A Response to Fraser Nelson and His Critics

In recent weeks, the former Spectator editor Fraser Nelson has been posting about crime in Britain. His claim is simple: crime is down. Yet his posts have not been well received. Almost every one has attracted dozens or hundreds of negative comments from users who are utterly incredulous that crime could have fallen.

On August 8th, he reiterated his claim in an article for the Times: “Violent, lawless, broken Britain? The facts tell a different story.” The article was once again met with a barrage of criticism. One comment, which garnered almost 700 likes, stated, “You’re a middle class, privileged c*** who should spend a few years living in a tower block on a council estate before your wanky pontificating about the lives we experience.”

So is Nelson closer to the truth, or are his critics?

My reading of the evidence is that Nelson is basically right. However, there’s an important caveat, which I will get out of the way first.

In his recent article, the former Spectator editor combines his well-supported claims about crime with much more contentious claims about the state of the country as a whole. For example, he lists several metrics that have improved, such as air quality and breast cancer mortality, and concludes that “there is no better place in the world to call home”. He also emphasises that, after looking at the data, he discovered that “the world was not just getting better but at an unprecedented pace”.

However, the fact that fewer Chinese people live in poverty is hardly relevant to a debate about the state of Britain. And pointing to trends in a handful of metrics doesn’t constitute a comprehensive survey of national well-being. Living standards are stagnant. Housing is increasingly unaffordable. And demographics are changing rapidly.

With that said, Nelson is on much firmer ground when talking about crime, as I’ve argued before. In support of the claim that crime has fallen, we have homicide data, the Crime Survey of England and Wales and hospital data on rates of admissions for violent injuries. In addition, we have two independent surveys showing that Britons are now less afraid to walk home at night than they were in the early 2000s.

Sceptics point to police-recorded crime data, which suggests that some types of crime have risen. However, as the Office for National Statistics clearly states on its website, these rises are due to changes in reporting and recording. Ironically, some of Nelson’s critics claim that he must be wrong because many crimes go unreported or unrecorded. Yet the Crime Survey data that Nelson cites isn’t affected by levels of reporting and recording (unlike the police-recorded crime data, which supposedly proves him wrong).

Sceptics also point to rises in shoplifting and phone theft – which are real. The former is partly explained by a 2014 legal change that reclassified low-value thefts as summary offences. (The proliferation of self-checkouts may play a role too.) And the latter is explained by the obvious fact that, two decades ago, people didn’t go around with easily snatchable smartphones in their hands all the time.

Sceptics want us to believe the shoplifting data is absolutely unimpeachable, but for some reason we can’t trust the homicide data, the Crime Survey data or the hospital data. It doesn’t make any sense.

So, yes, most types of crime have fallen since the late 1990s. But that doesn’t mean the country is going through some sort of golden age – far from it.