Violent, lawless, broken Britain? The facts tell a different story

Times

2 days ago

When Mexico warned its citizens about the risks of visiting Britain, it sounded absurd — like a parody of a Foreign Office travel alert. 'Robberies and physical assaults, mainly involving knives, have increased,' says the official advice. Britain is 'relatively safe' but, if visiting, it's still best to 'maintain regular contact with loved ones' back in Mexico and 'inform them about your situation and schedule'. This from a country where cartel violence claims tens of thousands of lives each year.
But it chimes with what a great many Brits now believe. Poll after poll finds the public convinced that crime is getting far worse — and ready to believe Nigel Farage's summer campaign about 'lawless Britain'. NHS hospital data shows knife assaults last year fell to a 25-year low, with the number treated for violent assault close to half what it was in 2000. Crime surveys agree. By such measures our streets have seldom, if ever, been safer. So what's going on?
The answer is not just about crime but about the way social media now acts as a distorting lens through which millions see their country. When shrill voices dominate, hyperbole wins — and Britain is portrayed not just as troubled but in ruins, terrorised by immigrant-driven crime, even close to civil war. And if the official figures show none of this? Well, then those figures must be wrong.
Once this might have been dismissed as digital drivel. But in an era where more people get their news from social media than any newspaper, it matters — and it can change politics. If enough voters think that Britain is descending into chaos, it creates a new political force, one where 'the British state' is secretive, malign and run by the reviled elite. Such language is working well for Nigel Farage, whom polls put on course to be the next prime minister. Rather than challenge all this, the Tories are trying to copy him.
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The gap between the public debate and reality becomes so wide that many voters may no longer see the country they actually live in, or recognise the real progress that's been made. It becomes impossible to believe what the facts do seem to suggest: that our society, for all its faults, is probably safer, richer and better than any before it. Today, progress is the truth that dare not speak its name. Major environmental and social achievements are barely known and, when mentioned, universally disbelieved.
The global fall in crime — driven by advances in forensics, the ubiquity of cameras and smarter policing — has been met with a global disbelief. Such scepticism is partly human nature: as living standards rise, expectations rise faster. What was once extraordinary soon becomes the baseline; discontent becomes the norm. Which is just as well, because discontent remains the engine of human progress.
But in Britain, there's more to it. Some crime is genuinely surging, such as shoplifting and snatch theft. This is all too visible, while the fall in violence and burglary is invisible. This imbalance hits perceptions: people who notice their local store starting to security-tag lamb joints will not believe crime has halved. The picture isn't helped by improvement in how police record crime, which can make it harder to disentangle reporting quirks from real trends.
Most crimes have always gone unreported. That's why the Thatcher government set up the Crime Survey, asking thousands of households if they have suffered crime and, if so, what type. It shows that over the past 20 years — that is since the start of Strictly Come Dancing — robbery is down 60 per cent. Bike theft and car theft have both halved. Burglary is down by two-thirds. And all violent crime? According to the survey, it has halved since 2005. When Tony Blair won his third term, even he would never have dared to predict that a collapse in crime was under way. Even now it is, quite literally, unbelievable.
The Violence Research Group at Cardiff University keeps a tab on this, checking surveyed crime against hospital trends. 'Serious violence in England and Wales has decreased substantially,' it concludes in its latest report.
'This message needs to be much better known, not least because it reflects better prevention and because fear of violence, often stoked by reports of rare tragic violent events, corrodes individual and community wellbeing.'
Why isn't the message better known? When violence strikes, it can be spectacular. When progress happens slowly, invisibly or against the grain of received wisdom, it lacks a natural spokesman. The Tories won't be believed and their new opponents want to tell a very different story indeed. 'Politics is about sales,' Farage once said. 'It's about selling ideas, it's about selling hope. Sometimes, it's about selling fear.'
The narrative of a migrant-driven crimewave — so powerful for European populists — has always been harder to get going in Britain. Our immigrant population has certainly doubled, but crime halved over the same time. But individual stories, especially horrific crimes, can be highlighted and amplified to create the idea of a national crisis. The AfD pioneered this in Germany with press releases ten years ago. In recent months some British social media accounts have started a kind of ethnic-minority Crimewatch, scouring the local press for stories, then presenting them as a national metaphor.
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Matthew Goodwin, a former University of Kent politics professor, now a GB News presenter, has become adept at all this and is emerging as philosopher king of political doomscrolling. If you wish to be told that our society is about 'to blow', or see his calculations about how white Brits will be in the minority by 2063, you can join the 82,000 subscribers to his Substack. As an academic, Goodwin established himself as the most thoughtful analyst of the populist right. His switch from observer to activist has been fascinating to watch.
Other actors have rushed on to the new stage. An online video from Crush Crime, a grassroots group 'campaigning to make Britain safer', drew 3.6 million views after declaring 'theft has become legal in Britain'. Some '207,000 bikes were stolen in 2023', it proclaimed. It didn't say that this has halved over the past 15 years. When a poll found that 57 per cent of women feel unsafe in the streets of London, Goodwin popped up to 'say out loud' that 'a big reason is mass uncontrolled immigration'. If so, why would far larger surveys show a three-decade rise in the proportion of British women saying they feel safe walking home at night?
All this is not fake news. It's truth-adjacent: the almost surgical use of a real figure to create a false impression, while avoiding context that would shatter the illusion. A 'think tank', real or concocted, can declare, for example, that Afghans are 22 times more likely to rape: a technically defensible but fundamentally misleading mirage. We now have a new digital news architecture hungry for such figures, unlikely to scrutinise their robustness or provenance. Government failure to publish real figures creates a blank canvas.
This resonates because it's based on an important truth: a great many Afghans and others arrived on small boats, paying people-smugglers. They're unvetted. Lawbreakers. More of a risk. The Tories oversaw this and Labour can't control it, making fertile ground for Reform. But to make this into a tale of a 'lawless' country is impossible to reconcile with the general collapse in crime shown by the Crime Survey for England & Wales. So: what to do?
Last week Farage came up with an answer. The Crime Survey is invalid, he said, 'discredited', simply because, being a victim-based survey, it excludes shoplifting. He'd stick to police records, which are easier to cherry-pick. But most of all, he said, 'We all know that crime has risen significantly over the course of the last few years.' On one hand, four decades of crime data and nationwide NHS hospital data. On the other hand, what 'we all know'. This is the politics of perception.
What of critics publishing annoying, contrary data? Farage opened a recent press conference by dealing with one: me. Nelson thinks that 'all is well with the world and there's absolutely nothing to worry about at all', he said. I think there's plenty to worry about — but I'd also argue not just that the streets are safer but that, in general, this is probably the best time to be alive. That is to say: if you could choose any era to live in Britain, but not your place in society, you'd choose right now.
I'm in no doubt how aloof, how Marie Antoinette-ish this sounds: the leitmotif of the out-of-touch elite. Farage has a point. I've lived in a Highland town and on a decaying council estate. I've lived on an overseas military base and, now, in suburbia. None of these experiences give me a national view. That's why I've spent a career collecting the data: to check my own instincts and prejudices.
I started doing so as a young reporter at this paper, hoping to find stories and show how bad the world was. To my shock, the world was not just getting better but at an unprecedented pace. The turn of the millennium had ushered in a wave of globalisation that was lifting millions out of poverty, making the world not just richer but more equal. Incremental improvements had been changing lives more profoundly than the dramas that dominate headlines.
Newspapers tend to accentuate the negative because readers want to know what's going wrong, what threats may be brewing. But newspapers also deploy balance and perspective, mixing darkness with light.
Journalism is anchored to facts: no one pays to read junk. And almost no one pays for social media. It's a device selling people's attention to advertisers, with algorithms designed to engage (or enrage), to keep you hooked. Yet most Brits now use social media as a news source.
The overall picture people have is of a world getting worse, not better. Many big trends are almost unheard of, let alone believed. Take the climate. The Times commissioned YouGov to find out how many would think UK's greenhouse gas emissions have fallen by about half since 2000. The answer: only 12 per cent. And how many think the number of assaults resulting in hospital treatment each year in Britain has reduced by around a half? Just 22 of the 2,247 people surveyed: that is to say, 1 per cent.
Sadiq Khan campaigned on London's air quality 'emergency' and he's quite right to say that dirty air costs lives. But what he doesn't say is that, even before Ulez, the city's air was far purer than at any point in its measurable history. In fact, nationwide, levels of every major pollutant — sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10) — have at least halved since 2000. Our poll shows only 11 per cent are aware of this achievement.
The recent alarm over river quality is a classic example. Rivers were long used as sewers: less so, as standards rose. Now we have real-time flow meters, in-situ water quality testing and more. New disclosure rules revealed the storm-water sewage situation, to justifiable outrage. But it's not new: it's just visible. Before, it wasn't. When the Kinks released Waterloo Sunset in 1967 the 'dirty old river' was biologically dead. Now the Thames teems with dozens of varieties of fish: as does the Mersey and Humber.
When a child is killed on the road, it reverberates. Less so figures showing that airbags, speed limits and other safety advances have halved road deaths over the past 20 years. If you lose a relative to breast cancer, it's of no comfort to know that better detection and treatment has almost halved its mortality rate since 1990. Or that deaths from stroke and heart disease, two of our biggest killers, also halved over the same period.
We bank these improvements: and we should. Far too many still die on the roads and from cancer. That's where the attention should be focused. But it shouldn't hurt to look back, to see how far we've come — and use that to inspire hope, rational optimism, in what can be achieved next.
'I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them,' said Andy Bernard in the American version of The Office. But was life really better in the 1950s, when thousands died from smog and most lived in what's now called absolute poverty? Or the 1960s, when just one in ten children made it to sixth form, let alone to university? Even going back to 1995 would mean an average 25 per cent pay cut in today's money. And none of today's digital comforts.
Economic advances slowed to a near halt after the 2008 crash: today's living standards are still lower than then. A genuine scandal. But progress in health, tech, crime and the environment continued. The arrival of AI opens the prospect of another era of scientific, health and economic advances.
The biggest problem facing any country is demographic collapse, and almost every country in Europe is bracing itself for a steep decline in its working age population. But not Britain. Alone in Europe, we're projected to grow at a normal rate. If demographics is destiny, ours is pretty strong.
Our problems are significant: record taxes alongside creaking public services, and welfare dysfunction that scars communities. A small-boats crisis that the government is unable to resolve. Reform UK is being powered not simply by digital black magic but genuine despair at both Labour and a Tory party still unsure if it wants to fight Farage or copy him. Politically, it makes perfect sense for Reform to stoke despair by telling a story of Britain close to 'societal collapse'. It just doesn't make sense to believe it.
Perhaps the ultimate sign of national confidence is the migration figures: not so much the arrivals, but the departures. Last year, just 77,000 Brits emigrated, the lowest since records began. Among those who remain, I like to think, are some who share my deeply unpopular belief: that in spite of our problems, this is an amazing country. And that now, more than ever, there is no better place in the world to call home.