Where did crime go?

News this week that I live in the most violent borough in Britain induced a slight frisson of unwarranted pride, I'm afraid. Unwarranted because I've lived here since 1995 without once having been the victim of crime, excepting being defrauded by my bank (which took a County Court summons to solve). Mine is typical of several wealthy inner London boroughs; three or four massive council estates separated by swathes of middle-class Victorian terraces, two or three town centres and a score or more tube, rail and DLR stations. The violence happens around the council estates and town centres late at night, when we gentrifiers are either abed or on our way home from the opera to our safe local station. The last burglary in my street was in 1997. Then there was the prolonged shouty incident of 2001, in which two black women spent twenty minutes verbally abusing eachother over a distance of fifty metres. Despite a keen middle-class audience peering from every window they declined to fight, however. Life in Britain's most dangerous borough is, er, safe, unworrying and comfortable. So where did all the crime go? Look at the graphics below;

Since the turn of the century, crime has plummeted everywhere. Andrew Rawnsley writes in the Observer today seeking the reasons why, and finding multiple credible answers but no single cause. And there is no correlation whatsoever between the number of police officers and levels of crime. Nor has it risen again since 2008, as predicted (wrongly) on this blog and elsewhere.

Are the buggers putting bromide in the tea or something?

Sick scum

There is a cranks' corner of online libertarianism from which I dissociate myself utterly, a skin-crawling, tinfoil-hat and often borderline-deranged cabal of those who advocate violence and armed insurrection to achieve political change. The reality of this seditious and abhorrent internet abuse is the horror of Norway this morning. The killer is reported as having a known online presence and for protesting vociferously about Islamism, immigration and multikulti, a right-wing freak in the mould of Timothy McVeigh. There is no choice of tables on the web, and thus we all in some way share a platform with these people, but let me at least address the most repugnant advocates of death and harm to our fellow man.


The pope is not a twelve-foot lizard. Localism is not a conspiracy by the EU to take over the world. Don't quote American revolutionaries from 1776 at me like a parrot as though it's an unarguable justification for violence. And never, ever try to convince me that bloodshed and the extinction of human lives for the sake of your twisted and perverse world view is justified. You are not my equal, nor my peer. Your views render you beyond the pale of civilised discourse. Any distorted ideology that needs blood and slaughter to triumph is inherently evil and to be shunned like a rabid dog.


Democracy is a shield, not a sword.  

Is the BMA the new NUM?

Any film which shows smoking in a positive light should go up one classification, from a 12 to a 15 age certificate, Dr Vivienne Nathanson, head of the BMA science and ethics said, because of the huge impact imagery has on children taking up the habit.

Films like Pulp Fiction show Uma Thurman smoking and in the US blockbuster Independence Day every time Will Smith kills an alien he lights up a cigar, Dr Nathanson said.

Just as well our children are completely immune to the impact of imagery glamourising violence, then. And since when was Pulp Fiction licenced as a 12?