In response to Kathy Gyngell: Violent crime through the BBC looking glass, Royinsouthwest wrote:
‘In 1926 when millions of British working-class people lived in conditions of abject poverty . . . the violent offender rate, per 100,000 of the population, was 4.4. Today it is over 1,400.’
The smug, Guardian-reading class should be confronted with those statistics not just every time they pontificate about crime but also whenever they denigrate previous generations and the history of this country in general and boast about how much more tolerant and enlightened we are today.