At the beginning of August, Nigel Farage launched a six-week campaign on law and order. Standing in front of a lectern emblazoned with the slogan “Britain is lawless”, the Reform leader painted a grim picture of social decline and a migration-fuelled crime epidemic, arguing that Britain was facing “nothing short of societal collapse”, with criminals unafraid of the police, and innocent, hardworking people scared to leave the house. With Parliament’s return this week, and the Reform conference beginning today (5 September), this campaign has reached something of an apogee, with Farage promising “mass deportations” under a policy dubbed “Operation Restoring Justice”.
Farage is channelling a fear about public order being stoked across the British right. Last week, influential accounts including Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson amplified allegations that a 12-year-old girl had been brandishing weapons as she defended herself from two “migrants” in Dundee. Robinson claimed that the “men of Scotland” had been “stepping in to patrol Dundee”. Police Scotland have since dismissed the allegations as misinformation. But the story shows the paranoias currently operating in this space. The same fear is leaking into the rest of politics: Keir Starmer is expected to take this caricature on directly in his Labour conference address, while a recent poll found that two-thirds of British people think the country is “broken and needs radical action to fix it”.
Promising to halve crime once he took power, Farage has announced a package of criminal justice reforms which range from the common sense (prosecuting shoplifting and phone-snatching, recruiting 30,000 more police, stopping knife crime), to disturbingly authoritarian: forcing Reform councils to build more prisons; “pop up” Nightingale prisons built by the military; fast track courts; US-style “three strikes and you’re out” sentencing rules; and renting prison spaces abroad in countries such as El Salvador.
This is not a new political strategy. As I have previously argued, our current moment is eerily similar to the late 1970s when the welfare state social contract collapsed amid moral panics about immigration and street crime. These paranoias helped give rise to Margaret Thatcher, who skilfully inflated the folk devil of the “mugger” in order to tap into lower middle-class fears. Could our much-publicised wave of migrant-driven shoplifting and phone snatching do the same for Farage?
So far, some of the strongest resistance has come from the political right itself. Former Spectator editor Fraser Nelson took Farage’s declinism to task in a recent essay for the Times, accusing him of greatly exaggerating the crime wave and falsely linking rising crime to migration, ultimately arguing that Britain is the safest it ever has been. Central to Nelson’s issue with Farage was his elision of the overall decline in crime. Farage, Nelson argues, is essentially trading on fear, peddling lies, and spinning a misleading, fearmongering narrative when all the stats tell us crime is down: “On one hand, four decades of crime data and nationwide NHS hospital data. On the other hand, what ‘we all know’.”
While ostensibly about crime, Nelson’s essay evolves into a full-throated defence of modern capitalism and technological progress, lauding our huge progress tackling disease and pollution. We think crime is up when it’s down; we think our rivers and seas are polluted when they’re improving; air quality is getting better and road deaths are down. Remarkably, Nelson also claims, like Macmillan reborn: “[I]n general, this is probably the best time to be alive. That is to say: if you could choose any era to live in Britain, but not your place in society, you’d choose right now.”
This intra-right battle – between mainstream, liberal conservatism and its populist challenger – has since been picked up by the rest of the centrist commentariat. Lewis Goodall has been rhapsodising about London, likening the scaremongering about London to Trumpism. The new liberal counterattack is clear: the insurgent right trades on declinism, so the voices of reason must defeat it with facts and logic. But neither centrist complacency, nor populist paranoia, are the appropriate response to this crisis – and the perceptions around it. Because while Farage and Nelson both have their own political interest in respectively downplaying and dramatising crime in Britain, neither of them can concede its actual cause: the political economy they both support.
Fraser Nelson is correct that social media algorithms rot people’s brains, radicalising them with worrying speed, and the fact that the crime wave narrative has spread online is integral to its perceived intensity, as the Dundee story proves. Follow certain right-wing accounts, and one is sucked into a feedback loop which plays a stream of outrageous street fracas and public sector scams designed to antagonise: motability fraud, shoplifting, phone-snatching, fare-dodging and knife attacks. Gradually this becomes all you see.
Nelson is alsocorrect that “old school” crimes like car theft and burglary and are declining, largely due to advances in surveillance technology, just as the firearm ban has made gun crime a rarity. Homicide is slowly falling and it is also true that some forms of interpersonal violence – particularly alcohol-fuelled violence and violence from strangers – are declining. Like many others in smalltown Britain, my youth was scarred, quite literally, with a horrible amount of casual violence in pubs and clubs. Most nights out would witness some form of physical confrontation in the form of mass brawls and glassings. This culture of alcohol-fuelled violence was incredibly insidious, and I am extremely relieved it is petering out, although it may also be down to the general decline in alcohol consumption and pubs across the country and the fact young people are simply drinking less.
Yet is also true that other forms of serious crime have increased. “Knife enabled crimes” have gone up across Britain; in South Wales, where I live, knife crime – once rare – has surged, and reports of children carrying knives has become common. While youth crime has sharply decreased overall, it is now concentrated among a smaller number of more entrenched, serious offenders. Younger children are committing more serious crimes; younger children are killing and being killed themselves, including in schools. Youth crime is a classic instance of data versus feelings: even if the overall trend is downwards, the spectre of younger people carrying knives and the normalisation of criminal subcultures naturally leads to huge anxiety among young people, and apocalyptic fears among parents which cannot be dismissed by pointing to generalised downward graphs.
I admire Nelson’s earnest positivity – and particularly his noble attempt to defend migrants from the suspicion that they are all criminals, or potential criminals. But his argument conjures the old image of that Japanese soldier still gamely fighting the Second World War until the 1970s, refusing to believe the world has changed. Nelson’s brand of breezily patriotic, Richard Curtis-ite, 2012 Olympic opening ceremony loving liberal conservatism is long dead, and it is dead because that strain of Toryism doesn’t seem to understand the society that it itself has created over the last decade and a half. It fails to grasp that the crime is just one pillar of a broader narrative of decline which resonates with people’s frustrations about the state of the country.
The basic paradox at play in the UK is that, even though some forms of serious crime have declined, petty crime and antisocial behaviour – not just phone snatching and fare dodging, but fly tipping and “incivility” such as playing music on public transport – has increased and become normalised. We have become used to shopworkers wearing bodycams and being assaulted, and we have become used to seeing basic foodstuffs like cheese with anti-shoplifting devices fitted to them. Community pharmacists – who provide methadone to heroin addicts – have again reported a steep rise in shoplifting and aggression. Pupil violence in schools has escalated to the point that teachers feel the need to go on strike in protest. The steep rise in rough sleeping and the presence of chaotic people with serious mental health issues or addiction issues (who are also driving the shoplifting epidemic) in every inner city in Britain make public spaces feel unsafe, even if loitering or screaming in public is not “serious” crime.
There has always been conflict over how we measure crime, and this has always been linked to different ideas about how to actually define crime itself. Farage is right that many “low level” crimes often aren’t adequately captured in crime data because they’re often simply not reportedor recorded; or taken seriously by the police or local authorities when they are. Indeed, very often they aren’t even technically, legally even crimes, they’re just antisocial, annoying and threatening.
Research by the think tank More in Common on social trust paints a bleak picture of collapsing social cohesion and rising isolation, a conflagration of misery of which crime is one pillar (others include the death of the high street and the associational life of formerly thriving communities). Farage has consistently shown himself to be unparalleled at understanding and exploiting these anxieties, and crime is one aspect of a broader narrative which says: the state (in this case the police and criminal justice system) doesn’t work for us hard working folk. They don’t punish criminals properly, but they lock up people for tweeting. They don’t investigate when we get our bike stolen or car broken into; they don’t shut down the money laundering fronts which have taken over the high street; they don’t punish people for shoplifting or jumping ticket barriers. Declining faith in the police and criminal justice system is linked to the producerism which runs through right-wing populism like a stick of rock. Laila Cunningham, one of Reform’s new young demagogues,speaking before Farage, stated it very clearly: “We pay our taxes, we follow the rules, but they let us down.” Nelson does recognise the rise of petty crime but fails to note its visceral nature, or the corrosive impact it has, how it can make many of us feel like D Fens in Falling Down.
An alternative way to think about what Nelson calls the “politics of perception” is not as a question of what media you consume, or of people naively buying into Farage’s bullshit, but to understand that everything in life is coloured by one’s class position: where you live, who you know, your chances of a decent life, your likelihood of contact with the police and being a victim of crime. The UK is so socially and geographically segregated that it is of course possible to have a very pleasant life where you totally circumnavigate much of the chaos and insecurity which accompanies poverty: to only frequent nice pubs and parks, to live in a clean neighbourhood, to not go to shops in which shoplifting is normalised and in which the staff don’t have to wear bodycameras. Crime is always a class issue.
Many critical criminologists have long argued that our societal definition of crime is too narrow, and excludes a whole host of damaging “social harms” which have emerged in modern capitalism. Just as Farage realises antisocial behaviour is a social harm which isn’t captured in crime statistics, the hollowing out of our communities is also a social harm, albeit one you get a knighthood for administering if you were part of the last four Conservative governments. But the very economic system those governments maintained – the neoliberalism that Nelson and Farage both laud in different ways – have driven the decay and subsequent social crisis we face. The fact technology is raising living standards does not preclude enormous social fallout from the very same system that develops it. Marx himself noted capitalism’s incredible power to innovate and change society; the problem was the way in which it extracted profits from people and left a trail of devastation in its wake.
Farage talks about the entrenched minority who commit crime yet has no interest in understanding the structural factors which cause crime. Neoliberalism has created what Loic Wacquant calls a “surplus population” (what Marx called the lumpenproletariat, and what Charles Murray called “the underclass”): an entrenched bottom percentile which exist on the very margins of society, outside employment or education, cycling between care, homelessness, unemployment, and the prison system. This is a population which has steadily grown because of the destruction of meaningful work and employment.
For all his talk about the erosion of our shared social life and decency, it was Farage’s beloved Thatcher who destroyed the strong cohesive communities and families which existed around pits, steel and manufacturing, and with it basically the “respectable” working class. These communities had social problems but they also had meaningful work, and high levels of social trust which have since been destroyed. It was Nelson’s beloved coalition government which introduced austerity which systematically starved local authorities of cash, leading to the closure of vital diversionary youth services. Of course, being poor and living in a deprived area doesn’t make you commit crime. But for young men in these places with few prospects, crime is one way of asserting your masculinity by obtaining money and status.
In the new geographies of despair and stigma – sink estates in the city or deprived small towns across the regions – subcultures of crime have taken hold.These criminal subcultures exist among white lads in Liverpool, Scotland and South Wales; black youth in London; Muslim men in Bradford and Luton. Whether it’s inner-city London, Manchester or on a council estate in Ireland; the aesthetics of this subculture are identical even if the skin colour, religion or accent is different: ebikes, sportswear, balaclavas, Airmax 95s, knives, drill music and the normalisation and indeed celebration of drug dealing and prison. And yes, some young migrant men – as an ultramarginalised group excluded from the labour market and forced into the grey economy – are also at high risk of crime. Criminal subcultures and gangs crop up in migrant communities – of all ethnicities and backgrounds – across the world. There is no point in denying this.
“Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,” went the New Labour maxim, but no British politician has ever seriously attempted to tackle the root causes of crime. As Wacquant repeatedly notes, the state has no interest in actually solving crime or shrinking the surplus population caused by deindustrialisation and poverty, so it merely gets managed, by the prison system and the police but also by the education system, the care system, local authorities: pupil referral unites, youth offending teams, homelessness infrastructure. Huge amounts of resources and manpower are poured into managing these vulnerable populations without addressing the political-economic system that births them. Crime is a social problem: the majority of our prisoners are functionally illiterate; over a quarter of prisoners have been in care; nearly half were excluded from school; the vast majority have experienced some form of childhood trauma.
Successive British governments have doubled down on penal populism, massively expanding the prison population and lengthening sentences, all while cutting funding for the criminal justice system to the point it cannot properly function. The UK imprisons people at a dizzying rate which far outstrips other comparable countries in Europe, aping America with the introduction of privatized prisons and the imprisonment of women. Recidivism rates are extremely high, conditions in prisons are poor.
We keep imprisoning people. The police keep getting more powers. We keep creating more laws and new crimes. We have essentially already been doing what Farage wants for years, yet we clearly feel no safer. It is surreal to see videos of riot police arresting old people for holding placards on the one hand, yet being told by a former City boy that the problem with the UK is the police are woke, or that the criminal justice system isn’t authoritarian enough.
There are no easy answers on criminal justice and law and order, yet Reform’s half-baked policies represent an entrenchment of current policy. On law and order, as with the rest of Reform’s policies, Farage represents no real break with establishment thinking. He is a charlatan. The problem, though, is that the liberal commentariat essentially act as a foil for Farage. Denialism ensures that law and order becomes a culture war battle, and it’s fundamentally a battle progressives can’t win.
[See also: The left’s immigration failure]
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