Why I stepped in to confront fare dodger

Telegraph

4 days ago

Britain is broken. Law-breaking is rife. Graffiti is everywhere. Many of our high streets are now a mix of charity stores, vape shops, and fake American candy stores. There is a collapse of basic standards in public spaces – hop on the bus and you're likely to be greeted with terrible music from someone else, stubbornly refusing to wear headphones. It's a total mess.
Once-proud towns and cities are having their soul ripped out of them by petty law-breakers. Police are bystanders in this new system, reduced to a crime-reporting outfit rather than a proactive law-enforcement body. They seem more interested in poor-taste messages online, than the bread and butter, common-sense policing of our laws.
I've had enough.
Our public realm has been steadily chipped away at and too few people in authority are doing anything about it. Our leaders seem to just shrug their shoulders, unwilling to act – resigned to defeat. Many of them don't even notice the disorder as they spend their time in the protected bubble that is SW1.
That's why last Saturday I went to Stratford station – one of the worst hotspots for fare dodging – to try and shame London's do-nothing mayor, Sadiq Khan, into action. His general approach to stopping law-breaking is to legalise it: just look at his comments on cannabis this week.
According to YouGov, 79 per cent of train and Tube passengers say that they have personally seen fare dodging. Statistics show that one in 25 people who use the capital's public transport is not paying. But from my morning in Stratford station the problem must be much bigger than that. I watched as people flooded through an empty barrier, while the enforcement officer was on his backside, feet up, watching on. It was a perfect encapsulation of Broken Britain.
Across London, the rate of prosecution for fare evasion is declining year-on-year. Pre-pandemic, in 2018/19, TfL prosecuted 31,003 people for fare evasion – in 2023/24, that figure stood at 18,570. There is now no deterrent for fare dodging and, unsurprisingly, it has exploded as a result.
For ordinary hard-working citizens travelling into work on their morning commute, the sight of somebody slipping through the barriers without paying is a slap in the face. People who do the right thing are made to look like fools for sticking to the law, while others benefit from breaking the rules with impunity.
The British state needs to reassert itself. In 1982, two social scientists in the US came up with the 'broken windows' theory of policing. They argued that visible signs of crime, antisocial behaviour, and disorder create an environment which encourages even more crime and disorder. That idea was taken up in the 1990s by William Bratton, New York's police commissioner under no-nonsense Mayor Rudy Giuliani, at a time when crime in the city was totally out of control.
Bratton cracked down on fare evasion, public disorder, and graffiti. As a result, rates of both petty crime and serious crime fell sharply. Crime declined for the following decade. When the state shows the public that it cares, it creates an environment in which law and order is the norm.
The rule of law requires that our laws are actually enforced. When small ones aren't applied, more serious offences inevitably follow. Before you know it, law and order has completely broken down and the state is left impotent, lacking all authority. That's where we're heading.