AS outrage and horror over the appalling murder of Sarah Everard are understandably the focus of attention right now, Britain’s general ever-rising crime problem forms a background which continues to be largely ignored.
The Government, along with an equally sanguine mainstream media, is taking advantage of what appears to be a resigned acceptance to increasing lawlessness blighting our daily lives.
An Ipsos Mori poll published last week reported that almost half the UK population believe crime is going to get worse. Yet the findings appeared to get no attention at all from the press or the BBC, despite such deeply disturbing worries for our safety.
For, make no mistake, going on past experience of crime’s uninterrupted upwards trajectory, there is almost no doubt the pollsters’ predictions will be proved right.
Here is the detail of their gloomy forecasts:
On specific crimes, UK adults are most likely to expect anti-social behaviour (56 per cent), fraud (52 per cent), drug use (51 per cent) and knife crime (50 per cent) to increase over the next 12 months.
Forty-nine per cent believe robbery/theft will rise and 46 per cent think the same about burglaries. Similar proportions expect to see an increase in domestic abuse (46 per cent) and sexual offences (42 per cent).
Thirty-nine per cent say the number of murders and manslaughters will stay the same, while 31 per cent believe it will increase. People are split on whether gun crime will remain the same or go up (36 per cent vs. 33 per cent respectively).
Hardly cheering stuff for a country to which people are fleeing because of its supposed reputation for law and order. And deeply ironic, given the Government’s constant harping-on about our safety.
The bottom line is that people no longer have any confidence in one of the fundamental jobs the Government is meant to do – protect them from crime.
Only 48 per cent believe in the police’s ability to do this job. (Interestingly, for all the concern about discrimination, ethnic minorities are more confident in the police than ‘whites’.)
So is law and order in this country any more than make-believe after five decades of effectively decriminalising crime, as David Fraser has argued elsewhere on TCW Defending Freedom?
Surely this is the ticket any new political party worth its salt should campaign on? How refreshing it would be to have a government that, once and for all, started fighting crime – the war that really matters – instead of waging a spurious Covid campaign against its own people, with promises of ‘safety’ from health risk that it cannot possibly deliver.
What do you think? Feel free to discuss this or anything else on your mind.
