Crime

Crime figures are down, again. This will be the first time ever that living standards have dropped over the length of a parliament, yet crime is down. Just as overall crime has been heading downwards every year since 1995.

According to the normal explanations for why the current levels of crime are so high this should not be happening. We are in the middle of the worst recession since the Second World War, more people are in greater financial difficulty than has been the case for a very long time, and yet crime is still going down as if we were still enjoying the good times. Between 1955 and 1995 crime went up whether the economy was growing or shrinking, now it goes down. Inequality is down slightly, it always goes down during a recession, but there will still be very little difference from when Labour came into power 13 years ago, and far higher than before Thatcher when crime was still increasing. Inequality is relatively high, so by the normal explanations crime should be rising and should have been rising for the past 30 years, but it isn't and hasn't. It has been falling since 1995, but was rising strongly before 1995 when for most of the time inequality was falling. When looking at the general trends from crime rates over the last century the standard lefty explanations for the massive rise in crime that followed the Second World War simply do not work, there must be something else going on. Something so strong that effected the whole of society and was able to overwhelm the effects of inequality and poverty.

One thing that is never mentioned is how the dramatic rise in crime that followed WW2 conincided with the period of the lefty post war concensus, with a 10 year delay as young criminals grew up under the new social arrangement. It was only after Thatcher broke the lefty postwar consensus and started to reverse it that crime peaked and started to decline, with the same 10 year delay as society adapted.