Crime will be the next immigration. Politicians will be punished for it

Telegraph

19 hours ago

It's hard to shake off the sense that Britain is creeping towards lawlessness. Low-level crime is on its way to becoming legalised, whether officially – in the case of cannabis – or not – as with shoplifting. Public faith in the police is collapsing as many serious crimes like burglary and assault routinely fail to be solved, and sometimes even go uninvestigated, while ' speech crimes' trigger the full wrath of the law.
Too many neighbourhoods are becoming hotbeds of anti-social behaviour, with begging prolific and buildings defaced by graffiti. True, Britain is cash-strapped. But it's the fusion of chronic underinvestment with liberal idealism which is so toxic. Disorder is being normalised, criminals treated as victims, the rule of law eroded. Though politicians remain convinced that crime is a second-order issue, it could eventually prove the Labour Government's undoing.
My own local area in west London is disintegrating. It started with a clutch of beggars congregating outside the Tesco after Covid. Now they are joined by dishevelled women selling 'washing powder' and bare-footed addicts. For the most part, they are a nuisance rather than dangerous. Like many women in the city, when I walk the streets, I get the surreal feeling of being neither safe nor unsafe. With the crime rate in my area surging by a third since 2019, and several of my neighbours recently burgled, that may soon change.
When I expressed my concerns to police and crime commissioners this week, they echoed Mark Rowley's complaint about a lack of funds. Some say they find Rachel Reeves's claim that she is hiking police spending by 2.3 per cent each year exasperating.
A view prevails in Westminster that crime is a non-issue. Its proponents point to statistics that suggest it is at its lowest level on record. They think that technology is rendering crime a relic of the past, with their favourite example, carjacking, now largely a fool's errand thanks to security device innovation.
They think that any ongoing problems pertain to a tiny number of chronic offenders. Meanwhile, Left-leaning criminologists insist that conservatives' fears that 'soft' policing could drive up crime are prejudiced. Crackdowns are said to be 'counterproductive', alienating 'disproportionately-targeted' minority groups.
Such framing overlooks the risk that unrecorded crime is quietly climbing, as law-breaking becomes such a regular occurrence that some victims don't bother to report it. Other kinds are probably not being picked up properly by polling.
Even more worrying is the Leftist view that, if there is a specific issue with chronic offenders, it's the consequence of too much law and order rather than too little. Keir Starmer's prison guru, James Timpson, thinks Britain is 'addicted' to sentencing. Sadiq Khan has backed 'partial' cannabis decriminalisation, amid claims that policing the drug harms more than the substance itself.
The way in which the Left tries to romanticise these criminals is if anything becoming more strident – we are told that in the wake of austerity and Covid, certain law-breakers are, deep down, troubled souls. Shoplifters and fare dodgers who are allegedly 'struggling with the cost of living' are the latest group to which any 'compassionate' society should turn a blind eye, the Left insist.
This myth threatens to shake the foundations of our society by undermining the sacred principle that we are all equal under the law.
There is only so far we can fall down this rehabilitation rabbit hole before triggering a crime surge. Labour is adamant that the Michael Howard school of tough sentencing has failed. It has opted to release offenders early and ignore our rotting prison estate.
This is a terrible mistake. Even if prison isn't working in the sense that it isn't preventing ex-convicts from reoffending, policymakers should not use this as an excuse to avoid punishing those who break our laws. The answer to our failure to rehabilitate is not to allow criminals to escape punishment. In the most important sense, prison almost always 'works' by preventing somebody who is locked up from stealing or assaulting other people.
True, rehabilitation can sometimes work wonders. I have spoken with ex offenders who have been transformed by such programmes. One woman, Sonia, told me of how the support of one charity helped her evade the 'revolving door back to prison'. But resource-intensive, bespoke rehabilitation is tricky to scale. In austere times, the temptation to roll out rehab on the cheap could prove overwhelming, and will end in failure.
As veteran probation expert Mark Leech told me: 'There are prisoners that have done the courses so many times they could deliver them better than the tutors who deliver them.' Chasing a utopian ideal, with no idea how to make it work, let alone on a tight budget, is flirting with disaster.
Efforts by some criminologists to discredit the policing approach known as 'broken windows' could also end badly. This concept, which clamps down on low-level crime such as graffiti and drug-taking on the basis that tolerating 'minor' disorder leads to a culture that promotes much more serious crime, helped flatten a vicious crime wave in 1990s New York. It has been trashed in recent years, amid complaints it is racist and based on 'bogus' evidence.
I disagree. Broken windows could once again be a vital weapon against certain serious crimes, such as sexual offences. Police officers on the front line certainly seem to think so: as Matthew Barber, PCC for Thames Valley, says: 'You won't find many hardened criminals who didn't start doing things at a young age before getting steadily out of control. Fix those basics and you'll prevent an awful lot more serious crime down the road.'
Though Labour politicians may be in denial, a slow-burning crisis is unfolding. There is a widespread sense of malaise, that law is breaking down. In Red Wall towns, Labour's 'levelling up' projects are being undermined by anti-social behaviour. In the cities, alarm at gang violence, as well as muggings and burglary, may yet nudge professionals to the Right. Labour's inability to tackle crime could cost it dear.