Crime rates are down, employment is up, so why won't people accept that
things are getting better?

Polly Toynbee
Friday October 20, 2000

You may not be able to fool the people when it comes to empty political
boasting. But it seems only too easy to persuade people that things are
getting worse when they aren't. Despite this week's figures, people still
think crime is soaring. Here we are with the economy booming in its ninth
year of unbroken growth and unemployment falling steadily for seven years,
full employment in sight. Yet people think job insecurity is getting worse.
By April the poorest 10th of the population will be a real 11.4% better off
than in 1997. The real cost of food is falling, the total cost of motoring
has stayed stable for years. More children are getting a better education.
The NHS is doing more operations on a healthier population. So why don't
people think so?
Leave aside the complex question of how much Labour deserves the credit for
the above. Why is the prevailing noise a whinge, so much scare and fear,
outrage and indignation? Human nature, says a pessimistic colleague. But the
people are confronted with such a barrage of misinformation, encouraged to
complain, to sue, to blame its leaders. Grudge is the general climate of
discourse. Why?

Take the new crime figures. They matter because they feel like the moral
pulse of a nation: rising crime creates moral panic. Progress seems to grind
into reverse if a scary new generation fails to inherit its parents' cultural
values. So the truth of the matter is vitally important to the nation's
self-image.

The British Crime Survey, the most reliable figures unearthing far more crime
than the recorded figures, shows crime fell by 10% in the past two years, on
top of a previous 15% two-year fall. Burglary is down 21%, car crime down
15%. But how is anyone to know that? The Conservative party's "Believing in
Britain" mini-manifesto chapter, the War on Crime, states flatly "Crime is
rising again and yet there are fewer police." Crime is not rising, it has
been falling for six years. The Tory website claims "Rural crime is rising
dramatically." No it's not, it's lower than anywhere else and falling just as
sharply.

How did the press report the good crime news? BBC television gave it a
two-line read low down on its new 10 o'clock news - blink and you missed it.
This from the same corporation that frightens the socks off viewers with
Crimewatch, crime stories and crime shockers. How are most people supposed to
gain any statistical sense of risk, drowned in crime horror with a drought of
crime fact? The Mail on page six headlined their misleading story, "The
playground plague" because of a rise in 16-year-olds grabbing mobile phones
off each other. There was also a rise in drunk young men fighting outside
pubs. The Telegraph's story was deliberately distorting: "10% drop in crime
masks a rise in violence". Not so: there was a drop in violent crime of 4%, a
fall of 20% since 1995.

Quite why crime is falling is a mystery. The government is wisely careful not
to boast, since it's happening right across Europe and the US. As ever, it
follows the rise in employment and the good economy. How much Labour can
claim this success is still hard to judge. But crime was expected to rise:
only last year the Home Office research department predicted an imminent 30%
rise in burglary but instead it fell by 21%. Two key factors indicated that
it should have risen - a growth in the number of boys in the high-crime age
group and a growth in the number of goods around to steal. Paul Wiles, Home
Office head of research, says the projections were calculated on past
behavior, but times appear to have changed. More than 200,000 young people
unemployed for over six months are now in jobs through the New Deal. One
million more people are now in work. More people now have many of the most
often stolen goods. Increasingly the luxuries of the rich are unstealable,
such as foreign holidays. Researchers date the modern rise in crime of about
5% a year since 1918 from the time there began to be more things to steal
from ordinary people's homes.

Labour's anti-crime projects have contributed to the trend: quick hits have
produced results - target-hardening locks on cars and car parks and on
household windows and doors in high-crime areas. But changing people, not
locks, takes time. The youth offender teams redirecting boys away from crime
at their first offence will take another two or three years to provide
measurable outcomes. The police are only just starting on new truancy sweeps
to pick up children at the first risk of crime.

Michael Howard left office crowing that his "Prison Works" regime delivered a
four-year drop in crime. Not so. A Cambridge study across the US, UK and
Sweden found no correlation between numbers of people imprisoned and crime
levels. Even within the US, there's no correlation between crime rates and
the states with the most prisoners. Traditionally there is a strong
correlation between chances of being caught and crime rates, though in the UK
the chance of being caught has fallen over the same years that crime dropped.

In sparring over funds, the Treasury wants proof that Home Office schemes are
winning the "war on crime". The Home Office asks impudently in reply if the
Treasury can prove it is responsible for the good economy? Individual
governments can't yet claim too much credit when the same good story of
rising prosperity and falling crime is told across such different political
cultures. Fear of hubris keeps fingers crossed (no one mentions "oil-shock")
but all past predictions are being torn up as researchers stand back
scratching their heads in puzzlement, whispering of entering a new, uncharted
era of golden plenty and a good society.

Do people know when things are getting better? From the tenor of the
Tory-dominated press debate, you wouldn't think so. Vox pops only show the
public dutifully delivering the appropriate grumble of the day the reporter
wants. Mori finds people grumble more in focus groups because they're
encouraged to: for example, nine out of 10 polled said they were happy with
their refuse collection, but after a long focus group they thought up myriad
new complaints. Mori warns Labour to be more cautious of focus group bias.
But people do seem to know how things are going. When Mori asked: "In
general, how happy or unhappy are you with your life at present?" in 1991, in
deep recession 69% said they were very or fairly happy. In 1997 it was 76%
and the last time they were asked in 1999, 83% reported themselves happy.

There are other questions: how much better could things be? Is the government
ambitious enough? This is still a too low-taxed country with inadequate
public services. Pockets of people are left behind. Why do we have to work
such grueling hours? Transport will take years and billions to fix: if you
can't tax and spend more boldly on this rising tide, then when? Now Labour
must get braver and seize the day.