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Telegraph
3 days ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
This is what young people really think of modern Britain. The picture is bleak
Crime This week Mexico reportedly advised its citizens to exercise 'a high degree of caution' when travelling to the UK. When a state plagued with cartel violence doubts your country's safety, something is seriously wrong. New polling by Adam Smith Institute reveals an alarming consensus among young Britons: 61 per cent of 18-30-year-olds are concerned about violent crime in their area. This worry cuts across ethnic backgrounds: 64 per cent of black, 60 per cent of white and 58 per cent of Asian youth share the same fear. Even Labour and Reform voters agree on this: 67 per cent of young Labour supporters and 67 per cent of young Reform UK supporters alike say they are concerned about violent crime in their neighbourhoods. When a supermajority of the younger generation – regardless of ethnicity or politics – agrees on something, it's a flashing red light. And what they're telling us is clear: Britain has a public safety crisis. These fears aren't just perceptions, though. Many forms of violent crime really are rising. Police data shows knife offences rose 4.4 per cent in the year ending March 2024 (to 54,587 incidents in England and Wales), one of the highest rates in Europe. In that same time period, robbery offences jumped by 8 per cent and shoplifting surged by 37 per cent. While naysayers point out that overall crime rates were higher in the 90s, this long-term trend is misleading. It masks the fact that violent crime is climbing again. Even the Home Office acknowledged that some violent crimes have increased since 2014. Knife crime, in particular, has skyrocketed by 87 per cent over the past decade. In other words, the 20-year decline in overall crime obscures a recent upswing in deadly violence. This is the reality underlying young people's anxiety: after years of improvement, violent crime is once again a growing threat. Foreign conflict The ASI polling found that 75 per cent of 18-30-year-olds believe that the risk of Britain becoming involved in a war has increased compared to five years ago. War already rages in Eastern Europe as Russia crashes against Nato's borders. Militant groups like the Houthis strike global supply chains while, in the Far East, China grows increasingly brazen in its aggression against Taiwan. Yet, as fears of conflict grow, Britain's armed forces are at their weakest in over three centuries, crippled by a dysfunctional procurement system and personnel shortages. The Royal Navy, once the Lord of the Seas, is now dangerously depleted. Its escort fleet has dwindled to just 14 operational frigates and destroyers, down from nearly 60 in the 1980s. Frigate numbers are set to drop even further by year-end. Labour has promised a ' tenfold more lethal ' military but without any concrete financial backing – only pledging a defence spending increase to 3 per cent of GDP by 2034. The review lacks real commitment or near-term funding, pushing essential capabilities such as submarines into the distant 2040s. As former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace put it: ' even Putin will be dead by then.' And closer to home, domestic policies have left Britain ill-equipped to fight a major war. No country has ever succeeded on the battlefield with a shrinking domestic industrial base, a stagnant economy and a divided society. Yet this is precisely where Britain finds itself. Job Prospects The latest polling also lays bare the degree of economic anxiety gripping Britain's younger generation. Overall, 60 per cent of 18-30-year-olds believe that finding a well-paid and satisfying job will become harder over the next five years. This is a bleak verdict on the stagnant wages, record-high taxes and unrelenting competition for fewer jobs that has characterised Britain in recent years. Yet beneath this consensus lies a striking ethnic divide. Young black Britons are more than twice as likely as their white counterparts to say that the job market will actually improve (47 per cent vs 22 per cent). This disparity suggests differing expectations rooted in divergent experiences of opportunity. For many white young people, record-high taxes, soaring housing costs and sluggish wage growth seem to have narrowed their horizons and shaded their outlook more so than their black counterparts. By contrast, a sizeable minority of black respondents – perhaps buoyed by 'positive action' initiatives, like an internship scheme at MI5 and MI6 which recently went viral for explicitly prioritising candidates from ethnic minority backgrounds – are more optimistic about employment. NHS Quality Young people are deeply divided over the state of our health service. While 34 per cent of 18-30-year-olds believe NHS services have improved in recent years, 46 per cent say they have worsened. And there is a significant gender gap on this issue. A majority of young women (55 per cent) feel that care quality has declined, compared with 36 per cent of men. This gendered gulf reflects the heavier reliance women place on NHS services, from reproductive health to mental-health support, and underscores the growing frustration with inaccessible GP appointments, ballooning waiting lists and understaffed clinics. The perception that half of female patients have experienced a tangible drop in quality should ring alarm bells in Whitehall. It is no longer enough to tout headline funding figures; ministers must deliver reforms that cut waiting times, bolster frontline staffing and leverage technology for smarter triage.
CBS News
05-08-2025
- CBS News
Crime down in every category in 2024, FBI report says
Crime decreased in every category in 2024, including murder, violent crime and motor vehicle thefts, according to data released by the FBI on Tuesday. It reflects a trend experts have been tracking as reported numbers of violent crimes continue to drop from a spike immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic. While the report included good news, a violent crime still occurred on average every 25.9 seconds in the United States last year, according to the FBI's annual Unified Crime Report, which compiles crime statistics submitted by law enforcement agencies across the country. This year's report used data submitted by 16,675 different agencies, which the FBI said covers a combined population of more than 325 million people, or about 95.6% of U.S. residents. The FBI's report did not venture to say why the violent crime stats decreased. "It's difficult if not impossible for us to say why, and each reporting agency would have a different reason why," an FBI official said Tuesday in response to a question from CBS News during a briefing. The FBI did note it has seen an increase in the number of officers shot in the line of duty. "Between 2021 and 2024, we saw 258 law enforcement officers feloniously killed in the line of duty," the FBI official said. Violent crime, which the FBI defines as murder, nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, was down an estimated 4.5% in 2024 compared to 2023, with each subcategory also seeing a decrease. The murder and nonnegligent manslaughter rate decreased 14.9% year over year. Robbery dropped by 8.9%. Rape saw an estimated 5.2% decrease and aggravated assault was down 3%, the report found The murder and nonnegligent manslaughter rate dropped for a second straight year, after dropping from 6.5 to 5.7 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023. In 2024, the rate dropped again, to 5 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. Over the last 20 years, the high mark in the murder rate was recorded in 2020, with 6.7 per 100,000 residents, while the lowest recorded was in 2014, with 4.4 cases per 100,000 people. Analysis from Jeff Asher, a criminal justice data expert and co-founder of consulting firm AH Datalytics, noted that while murder, rape and robberies have fallen to below pre-COVID levels following a large spike during the pandemic, aggravated assaults, while decreasing, remain "stubbornly high." In a shift from previous years, both the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office contributed data to the FBI report. LAPD Chief of Detectives Alan S. Hamilton credited community and violence intervention programs in Los Angeles for contributing to the drop in crime there. "We made an investment in the future and I think these are the dividends," he told CBS News in a phone call Monday night. Rodney Harrison, former police commissioner of New York's Suffolk County and a CBS News law enforcement contributor, said some of the drops in violent crime could be attributed to criminals shifting their efforts to online crimes like identity theft. "If they don't have to go out on the street and run drugs and can make money sitting at the computer, some criminals will do that, which presents a new challenge to police," Harrison told CBS News. Property crime also saw a considerable decrease of 8.1% in 2024, the FBI report found, following a 2.4% drop in 2023. Of note, motor vehicle thefts decreased by 18.6% from 2023 to 2024 following several years of increases. It's the largest one-year drop ever recorded in that category, although the overall rate of car thefts is still higher than it was in 2019, according to Asher. Other subcategories of property crime include burglary, down 8.6%, and larceny-theft, down 5.5%. The overall property crime rate in 2024 was the lowest recorded since 1961, according to the Council on Criminal Justice. While the FBI's report is focused on 2024, statistics for the current year are available and show a continuing downward trend, according to analysis from the Council on Criminal Justice. The homicide rate continued to decline in the first half of 2025, lowering the rate in the U.S. to a level it hasn't seen in a decade, the CCJ said. Although the group noted that while the overall numbers are going down, many cities are still seeing higher homicide rates than they did in the first half of 2019. "These numbers are promising but not surprising," Ernesto Lopez, senior research specialist at the CCJ, told CBS News. "After significant increases in violent crime starting in 2020, the decline in all major crime types across all sizes of jurisdictions is promising. These trends are closely aligned with our own findings, which show crime falling last year and continuing to fall in the first six months of 2025." The council also noted the limitations of the FBI's data, which doesn't cover the entire U.S. population and only measures crimes that are reported to law enforcement. Advocates for victims of sexual assault, for example, often note that many rapes go unreported. "The police data is critical, but it's also important to remember that most crimes are not reported to police, so the overall volume is much higher than what's represented here," the CCJ told CBS News. Jacob Rosen contributed to this report.
