Britain is far less safe than it should be

ADAM WREN

Anyone who’s hosted friends in London will be familiar with the etiquette advice that’s given to new arrivals: “don’t stand on the right side of the escalator”, “don’t stop moving in the middle of the street”, or the all-but-dead “don’t have a conversation on the tube”.

Increasingly, we’re starting to add safety measures like: “don’t make eye contact with anyone that seems crazy”, “a wallet isn’t worth dying for”, or “don’t get your phone out of your pocket in public” (not that you’d get any signal anyway).

As always, the first questions should be: Who are they asking? What questions are they asking them?

It’s maddening that the people giving this advice are often the same people making fun of non-urbanites for being overly scared of crime. The latest evolution in gaslighting is posting graphs showing that crime is dropping and that actually, our rapidly declining cities are the safest they’ve ever been.

As always, the first questions should be: Who are they asking? What questions are they asking them? This particular survey samples residents from designated statistical areas known as Middle Layer Super Output Areas (MSOAs) and Lower Level Super Output Areas (LSOAs). These areas don’t map cleanly onto cities, towns or police jurisdictions but have roughly equal population sizes to normalise statistical rates — an approach that’s useful for health indicators such as heart attack incidence, but less appropriate for capturing the complexity of crime.

Crime, unlike many other health or social phenomena, is highly concentrated geographically. Crime data often follows power law distributions, where 80 per cent of crimes are committed by a small number of repeat offenders and concentrated in just a handful of hotspots within any given area, typically busy streets, pubs, bus stations, and train stations. A survey that evenly samples across areas that differ drastically in crime intensity will inevitably mask these concentrations.

The survey also samples exclusively single-occupancy dwellings, deliberately excluding Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs). This significantly undercounts crimes in densely populated, often economically disadvantaged areas, and disproportionately oversamples wealthier, single-family homes.

The survey focusing on crimes against individuals also doesn’t capture crimes against businesses, including rampant shoplifting, vandalism, or other property damage. Nor does it accurately represent repeated victimisation, which used to be capped at 5 reports and was replaced by an opaque “crime-specific imputation method based on the 98th percentile” in 2019. This new method doesn’t solve the problem. If 98 per cent of respondents report 7 or fewer burglaries, the cap might be set at 7 for burglary, so someone reporting 20 burglaries is now recorded as 7 instead of 5.

Nor does it accurately represent repeated victimisation. Previously, the survey artificially limited or “capped” responses at 5 incidents per crime type, meaning that if someone reported being burglarised 15 times, it would only count as 5 incidents. In 2019, this was replaced by an opaque “crime-specific imputation method based on the 98th percentile”, but this new method doesn’t solve the underlying problem. If 98 per cent of respondents report 7 or fewer burglaries, the cap gets set at 7 for burglary. So someone reporting 20 burglaries would still be recorded as only 7 incidents instead of the previous cap of 5.

Historically, the demographic most likely to commit crimes is males aged between 15 and 35. Given that the UK’s median age has now reached 40, combined with significantly lower alcohol consumption among younger generations (a key factor associated with violent criminal behaviour), we would expect a substantial reduction in crime rates. It’s hard to reconcile this with imprisonment rates reaching historic highs, to the extent that the government is releasing individuals convicted of minor violent offences early to accommodate more serious offenders, with thousands more trapped in court backlogs.

In reality, definitive conclusions about whether crime rates are rising, stable, or declining are challenging to draw from this or any other crime survey in aggregate. A key question is: Which crimes? It might be the case that crime rates have in some sense dropped substantially, but people notice, nonetheless, that some demographics that contain a disproportionate number of criminals make up an increasing proportion of our population — and that along with this the types of crimes are changing. Mass stabbings or violent events like acid attacks that once would have been national news stories for weeks have become background noise.

Beyond this, what costs have been accepted in the name of crime avoidance? They might not be entirely aware of it, but people change their behaviour to avoid being victimised. In South Africa, Brazil, and other notoriously criminal countries, people live in secure compounds behind barbed wire fences, with CCTV cameras that alert friends if they get signal jammed. Their already notorious victimisation rates would likely be hundreds of times higher if they tried to live as we do in the West. What people are lamenting when they say crime is “out of control” might not be their personal stories of victimisation but the increasing cognitive load and behavioural adjustments required to stay safe that weren’t necessary even 5 years ago. Given that people change their behaviour, how people feel is really the only thing that matters. As Jeff Bezos said, “When the data and anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. It’s not usually not that the data is being miscollected, it’s that you’re not measuring the right thing”.

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This article (The myths of falling crime) was created and published by The Critic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Adam Wren

How London became the world’s kleptocracy capital

I spoke to the authors of an important new book about Britain’s complicity in global corruption —from offshore havens to Westminster itself.

PETER GEOGHEGAN

John Heathershaw is one of the UK’s foremost experts in kleptocracy and corruption. In January 2023, the Exeter university professor received a curious email. It offered “a small piece of paid work where you might be able to add your professional value”.

The sender? A British public relations firm called CTD Advisors. The “small piece of paid work”? Writing a short article for an academic news site, talking up supposed ‘improvements’ made by Uzbekistan’s autocratic government.

The article would appear independent—but in reality, Heathershaw would be handed “£3,000 straight away.” (That’s well above the going rate for freelance journalism—I can personally vouch for that.)

Heathershaw declined. But the episode offered a rare glimpse into how Britain helps oligarchs and autocrats from post-Soviet states protect their wealth, launder their reputations, and influence UK democracy—via legal firms, PR advisors, political donations, and an entire ecosystem of “enablers.”

And sometimes, the approach is far less polite than a nicely-worded email.

At the same time Heathershaw was being offered money to write puff pieces for Uzbekistan, he and his colleagues—Tena Prelec and Tom Mayne—were being threatened with legal action by a Conservative donor over a report they’d written on the UK’s kleptocracy problem.

The legal threat was eventually dropped. But it speaks volumes about how hard it is even to write honestly about one area where Britain is, unfortunately, genuinely world-leading.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy has said that tackling kleptocracy is one of the new government’s top foreign policy goals. He’s promised a major summit in London on countering illicit finance.

But if Britain really wants to fight kleptocracy, it must also reckon with its own role in enabling a global system that lets corrupt elites loot public wealth—and move it across borders with impunity.

This week, I sat down with Heathershaw, Prelec and Mayne—the authors of the excellent Indulging Kleptocracy—to discuss exactly that.

The UK sits at the centre of a vast web of offshore jurisdictions—sunny places to stash dirty money. Successive governments have promised to crack down. But the British Virgin Islands, perhaps the worst offender, recently ignored its pledge to publish registers of company ownership.

It’s hard to overstate what a key role Britain’s offshore world plays in global corruption. Behind so many drugs cartels and money laundering, lie opaque shell companies in the BVI and elsewhere.

What’s really striking is that ‘Londongrad’ didn’t just start in the 1990s. From the 1950s on, Britain’s bankers, accountants and PR professionals realised there was a way out of post-imperial decline: to become, as Oliver Bullough puts it, ‘butlers to the world’.

Today, London is the global capital of reputation management. You can sue journalists into silence, scrub your internet history, buy football clubs, and donate anonymously to Royal charities, Russell Group universities and major art institutions—all for a price.

And then there’s British politics.

Russian Britons make up just 0.1% of the UK population—but wealthy Russians donated £3.5 million to the Conservative Party between 2010 and 2019.

Foreign governments have bought access to Westminster through shady All-Party Parliamentary Groups and lavish freebies for MPs. Tony Blair, Prince Andrew and others have advised corrupt regimes such as Kazakhstan.

The recently announced Elections Bill still doesn’t go far enough to stop foreign money from distorting our democracy.

One moment from my conversation with the authors really stuck with me. Over the sweep of human history, kleptocracy is the norm. Insiders get rich. Everyone else loses.

“Donald Trump is normal,” Heathershaw told me. “Anti-corruption is unusual.”

That’s why building—and defending—the institutions that tackle kleptocracy matters so much. We could start by dismantling the London-based enabling industry. And by finally taking big money out of British politics.

At Democracy for Sale, we’re committed to exposing dark money and hidden influence in our politics. If you value this work and haven’t yet joined us, now’s the time.

Become a supporting subscriber today—and be part of the fight to defend democracy.

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This article (How London became the world’s kleptocracy capital) was created and published by Democracy For Sale and is republished here under “Fair Use”

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SHOPLIFTING EPIDEMIC HITS HIGH STREETS: Nearly 3 Thefts Every Minute as Crime Surges Under Labour

CP

Britain is in the grip of a shoplifting epidemic with nearly three thefts a minute reported by stores, shocking new figures reveal.

Police recorded a record-breaking 530,643 shoplifting offences in the year to March – a 20 per cent rise from the 444,022 seen the previous year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

That’s more than 10,000 thefts a week, or over 1,400 a day, almost three every minute during typical store opening hours.

The figures are the highest since national records began in 2003 and come as the retail industry warns of growing lawlessness on the high street. Shop theft rates are now nearly double what they were two decades ago.

Retailers say the wave of crime is hitting shoppers in the pocket. The British Retail Consortium (BRC) estimates shoplifting adds at least 6p to every single transaction. Annual losses top £1.8 billion, with stores forking out a further £700 million just to beef up security.

And it’s likely to be far worse. Police-recorded figures are believed to represent just five per cent of the actual thefts, with most incidents going unreported unless an offender is caught or captured on CCTV.

Crime explosion

The chaos isn’t limited to shelves and checkouts. The latest Crime Survey for England and Wales revealed snatch thefts – including phones and bags – have soared to 90,000 in the past year, the highest for two decades and up 29 per cent from 70,000 the year before.

The spike has sparked fears frontline officers are being pulled away from tackling everyday crime. Forces have warned they may be stretched further this summer by protests over migration and other pressures.

In response, top retailers including M&S, Tesco, Primark, Morrisons, Boots and Greggs are launching a major crackdown. Under a new scheme, they’ll share CCTV, photos and personal data of repeat offenders with each other and with police.

The idea is to “join the dots” and build a clearer picture of serial shoplifters. The database will support prosecutions and give security teams door-side photo watchlists to block entry.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper hailed new action from police, claiming: “That is why this summer our new Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee means over 500 town centres are getting extra neighbourhood patrols and action on town centre crime, and we are delivering the first 3,000 increase in neighbourhood officers and PCSOs in communities by next spring.”

Critics blast Labour’s approach

But critics aren’t convinced. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp hit back:
“Following yesterday’s damning drop in police numbers, today the consequences of Labour’s negligence are on full show.

“Under Labour, crime is up seven per cent, shoplifting has surged by 20 per cent, and under Labour’s London Mayor, over 60 per cent of all personal thefts now happen in the capital.”

Andrew Griffith MP delivered a blistering attack, comparing Labour’s approach to the failed policies of California – where petty thefts under $950 were effectively decriminalised.

Claire Bullivant, Editor of this publication confirmed:
“I lived in California for 14 years… I watched this far-left fantasy unfold in real time.
“My friend ran 14 restaurants across the Bay Area. Within months of California decriminalising shoplifting, those restaurants were shuttered. People would come in, eat, and simply walk out. No payment. No shame. No punishment.”

As Conservative MP Andrew Griffith starkly laid out in an X thread, “98% of shoplifting prison sentences are under 12 months, the very sentences Labour wants to abolish. They’re not just cutting slack. They’re cutting the brake lines.

“This isn’t about compassion. This is about cowardice.”

He added:
“Let’s talk about Tanya Liddle. Convicted over 170 times, over 400 offences. Under Labour’s plan, she’d face no prison at all. How can anyone look at that and still mutter the phrase ‘restorative justice’ without choking?”

Victims of violence and harassment

ONS figures also laid bare the scale of personal crime. Around one in eight women were victims of sexual assault, domestic abuse or stalking in the last year. The number for men was also high – at one in 12.

An estimated 5.2 million adults (10.6%) aged 16 and over in England and Wales suffered one or more of these serious crimes in the year to March.

Domestic abuse affected 3.8 million people, stalking hit 1.4 million, and sexual assault impacted 900,000, the survey found.

Fraud is also spiralling… now accounting for 4.2 million incidents annually, the highest since it was first tracked in 2016. Total reported crime to police actually dipped slightly to 6.6 million offences, but that remains far above pre-pandemic levels.

“Britain must not become California”

Mr Griffith concluded with a stark warning:
“Shoplifting is NOT a victimless crime. It bleeds our high streets, drives up prices for working families, and brings daily threats to frontline retail workers.

“When the law steps back, the mob steps forward.”

With high street crime spiralling and political pressure mounting, the Government and police now face growing calls to prove they can keep Britain’s shops – and shoppers – safe.

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This article (SHOPLIFTING EPIDEMIC HITS HIGH STREETS: Nearly 3 Thefts Every Minute as Crime Surges Under Labour) was created and published by Conservative Post and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author CP

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