prison are responsible to those crimes committed in 2026. It would appear that some 380,082 cases have been disposed of so far in 2026 at the Magistrates Courts and 29,600 at the Crown Court, although those Crown Court cases will be included in the cases committed to it from the Magistrates Court. That represents about one half of one percent of the population. 

The budget for the courts, prison, probation and legal aid services is approximately 13 billion pounds and for the police services some 19.89 billion pounds. How much of the police budget is taken up for dealing with non criminal matters, I do not know, but take away around 5 billion  and we are looking at about 28 billion pounds to deal with dishonesty and violence in our society this year. That’s £400 per annum in 2026 per person in the United Kingdom and that does not include what we spend on insurance for theft of our goods. That is, of course, if every single individual pays up the £400. This just gives an idea of what the figures represent as, in any event, it is budgeted for in our taxes received by the Government of the day. Like all budgets, it is clearly not enough to deal with the worst of our human activities; however, deal with it we must. Dishonesty and violence are unfortunately not going away. 

Returning to Mark Easton’s report on the overall decrease in crime, it is gratifying that perhaps there is a possible positive progression towards more civilised behaviour. If the figures are, as he says, coming down, perhaps so too can the costs. Nonetheless, the disturbing stratagem of some political activity to gain power and influence by appealing to that ‘threat focus’ we all have, is a great worry. It is dangerous as it not only re-enforces anxieties and biases, it can easily propel violent protest and disorder as we have seen in Thetford, Epping and coming to Clacton. The exaggeration of crimes allegedly committed by immigrants and ‘foreign nationals’ is in the playbook of most national populists. One only has to listen to the rhetoric of Donald Trump against immigrants in the United States, accusing them of being sent from prisons and lunatic asylums and of being rapists, murderers and thieves. This has not stopped and is also implied in the pronouncements of Farage and Co. Scapegoating is popular politics. It has always been thus. One should also take notes how Farage’s party thinks of claimants for benefits, as being people who deserve nothing but a community service order being applied to them and their benefits withdrawn, as you might sentence an offender is court. What are they thinking? 

I hardly know where to begin. There are a variety of ways a democratic nation can exist and thrive, In the United Kingdom, under a constitutional monarchy, we have those of us who take a more liberal approach to running the state, which includes the notion that the welfare of the citizen is important enough for the state to lend a hand. We see health and welfare as a matter of human rights. Having employment is equally important. Feeling secure and safe is very much a matter of concern. The rule off law is paramount as they preserve all our democratic freedoms and rights. We like to think that those able to contribute to the general state funds are in line with the state and its uses of those contribution, as well as the manner in which it imposes those taxes which regulate our contributions. In other words, we are obliged to pay taxes, but we elect the government that imposes those taxes. 

Problems and disputes can arise over the amount of state revenue  that needs to be raised, how it is raised  and how it is spent.  Just how much should be done by the state. There are some who think the state should be involved as little as possible, and that somehow, the private sector and charities will take up the slack. Yet, while they feel the state should not be involved financially, they see the state as a controller of human activity. Make them work if they want funds, there will be limited state benefit. If citizen’s are ill, private insurance can be sorted. There is no need for the state to be concerned. The state should only spend money for the security of the nation, on the military, the police and the courts. Oh, and on the executive of course. There would be a small budget for dealing with licences and regulations, but nothing  too onerous. Where have we seen that before? Of course I exaggerate, but it seems to be happening before our eyes in the United States of America. There are those in France, Italy, Germany and the UK who would follow that lead. 

The problem is that people are never happy about having to pay taxes, mainly because they have been extracted from people who cannot afford to pay them. Those that can, are reluctant to pay and always try to pay as little as possible. The political parties who seek to want to run the state with less, play on that fact. The public are encouraged to complain by those very parties and are critical of any suggestion of increases in taxation. So much so that governments seeking to provide the services that are actually essential for the running of the state, are reluctant to increase revenue and look for different and obscure methods of gaining revenue. 

I can recall Trump even remarked during a debate that the fact that he paid so little taxes meant that he was smart and clever. He was not picked up on this comment, and so he still thinks getting away without paying any bill is clever and smart.  But I digress.

It comes back to the question of what do we want? If we want an NHS, if we want state pensions, if we want social care, if we want security, if we don’t want real miscreants loose, if we want freedom and the continued existence of democracy under the rule of law, then we will have to step up and our government will have to get the message across to get the public on side, to support them in putting a penny or two on the income tax. Just what is it you want?

At least we do not have the problem of trying to put America back together. Trump has so squandered the economy on his war and tariffs, his Gestapo, his failed and corrupt department of justice, his joke of an FBI, his general attack on freedom of thought and speech, his colossal personal venality and acquisitiveness, that the only people to whom America First applies are the billionaires who feed at his table. His disrespect and attack on lawyers, the rule of law and education  in general has ground the country into a cesspit from which it will have a very hard time getting out of.  The coffee that used to smell good? - now it reeks of excrement.