Latest news with #FraserNelson
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Voices: Britain isn't broken, but people believe it is, and that is a big problem for Keir Starmer
Fraser Nelson, the former editor of The Spectator, the Conservative weekly, is having a remarkable afterlife as a great defender of the Labour government. He has gone head to head with Nigel Farage over the Reform leader's claim that we are living in 'lawless Britain'. There is less crime in Britain today than there has been for decades, Nelson pointed out at one of Farage's media conferences this week. This reduction in crime is nothing to do with people not bothering to report crime to the police any more, because the figures come from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, a large survey of a representative sample of the population that asks people if they have been the victim of a crime in the previous 12 months. The number of crimes has fallen by four-fifths since 1995. Farage waved the Crime Survey aside, saying it was 'discredited' because it does not include shoplifting. It doesn't, because it asks people about crimes of which they have personally been the victim, and it is true that shoplifting has increased. But that does not mean the Crime Survey is discredited. On the contrary, it is the best and most reliable evidence, and it is especially useful for measuring trends over time, because it is not affected by changes in the way police record crime. What did Farage say to that? 'We all know that crime has risen significantly over the course of the last few years.' A big welcome back, please, to that dread phrase, 'we all know'. For years I would point out that four public inquiries had found that Tony Blair told the truth about Iraq, only to be told that 'we all know' he didn't. As Nelson comments: 'This is the politics of perception.' As he points out in an excellent article in The Times today, it is the same with road safety, air pollution, sewage, and living standards. 'We all know' they are getting worse – when in actual fact they are getting better. So it does not matter to most people what the Crime Survey says. Most people believe that crime is rising, and the numbers who believe that have not changed over the years that crime has been falling. People are influenced by reports of terrible things happening to other people, and misremember their own experience. Anything more than five or 10 years ago was a golden age when there was some decent music in the charts and Mars bars weren't behind perspex screens. Why, though, has what 'we all know' become so much worse in the past year? Probably because some highly visible crimes have increased: shoplifting, phone thefts and graffiti. These are crimes that make people feel threatened by disorder, even as more of us than ever report feeling safe walking alone in their local area at night. What is corrosive is the perception – 'we all know' – that the authorities are not securely in control. Behind that perception lies the reality of asylum-seeker hotels and a government that is powerless to stop the boats. What has changed since the election is that Farage is more active, at the head of a social-media movement and a TV channel, GB News, dedicated to portraying the country as a hellhole. The intensity of this campaign to spread fear and insecurity seems to have reached a critical mass that is dangerous to Keir Starmer. He cannot fight it with facts – or not only with facts – because the answer will always be that 'we all know' that the facts are wrong. As Ian Leslie, the advertising executive turned social commentator says, 'Instead of asking, 'Why are people angry?' we should ask, 'What are we missing?'' What the government needs is to take visible and forceful action on the things that people care about, the shoplifting, phone snatching and graffiti, but above all on asylum hotels and stopping the boats. So far, Starmer has tried to do all these things, but limply. There have been roundtables at No 10 with the police and representatives of the retail industry and phone companies. Even these feeble initiatives have been undermined by people in authority doing foolish things, such as the police in Wales telling off a shopkeeper for calling thieves 'scumbags' and Andy Lord, the London Underground boss who accused citizen graffiti-removers of defacing trains themselves so that they could pose as heroes for cleaning it up. Most importantly, Starmer now has a treaty with France to return some of the cross-Channel migrants, but it will take a long time to build up to returning all or nearly all those who arrive – at which point the crossings would stop – and it is not clear that the French are in it for the long haul. One thing that Tony Blair understood, as he faced spikes of street crime, anti-social behaviour and asylum-seeker numbers, was the importance of 'grip'. It may sound like annoying spin-speak, but it was critical to communicating that he understood how people felt and he was doing something about it. Starmer should be grateful to Fraser Nelson, formerly of The Spectator, for pointing out that we are safer, richer and healthier than ever before – but if the perception is that we are not, the government has to get a grip on what 'we all know'.
The Independent
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Britain isn't broken, but people believe it is, and that is a big problem for Keir Starmer
Fraser Nelson, the former editor of The Spectator, the Conservative weekly, is having a remarkable afterlife as a great defender of the Labour government. He has gone head to head with Nigel Farage over the Reform leader's claim that we are living in 'lawless Britain'. There is less crime in Britain today than there has been for decades, Nelson pointed out at one of Farage's media conferences this week. This reduction in crime is nothing to do with people not bothering to report crime to the police any more, because the figures come from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, a large survey of a representative sample of the population that asks people if they have been the victim of a crime in the previous 12 months. The number of crimes has fallen by four-fifths since 1995. Farage waved the Crime Survey aside, saying it was 'discredited' because it does not include shoplifting. It doesn't, because it asks people about crimes of which they have personally been the victim, and it is true that shoplifting has increased. But that does not mean the Crime Survey is discredited. On the contrary, it is the best and most reliable evidence, and it is especially useful for measuring trends over time, because it is not affected by changes in the way police record crime. What did Farage say to that? 'We all know that crime has risen significantly over the course of the last few years.' A big welcome back, please, to that dread phrase, 'we all know'. For years I would point out that four public inquiries had found that Tony Blair told the truth about Iraq, only to be told that 'we all know' he didn't. As Nelson comments: 'This is the politics of perception.' As he points out in an excellent article in The Times today, it is the same with road safety, air pollution, sewage, and living standards. 'We all know' they are getting worse – when in actual fact they are getting better. So it does not matter to most people what the Crime Survey says. Most people believe that crime is rising, and the numbers who believe that have not changed over the years that crime has been falling. People are influenced by reports of terrible things happening to other people, and misremember their own experience. Anything more than five or 10 years ago was a golden age when there was some decent music in the charts and Mars bars weren't behind perspex screens. Why, though, has what 'we all know' become so much worse in the past year? Probably because some highly visible crimes have increased: shoplifting, phone thefts and graffiti. These are crimes that make people feel threatened by disorder, even as more of us than ever report feeling safe walking alone in their local area at night. What is corrosive is the perception – 'we all know' – that the authorities are not securely in control. Behind that perception lies the reality of asylum-seeker hotels and a government that is powerless to stop the boats. What has changed since the election is that Farage is more active, at the head of a social-media movement and a TV channel, GB News, dedicated to portraying the country as a hellhole. The intensity of this campaign to spread fear and insecurity seems to have reached a critical mass that is dangerous to Keir Starmer. He cannot fight it with facts – or not only with facts – because the answer will always be that 'we all know' that the facts are wrong. As Ian Leslie, the advertising executive turned social commentator says, 'Instead of asking, 'Why are people angry?' we should ask, 'What are we missing?'' What the government needs is to take visible and forceful action on the things that people care about, the shoplifting, phone snatching and graffiti, but above all on asylum hotels and stopping the boats. So far, Starmer has tried to do all these things, but limply. There have been roundtables at No 10 with the police and representatives of the retail industry and phone companies. Even these feeble initiatives have been undermined by people in authority doing foolish things, such as the police in Wales telling off a shopkeeper for calling thieves 'scumbags' and Andy Lord, the London Underground boss who accused citizen graffiti-removers of defacing trains themselves so that they could pose as heroes for cleaning it up. Most importantly, Starmer now has a treaty with France to return some of the cross-Channel migrants, but it will take a long time to build up to returning all or nearly all those who arrive – at which point the crossings would stop – and it is not clear that the French are in it for the long haul. One thing that Tony Blair understood, as he faced spikes of street crime, anti-social behaviour and asylum-seeker numbers, was the importance of 'grip'. It may sound like annoying spin-speak, but it was critical to communicating that he understood how people felt and he was doing something about it. Starmer should be grateful to Fraser Nelson, formerly of The Spectator, for pointing out that we are safer, richer and healthier than ever before – but if the perception is that we are not, the government has to get a grip on what 'we all know'.
Telegraph
04-08-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Being English is not a matter of your ancestry
'You can't teach someone to be English', called a heckler at the end of a conference last month on How to Save England. 'Of course you can,' I replied. 'That's how we all learn it.' 'Rubbish,' he replied: for him, Englishness seemed to be (I couldn't quite hear) about 'ancestry'. This brief debate was unfortunately stopped by the chair so that we could go to the pub. But the day's discussion got huge numbers of viewers on YouTube, a longish report in The Spectator, and a rather overwrought follow-up article in The Critic magazine accusing me (along with other 'self-identifying conservatives' such as Fraser Nelson and Niall Ferguson) of being a defender of multiculturalism, and by implication of mass migration. Frankly, I thought this was laughable, and have been joking with friends about being a Lefty. But in the present fraught climate, the issue needs to be addressed. I should explain that my intellectual sins had been to praise Katharine Birbalsingh (invariably though inadequately described as 'Britain's strictest headmistress') and to have commented that to see little girls in headscarves reciting Kipling and singing the national anthem showed that 'becoming English was possible', on the condition that it was encouraged, taught, and indeed required. Is this 'multiculturalism'? I can't see how. Progressives would reject it as 'monoculturalism', as it involves inculcating a common English culture: poetry certainly, and also Shakespeare, the classics, history, mathematics, science, and indeed as many as possible of the educational riches that those same progressives reject as 'colonialist'. This is a completely separate issue from mass immigration. Uncontrolled, non-selective and far beyond rational limits, it becomes economically ruinous and socially divisive. It corrupts democracy, affronts sovereignty and law, and pulverises national solidarity. I favour narrow limits and strict enforcement. But the question of integration and eventual assimilation is no less urgent. There are now, and in the future will be, many children in England who were born elsewhere, or who are descended from a foreign-born parent. Many will have darker skin than mine. We have a very clear choice. Either we do everything possible to make them and their eventual descendants part of our nation. Or we treat them as perpetual outsiders, 'ethnic minorities' in a tribalised England. I am speaking of England rather than Britain. Being British is primarily legal and political. Many newcomers are happy to be 'British'. But we are also English (or Welsh, Scottish or Irish), and that is a deeper kind of belonging. The United Kingdom is technically a 'state nation'. England is a 'culture nation', based on shared history, customs and emotions. Without these, the UK is an empty shell.
Telegraph
22-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
You're right to feel crime is spiralling out of control
There are lies, damn lies, and the Office for National Statistics. That is, of course, if you don't trust the crime stats coming out of the ONS, the nation's collector of stats about all manner of subjects. I am one of them. There is a pervasive sense that Britain is going fast off the rails, and the sense that law and order has broken down creeps into everyday conversation. Balaclava-clad hoodlums nab dozens of phones a day. Foreign paedophiles avoid deportation while young mums get imprisoned for mean Facebook posts. Academics and politicians (Nigel Farage, following on from the Conservative shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Alex Burghart) warn about the threat of widespread civil conflict. And yet, Fraser Nelson, formerly of this parish, patiently shares the official crime survey statistics from the ONS that show a steep decline over the past 20 years. Theft, violence, even neighbourhood crimes have more than halved, with total reported crimes at over 12 million in 2005, now dropping to less than 6 million in 2024. That crimewave in full... — Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) July 21, 2025 What to do when the anecdotes, or the 'vibes' as the kids say these days, clash with the evidence? Should we just trust the nation's stats maestros, and ignore the impending sense of doom that feels all around us? Jeff Bezos, the genius behind Amazon, has a very useful heuristic for this sort of question: 'The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it.' With this insight in mind, Adam Wren (an inspiring campaigner behind fundraising to pay for court transcripts in the Pakistani rape gang cases) has interrogated the data. In a thread on X, he systematically dismantles much of the methodology behind the ONS's work. Wren points out that the official crime survey uses 'super output areas' which are areas defined to have roughly equal population sizes. This is to normalise outputs and be stable across time. Wren explains that whilst this might work for other types of statistical reporting, such as heart attacks (which might be expected to be more uniform) crime tends to be focused on some specific geography. Indeed, he says that: '80 per cent of crime in any given area will occur on certain streets or hotspots like pubs, trains or bus stations.' According to Wren, the ONS data doesn't even measure crimes against businesses, shoplifting, or criminal damage, despite every small supermarket in London pushing both its staff and its produce behind horrible plastic barriers to prevent more crimes. It is in these areas where Britain has seen an explosion of vicious, senseless violence and other offences. So it would be a mistake to fixate on whether crime has 'gone up' or 'gone down'. It doesn't matter how safe you feel if you live your life in a peaceful, lovely village 364 days a year, but on the one occasion you go to a big city to visit a theatre or restaurant your phone is nicked and some recent arrival threatens you with a zombie knife. If I had to put my finger on it, I put a lot of the dread down to the changing nature of violence in Britain in the 21st century. Back in the day, you were much more likely to get punched in the pub. But you also knew that you were going to that sort of place and that certain behaviour would lead to a fight. You might even want that. If you didn't want to get into a fight, you just went to a different pub. And because it was rules-based within communities, people knew where the line was and that line was socially policed. That kind of social violence has now largely disappeared, replaced by: 'maybe I'll get stabbed for asking someone to put headphones on'. The violence we see now in Britain is more arbitrary, more random, and more spontaneous. Westminster is always the last to see social trends. But the febrile scenes from Southport and Ballymena to Epping – not to mention unreported crimes – will eventually make themselves known, even if politicians don't want to see it.
Telegraph
12-07-2025
- Telegraph
Reform welfare or become a failed state: that is Britain's only remaining choice
Whitney Ainscough boasts that she makes £500,000 a year through her social media posts. Those posts essentially tell people what to say to exploit the welfare rules. The mother of three from Rotherham walks her subscribers through the buzz words and correct answers to give in order to be awarded benefits. In one post, she revelled in the fact that she was herself being given £1,151.90 a week by taxpayers. 'Why would I get a job?' she asked. 'I get your monthly wage in a week – so why would I put myself out and get a job? I mean, I'm living my f***ing best life!' Ms Ainscough is one of an army of online 'sickfluencers': people who make a living out of coaching others on how to qualify for benefits. In his recent Channel 4 documentary, Fraser Nelson met a consultant who charged £750 for a three-hour session on how to qualify for the maximum allocation on incapacity or disability payments. That is an hourly rate not far off some London KCs. Yet, such are the perverse incentives created by our benefits system that, for many would-be claimants, it is a reasonable up-front investment. If you have paid taxes throughout your working life, you may be shaking with anger as you read. The realisation that middle-men – or, more often, middle-women – are getting rich by steering people towards undeserved payments is infuriating. But sickfluencers are the by-products of our rotten system, not its authors. If we don't keep the kitchen clean, we can hardly blame the bacteria. As Charlie Munger liked to say, 'Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome'. Like the Channel people traffickers, sickfluencers are facilitators. They service a demand created by perverse incentives. In the one case, a benefits system which, according to the Centre for Social Justice, will soon let people earn £2,500 more than the minimum wage; in the other, an asylum system where judges seek always and everywhere to overturn deportation orders. We blame the people traffickers because we don't like to dwell on the fact that the migrants who pay them are criminals. We think of ourselves as compassionate, and so don't enjoy asking why genuine refugees would be desperate to leave France. In the same way, blaming sickfluencers allows us not to insult claimants – some of whom are indubitably disabled, and all of whom vote. Why, then, did I begin the column with Ms Ainscough? You, after all, are a reader of the nation's leading quality newspaper. His Majesty's Telegraph is not a sensationalist tabloid. Should I not be persuading you with facts and figures rather than making your blood boil with stories of a benefits claimant who holidays in Cyprus and films her posts from behind the wheel of what looks like a Range Rover? Maybe. But here's the problem. The numbers don't stir people to the pitch of emotion which, on their merits, they should. Perhaps they are simply too large. I always found, as an MEP, that telling people that the EU was wasting £10 billion on this or that project would elicit a resigned shrug, whereas telling them that I could pay my wife £14,000 a month prompted purple, choking fury. We can all imagine what we would do with £14,000. If people truly understood what the figures implied, there would be no more immediate issue in politics. Those Labour MPs who voted down the mildest attempt to slow the increase in incapacity benefits would, instead of complimenting themselves on their big-heartedness, be fending angry mobs from their constituency surgeries. Consider, one more time, some of the statistics. Around 3,000 people a day are signed off as too sick to work. The total number of claimants is forecast by the government to go from 3.3 million to 4.1 million by the end of this parliament. According to the NHS Confederation, in 2021-22, 63,392 people went straight from university onto long-term sickness benefits. The fastest rise is among 25- to 34-year-olds, an incredible increase of 69 per cent in five years. (Incredible in every sense: such a sudden and cataclysmic explosion in disability would surely be visible on the streets.) In Birmingham, one in four working-age adults is inactive. One. In. Four. Even at the height of the Great Depression, the proportion in our second city never rose so high. Then, mass worklessness was treated as the most important challenge facing the nation; now, we barely notice. Behind each of those numbers is someone trapped in the system, scared to find a job and paradoxically lose income, possibly bringing up children in a household severed from the rhythms of a working day. If the waste of human potential does not bother you, consider the viability of the British state. The total cost of benefits has risen from £244 billion a year on the eve of the pandemic to £303 billion (adjusting for inflation). No other country has seen anything like it. In Europe, as in the Anglosphere, claims fell when lockdown ended. If we look, not simply at benefits, but at state salaries, too, there are as many people claiming money from the government as supplying it: 28 million in each category. But that does not mean that the sums are in balance. To meet its obligations, the government is borrowing £150 billion a year. At the same time, it is spending £55 billion a year on disability and incapacity benefits – a sum that will rise to £70 billion by the end of this parliament. What went wrong? The baleful one-word answer, as so often, is 'lockdown'. The pandemic brutally exposed the inadequacies of the British state, its poor analysis, its safetyism, its authoritarian tendencies. But the government turned out to be good at one thing, namely giving money to people. A lot of workers who had never before been in contact with the benefits system learnt how easy it was to make claims. Some began to see work as a lifestyle choice. At the same time, face-to-face benefits interviews were replaced by telephone assessments, where claimants find it much easier to lie. This was supposed to be a temporary measure but, across the civil service, officials have continued to work from home and, five years on, over 70 per cent of benefits assessments are being made remotely. Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. The surge in long-term benefits under Gordon Brown was tackled after 2010 by a combination of benefits caps and tax cuts. When work paid more, more people worked. This time, though, taxes and unemployment are rising, creating very different incentives. Meanwhile, as predicted in this column, figures now confirm that the economy shrank in the last quarter. In the dry language of the Office for Budget Responsibility, the government 'cannot afford the array of promises that it has made to the public'. Is anyone proposing to do anything about it? Actually, yes. Kemi Badenoch made a thoughtful and serious speech on Thursday explaining how she planned to cut the bills, including bringing the legal definition of disability into line with what most of us understand by the word, and ending claims by foreign nationals, which currently cost a billion pounds a month. The rise of Reform means that the Conservatives have little option but to position themselves as the only party that stands for fiscal responsibility, enterprise and limited government. Although that position may attract less than 50 per cent of the electorate, it attracts more than the 18 per cent that the Tories are currently polling. In any case, it is the right thing to do. Labour's inability to slow, let alone halt, the rise in bills is dooming Britain to a full-scale budgetary and currency crisis. The Conservatives need to provide the diagnosis now so that, when the crash happens, the electorate is ready to gulp down its medicine.
