My suspicion that government crime statistics could be misleading (see previous entry) is supported by a study published by Civitas in June last year.

It appears that the British Crime Survey has a very particular way of counting crimes. The real incidence of all violent crime appears to be 83 per cent higher than that which given in the British Crime Survey. This understating of crime has been going on since the survey started in 1981. Since the total level of crime in each year since then has been understated but to an unknown but presumably varying degree each year, the assertion that violent crime is going down is not wholly reliable. I suspect there are further reasons to doubt the trustworthiness of the crime figures. A few have already been suggested in comments on my previous post (below).

I should add that the academics who wrote this report went out of their way not to criticise the statisticians themselves. The fault they find is with a way of treating the figures that was started in 1981.

Here is part of the Civitas press release:

...ever since its inception in 1981, the British Crime Survey (BCS) has omitted many crimes committed against people who have been repeat victims. If people are victimised in the same way by the same perpetrators more than five times in a year, the number of crimes is put down as five. The justification for this was ‘to avoid extreme cases distorting the rates’, but, as Farrell and Pease point out, ‘if the people who say they suffered ten incidents really did, it is capping the series at five that distorts the rate’.

By recalculating the figures without the arbitrary cap of five crimes, Farrell and Pease have revealed that there are over three million crimes omitted from the BCS:

In its most recent published sweep, BCS estimated an annual total of some 6.8 million ‘household’ crimes (covering burglary; theft in a dwelling; other household theft; thefts of and from vehicles; bicycle theft; and vandalism to household property and vehicles). It estimated some 4.1 million ‘personal’ crimes (which covers assault, sexual offences, robbery, theft from the person, and other personal theft). Our re-analysis reveals that, if we believe what the respondents tell us, there would be 7.8 million household offences and 6.3 million personal crimes. Thus, removing the arbitrary five offence limit, over three million extra offences come to light… Household crime is increased by 15% and personal crime by a staggering 52%. As the sum of personal and household crimes, total crime would have been understated by 29%.

The increase in the number of crimes is not evenly spread across all types of crime. For example, theft of vehicles is not increased at all, but levels of vandalism are almost a quarter more than reported, and there are 20 per cent more burglaries. Violent crime of all types increases by 83 per cent. Violence perpetrated by an acquaintance increases by 156 per cent and domestic violence by 140 per cent. As Farrell and Pease say, ‘these are not minor differences’.

The full press release is here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime

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Last week I suggested at a meeting that the figures for unemployment in Britain had been manipulated. A member of the audience who said he was a civil servant was appalled and angry, suggesting that I was impugning the integrity of civil servants. I was somewhat taken aback by his outrage since I have become very accustomed, in the past ten years, to the thought that many government statistics are highly misleading. There are so many examples of it.

Hospital waiting lists are a prime example. Much unemployment is hidden under the category of incapacity benefit. Education is an outstanding example. My confidence in all government statistics has been completely undermined.

When I was a once-a-week leader writer for the Daily Telegraph (about five years ago) I would often start my research with some headline government statistics that appeared to support the official line and then find, on looking more deeply at the figures, that the headline figures were extremely misleading and, in some cases, that the real story was the very opposite of what the government was suggesting. Exam results are a well-known - or rather 'notorious' - example of this but there are many others that are less well-known and which succeed in fooling people (or at least the media).

As I explained to the irate civil servant, I am not suggesting that that figures are simply changed by the statisticians - that numbers are moved around Mugabe-style. No, I am suggesting something more subtle. I am also not suggesting that the statisticians are driving the misleading of the public. That is a political matter and therefore surely driven by the politicians and their 'special advisers' and public relations advisers - although let us not pretend that statisticians are all without political views and that all of them can put those views away when they select which, of the many ways of measuring things, they choose.

It is quite easy to manipulate statistics. One can choose the numbers that put the best gloss on things, ignoring ones which tell a different story. One can quote one study which ignoring others. One can redefine what counts and does not count as an instance, say, of an exam pass (just change the pass mark from 50% to 10% and you get a surge of apparent academic success.

One of the statistics I am currently suspicious of is the supposed fall in violent crime. I have not had time to mine the statistics. But I noticed this weekend a story in the Sunday Telegraph which encouraged my suspicion. A professor of 'advanced social sciences' surveyed frontline police officers, contacting them by email. No such study can be regarded as conclusive. However she apparently contacted 1200 of these officers which is quite a big sample.

She

...found that 80 per cent of borough police officers agreed or strongly agreed that knife crime was worse in their community than five years ago. Only eight per cent disagreed.

Some 70 per cent judged that gun crime had worsened and nearly three quarters said they had seen a rise in gang crime.

Professor Qvortrup herself remarked that the result of her survey 'flies in the face of other research from the Home Office and the British Crime Survey, which says that gun crime is falling'.

I wonder. Is gun crime really falling? If so, why?

The full story is here.

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I wonder if this is true? A person who commented on the Daily Mail website on the story below, wrote:

In The Netherlands a single mother with a child is not entitled to claim benefits or social housing until aged 22. This makes young women more likely to be careful about teenage pregnancy and get on with their education and lives instead of stuck in a hole of state dependency.

- Adam, UK

If this is indeed true, it casts a different light on the debate on teenage pregnancy in the UK. Usually the argument is all about sex education and I think, if memory serves, it is suggested that the Netherlands has a particularly open form of sex education which, it is suggested, does no harm because the teenage pregnancy rate is lower that Britain's. But if this commenter on the Daily Mail website is correct, it would seem quite possible that in fact any lower teenage pregnancy rate could be due to the benefits system rather than the nature of sex education. It might be that the benefits system is the most influential kind of sex education around.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Parenting • Welfare benefits

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It is understandable that when older people suggest that behaviour has changed, that younger people are sceptical. Perhaps there is an element of 'them' and 'us'. A younger person might feel, "this is our time. If you say now is worse than before, you are saying that we, the young, are worse than you, the old." And nobody likes to hear criticism.

Yet the truth is, even if it is hard to accept, that British society has dramatically changed for the worse in the past half century. Of course we are richer and wealth brings a kind of freedom. But our behaviour - including the behaviour of many older people - has significantly changed.

Some evidence for this is in the book. But here is another little piece: funeral directors who have been in the business for years say that the respect shown to funerals has noticeably declined. Here is the coverage from the Daily Mail:

Drivers and youths are showing no respect for the dead or their grieving families, according to Britain's undertakers.

The past decade has seen public attitude towards funerals reach an "all-time low", they claim.

Similarly, firefighters are facing a torrent of abuse and mindless attacks from yobs as they attempt to save lives.

In a "sad reflection of today's society" motorists refuse to stop for funeral processions and regularly cut up hearses.

Horses pulling funeral carriages have even had stones thrown at them by schoolchildren.

Undertakers have revealed that members of the public now rarely stop when the cortege passes and policeman no longer salute.

The National Society of Allied and Independent Funeral Directors says members are reporting more such incidents, with the situation worse in big cities.

John Weir from the society, whose members organise 60 per cent of funerals in Britain, said: "Respect for the dead is at an alltime low.

"People used to stop as a funeral went past, those wearing hats would take them off, policemen would salute and traffic would give way.

"That doesn't happen any more and in the past ten years there has been a decline in behaviour.

"Funeral directors have noticed this change and, of course, it is the families who are affected.

"A funeral only happens once. If something happens, the relatives are scarred for ever. It is a sad reflection of today's society.

"Things are worse in the cities; in market towns and in the country it is not as bad."

John Harris, of T Cribb and Sons funeral directors in London's East End, organises 800 horsedrawn funerals each year. He believes carrying out a funeral has become more difficult because of the attitude of other road-users and a lack of respect from today's youngsters.

"In the past ten years respect for the dead has declined," he said. "And it is part of a wider breakdown of society.

"Road users are the biggest problem. Drivers will overtake and then cut in, which can spook the horses. And we have had an incident of schoolchildren throwing things at the horses.

"When I started 35 years ago, things like this would never have happened."

The full article is here.

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I appeared on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning. I was up against Oliver James who has a new book arguing that Thatcherite "selfish capitalism" has made British people unhappy. Unsurprisingly I didn't agree. But actually, though I think his economic premises in his new book are utterly wrong, I do have respect for Oliver James as a psychologist. I quoted him in The Welfare State We're In and met him while researching the book. He kindly directed me towards research indicating that British people are less happy than in previous generations - something on which we agree.

Over the next week, it might be possible to listen to the interview on the BBC website. The link is here. The conversation was at 8.48 on Wednesday 2nd January.

He has some good lines. I liked the one: "You can't pull with a Ferrari in Copenhagen". This is a claim which should be tested.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime

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While it is increasingly accepted that behaviour in Britain has deteriorated, people still believe that the army remains as it was: full of brave men of exceptional discipline and character. This may be so. One hopes so. However, given the decline elsewhere, I am not surprised to get the following report. I should emphasise that this is second-hand and I do not offer it as strong evidence. I mention only as a possible lead indicating what might be happening. It comes from someone who knows a man who...

...travels round the world with the military. As a result he has acquired a great deal of insight into the changes in military culture over recent years. Apparently, soldiers now dress in a slovenly way and officers can no longer collar them in passing if their dress or behaviour is sub-standard. Due process has to be followed and this has evidently meant that officers don't bother, with obvious results. This is possibly a result of worthy anti-bullying policies but, again, has had unfortunate results.

My correspondent puts down the reduction in discipline to altered rules on how an officer may and may not tell off a soldier. Doubtless that has played an important role. But I would suspect that the change in the character of British people generally has also affected the behaviour of armed personnel.

I should add that I have no wish to knock the armed forces, for whom I have great admiration. On the other hand, I believe it would be wrong to turn a blind eye if a change such as this is taking place.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime

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Recently I took part in a debate at the Royal Society for Arts about what are the greatest social evils of our time. I was welcomed by Matthew Taylor as I went in and he called me a 'token right-winger' which gives an idea of the views of most of the other participants. The main speech was by Julia Unwin. There was, perhaps surprisingly, some agreement about the worst social evils such as cultural impoverishment. However, even here I am sure we had wholly different views about the causes of that impoverishment.

The RSA website has an audio recording of the debate. The actual recording is here: http://www.thersa.org/audio/lecture190707.mp3

My main contribution starts just after a third of the way through. I also commented on the notion that the market economy has increased avarice in modern society at the beginning of the last eighth of the recording.

In my comments I mistakenly referred to a market in Rome having been created by Tiberius. I think the one I was thinking of was actually created by Trajan. I should also have mentioned that in late Victorian times, when charitable giving was vastly higher than it is now and behaviour was better, there was lower tax and Britain had much more of a market economy.

The page leading to the recording is here: http://www.rsa.org.uk/index.asp

Incidentally, the idea of the Julia Unwin that climate change should be regarded as a major social evil seemed to me quite extraodinary. It may or may not be an evil, but it is surely not a social evil. I am dismayed by the way that she - and perhaps the Royal Society of Arts, too - have turned old charities to address their own interests instead of the views and intentions of those who founded them.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • General

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When I say that crime per capita has increased 47 times over in the past century, people often reply that reporting of crime has increased. This idea is widespread. I am afraid I have yet to see it cogently argued, with evidence. I would be glad to see the argument put properly. (Norman Dennis once wrote a pamphlet saying that the idea was wholly untrue.)

In the meantime, there is some evidence suggesting the very opposite. The latest such evidence of this comes from the Federation of Small Businesses:

Small businesses have so little faith in the legal system that they no longer bother reporting crimes that cost them £19billion a year.

They think thieves and vandals are let off far too lightly, according to a survey published yesterday.

Four out of ten fail to report crimes because they do not believe police take them seriously enough, says the Federation of Small Businesses.

The findings reflect growing anger at shoplifters being let off with onthespot fines, half of which go unpaid.

Under the latest Government proposals they will escape punishment altogether if they agree to say sorry.

(Full article in Daily Mail)

This suggests that there is serious under-reporting of crime that is happening right now. It seems to me highly unlikely that small businesses did not report so many crimes in, say, the 1950s. But it would be interesting to see any evidence on the issue.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime

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I have just been to a talk given by Charles Murray, the American intellectual who has been so influential in the matter of state welfare and the damage it has done. He spoke about his idea for reform - an idea described fully in his book In Our Hands.

His idea, briefly, is this: that the government should give every person US$10,000 a year in place of all welfare benefits, retirement payments and healthcare. Of this, US$3,000 would have to be used to buy health insurance.

I hope he will forgive me if I misreport some of his remarks. I do not have shorthand.

He said he was not primarily concerned that the welfare state costs too much "though it does", nor that it tends to make things worse "though it does" but that it "drains" the life out of people - particularly the spiritual life and sense of meaning.

He believed that people derive a sense of meaning in their lives in one or more of the following four ways: vocation, community, family and faith. For these things to retain their meaning, it was vital that government should leave them alone.

He offered his sense of how Europeans defined the purpose of life these days. He felt they think that the idea is to have a pleasant time until you die. He felt that they no longer believe that life has a special or transcendental meaning. Their priorities seem to be holidays and shorter working hours. The idea that work can have meaning in their lives has faded. Their belief in marriage, too, has dwindled. They even are no longer so ready to put their children's interests above their own. There has been a secularisation of society. People now think they are a combination of chemicals which, after a while, would "de-activate".

This may be a caricature of how Europeans think but it is not so very far from how a lot of Britons think. His view is influenced, I think by the fact that he is a believer - and believers in God are probably more widespread and fervent in America than in Britain. It is his religion that perhaps makes him more shocked by some of the behaviour in Britain than non-religious people are.

In fact, I would suggest that America's continuing belief in God helped to get through the welfare reform of 1997. Many simply thought that it was wrong, for instance, that there should be special government payments for those having children outside marriage. It was against God's law. (American religion is, perhaps, different from what remains of British religion in that, here in Britain, the church has given up on morality and tends to take a socialist approach, calling for more big government).

He said that if his plan were introduced, behaviour would be affected. There would be 'feedback loops'. I think he implied that a girl would be less inclined to get pregnant out of wedlock if she knew she would get no extra money from the government. She would also be able to get money from the father because his regular money from the government would be paid to a known bank account and money could be taken from it. This would, Murray suggested, affect his behaviour, too. He would be more cautious about making women pregnant.

The idea of 'feedback loops', such as described above, is crucial to understanding how the welfare state has undermined behaviour. The welfare state has, in many ways, taken away the feedbacks which a society without state welfare used to supply.

Among these, Murray emphasised, is stigma. He said "stigma is wonderful" and "it is extremely powerful" and he suggested it was rarely a bad thing except in novels.

My take on Charles Murray's proposal is this:

I am struck first of all by how he admitted that this was a compromise. He said he was making an offer to the Left. They would be allowed to keep big spending - since his plan would continue big state spending. But it would be in a different form that would curtail many of the bad effects of state welfare.

Many times I have been asked, when giving talks about my book, "so what is the answer?" I have always felt it is impossible to give a satisfactory answer. The ideal solution - minimal state welfare - would probably not be politically acceptable in a democracy. But reforms that would be politically acceptable would probably not be radical enough to make a 'good society'.

What Murray has done is come up with an admitted compromise. But I wonder whether even this compromise would hold. I can imagine some hard luck stories that would be played out at length on TV and radio and would cry out for action by the government. Gradually, the whole thing might fall apart. I fear that in a democracy there is a tendency for people to look to government to sort out every problem. I fear that even in America, the will to say: "let the chips fall where they may - the net good to society will still overwhelmingly come from a low welfare state society" is not likely to be strong enough in the face of such stories.

I have come to fear that all advanced societies are becoming more and more welfare state dependent and that people in these countries are gradually being changed more and more by these welfare states. The welfare state gives you money if you have children out of wedlock, it gives you money if you don't work, if gives you money if you are well but you pretend to be ill and it declines money it would have given you if you have saved. I agree with Charles Murray that the worst effect of the welfare state is on the character of the people it affects (mostly the less well off). I would love to see major reform but I fear that over the long term, reform will not last and that the damage done to society will continue.

If this happens around the advanced world, we are really talking about a whole civilisation in decline. Is this too gloomy? I hope so.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Parenting • Reform

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One’s first reaction to the horrific killings of 32 people on Monday on Virginia Tech campus is: “why on earth don’t the Americans bring in gun control?” It seems the obvious answer.

If you have been listening to the BBC coverage you will probably have been subtly encouraged to view it this way. The attitude on some of its programmes seems to be: the Americans are bone-headed about this. They should be like us civilised Brits and ban gun ownership. But the facts about guns are not what you might expect.

Yes, it is true that guns are widely owned by American people. They can be found in two out of every five homes. It is also true that the homicide rate in America is tragically high at 5.9 deaths per 100,000 people each year.

But guns are also widely held in peaceful Switzerland. They are in 27 per cent of homes. Yet the rate of homicides in Switzerland is only 1.1 per 100,000 people which is lower than in Britain. So the idea that there is a simple connection between guns being out there and people getting killed is not reliable.

In Norway gun ownership also quite common with a third of homes having one. And what is the rate of homicide there? Fewer than one per 100,000, far lower than in Britain. The rate in England and Wales is 1.5 and and in Scotland it is 2.2.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime

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Philip Zimbardo was on the Radio 4 programme "Start the Week" this morning. He briefly described a famous experiment which he conducted in 1971.

Here is a description of it from Wikepedia:

The Stanford prison experiment was a psychological study of the human response to captivity, in particular to the real world circumstances of prison life and the effects of imposed social roles on behavior. It was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University. Undergraduate volunteers played the roles of guards and prisoners living in a mock prison that was constructed in the basement of the Stanford psychology building.

Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their assigned roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to genuinely dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early.

The full Wikipedia entry is here.

I see a parallel between the Stanford experiment and the welfare state. The Standfor experiment showed that good people could, if their circumstances were changed, start acting very badly indeed. We humans are generally not so inherently virtuous that we can go on acting well regardless.

This chimes with one of the central claims that I make in The Welfare State We're In, that living within the structure of the welfare state has changed the character of the British people.

I do not think that the majority of young men who become criminal thugs were born to be that way. I suggest that the circumstances they found themselves in made it more likely to that they would turn out that way. The welfare state conditioned these circumstances. The welfare state caused more young men to be brought up in adverse circumstances. It caused:

- more to be brought up by an unmarried mother, perhaps with visiting boyfriends
- more to be brought up on a sink council estate
- more to be illiterate and alienated at school and therefore more likely to be in gangs and turn to delinquent behaviour
- more to be unemployed.

One could add a few more such circumstances. Add them together and you have a large-scale experiment in what those kind of circumstances do to people. We know that, in many cases, criminal activity has been the result.

The circumstances in which people - particularly the poorest fifth - are brought up in Britain has been changed by the welfare state. It has had a damaging effect on their behaviour. But they could just as easily have been fine, decent people. It was nothing about them genetically. It was the circumstances into which the welfare state put them - just as it was the circumstances into which students were put in Stanford which made them behave so awfully.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime

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Alongside this story in the Telegraph was a box of "Family Facts and Figures". One of them was:

70 per cent of young criminals have lone parents

another was

22 per cent of children live with a lone mother.

This would appear to be further evidence that lone parenting makes it more likely that children will become delinquent. It does, of course, have to treated with care since it is possible that children of lone parents are more likely to suffer from some other problem that causes them to be more likely to be criminal. In other words, it is conceivable that the evidence is misleading. On the other hand, there is plenty of well-researched analysis that leads one to believe that this bare statistic powerfully reflects an important truth.

I am very interested in the origin of this 70 per cent figure. Previously the British government, unlike the American, has been reluctant to make any analysis of the family background of convicted criminals. It has been as if it did not want to know. So where does this figure come from? Is it in the Freud report?

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Parenting

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Most of the nonsense which Mr Blair spoke in order to get himself elected has been forgotten. He has not been held to account. But occasionally the propaganda which served him so well is remembered. The absurd lies are finally exposed. This week it has been his crime policy.

One of Mr Blair's most famous pieces of propaganda was the promise that, if elected, he would be "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime".

But this week the British public has been made very well aware that the government over which he presides did not build anything like enough prisons to house the steadily increasing number of criminals. In other words, he simply was not "tough on crime". That was a lie.

In addition, the failure of his government to build sufficient prisons has made crime worse than it would otherwise have been. This, rather unusually, has now been pointed out by a judge:

Judge Richard Bray jailed two men over a fight outside a pub, and told Northampton Crown Court: "I am well aware that there is overcrowding in the prisons and detention centres. That is not going to prevent me from passing proper sentences in each case.

"The reason our prisons are full to overcrowding, and have been for years, is because judges can no longer pass deterrent sentences."

He added: "What message does it send to criminals when they are told in the dock they will only have to serve half the sentence the judge thinks appropriate?

"Until politicians wake up to this fact, criminals will continue to re-offend and the prison population will continue to rise ever higher."

Of course, while Mr Blair 'presided' over the failure to build prisons, the person who should probably take the main responsibility is Gordon Brown. He was acting prime minister for domestic policy. His men at the Treasury will have been the ones telling any Home Secretary who wanted to build prisons, 'sorry, money is too tight'. So the great extent of the rise in crime is yet another failure of this government that probably can be put down to the actions of Gordon Brown.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Politics

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In the 'comments' section of the posting below on re-offending, John Hudson has cast doubt on my assertion that the welfare state has been a major factor in the massive rise in crime in Britain. His argument is worth a hearing and I have responded to it.

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It should not be difficult to spot the flaw in the argument for making all children stay at school until they are 18. It is contained within the first two, short paragraphs of the news story in the Daily Telegraph:

Teenagers should be forced by law to stay in school or training up to the age of 18, the review of skills ordered by Gordon Brown said yesterday.

More than one in six young people leave school unable to read, write and add up properly and the proportion of 16- year-olds staying on in full time education in the UK is below the average for developed countries, it said.

To put the same information in a different way, this advisory body suggests that children whom Britain's state schools have failed to teach even to read and write should be compelled to stay at those schools for an extra two years.

This is absurd. You might call it 're-inforcing failure'. This is an idea according to which, if you have a system for climbing a mountain which does not work, then you should be made to go on using it.

The damaging consequences of increasing the school-leaving age are serious. We already know - in a big and undeniable way - that many of those children whom state schools have failed even to teach how to read and write, are disenchanted by school. It would be surprising if anything else were the case.

We also know that such children - especially the boys - are the ones who are likely to establish gangs within the school, to disrupt lessons, to bully, to truant and to commit crimes. This is already a major problem. An astonishingly high proportion of street crime is already committed by children of school age in school hours.

What would be the effect of keeping even bigger boys at school who are disenchanted by the experience and who have not even learned to read and write and who have already formed gangs and become juvenile delinquents? It would undoubtedly be to breed bigger and more dangerous young men present in school. It is not an exageration to say that the crime rate in Britain would increase. More teachers would be too frightened to even attempt to exercise authority. More knives and drugs would be brought into school. More lessons would be disrupted. At present, those who stay on are the keener ones. They have a better chance to make progress in those two years because the disenchanted ones have left. That chance would be seriously endangered by this proposal.

Raising the school-leaving age is a seriously bad idea.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Education

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One of the contentions of The Welfare State We're In is that the welfare state has been a major contributor to the massive rise in crime and anti-social behaviour since the beginning of the 20th century. The problem is compounded by the fact that the state, in addition to being a bad supplier of welfare, tends to be a bad administrator of everything else it does, too. This applies to all aspects of criminal justice including investigation of crimes, prosecution, the courts and punishment.

The poor performance of the state in these areas exacerbates the increased crime for which the welfare state is largely responsible.

At the end of last month, Lord Ramsbotham, the former prisons chief, wrote a scathing attack on the administration of prisons in The Independent. It was significant because it came from such a well-placed soure.

This is part of what he wrote:

Yesterday's announcement that the prison population now exceeds 80,000 is the latest low point in what one can only describe as the Government's headlong and self-induced race to absurdity as far as the conduct of imprisonment is concerned.

He cites various reasons for this. The one that is particularly worrying is this:

If you do not resource prisons, to enable them to conduct work, education and training, prisoners are more likely to reoffend, as proved by the fact that the reoffending rate among adult males has gone up from 55 per cent to 67 per cent in the past five years.

That rise in re-offending seems remarkable and suggests, all by itself, that something may be going badly wrong in our prisons.

What could it be?

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Roy Keane, of all people, has criticised the bad behaviour of football players . This is comical, considering his own record of foul language, insults, intimidation and deliberate violence - in one case leading to serious injury. The thing that really seems to irritate him now is players faking injury. It is an example of how selective and illogical people can be when it comes to a moral code.

Despite all the above, I welcome Keane's words (see the Telegraph article and below). When I wrote The Welfare State We're In, I was delighted to find a long history of sendings off in professional football. I thought that I had discovered a good way of demonstrating the dramatic deterioration of behaviour in Britain - a way that went beyond anecdotes, a way that was quantified.

Many people watch football and they would easily relate to the figures I was able to quote. It seemed like a great way to make my point. But this was to ignore the passionate longing of many football fans - including highly intelligent people - to believe that it is all the fault of the referees. Many fans refuse to accept that behaviour has changed. They say the enormous rise in sendings off is only and entirely because referees have become stricter. They claim that one footballer barely has to touch another for the ref' to give a yellow card. You can be sent off for things which would never have resulted in such a tough response in the good old days.

I can only gasp at the way these fans ignore the violence, the shirt-pulling, the pushing, the holding, the tripping, the kicking and the punching, not to mention the diving, that are now part and parcel of football. I would suggest that the new, stricter rules are not the cause of the sendings off but have been put in place because it was the only way to reduce the level of mayhem on the pitch. Indeed this was explicitly the case in the 1970s, I think it was (the details are in the book).

But, in any case, the book was meant to be about the welfare state, not about football refereeing, so reluctantly I changed the way it was written to put less emphasis on the astonishing history of sendings off. I did not want to put people off my welfare state arguments by arguing with them about football!

Nevertheless, I am glad to a kind of back-handed support for my views from Mr Keane. It is implicit in his interview that he thinks behaviour has deteriorated. He, of course, was a fully paid-up member of this trend. For details of his own sorry role, see Chapter One.

This is from the Telegraph article:

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In a small Tesco store in Alresford, a pretty Georgian village in Hampshire, I saw a sign declaring that flour and eggs would not be sold to people under 18 years of age until after October 31st. What a strange development this is.

Tesco has imposed the ban because it is trying to do its bit to reduce the amount of damage done by those who 'trick or treat' on the night of Halloween. I don't know for how many years it has imposed such a ban. I was ready to believe that this was another case of the nanny culture gone mad. But the staff there told me that it was no joke. Even in this village that looks as though it is the epitome of English civilisation, they told me that Halloween night is an evening on which those who 'trick or treat' really do some genuinely nasty things. The damage that can be inflicted with flour and eggs is the least of it. The 'trick or treaters' have been known to go a great deal further including setting fire to letterboxes.

A sign such as Tesco now feels it must put up would not have been at all necessary even 20 years ago, let alone 50. It is hard to overstate the reduction in civility in British culture.

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This is an article of mine which appeared in the Yorkshire Post.

MY FATHER used to tell my brother and I about his time serving in India during the Second World War. The Japanese army was advancing and looked likely to invade.

My father said that his greatest fear was that, if captured by the Japanese, he would be unable to hold out in the face of torture and might let down his comrades by revealing military secrets.
The way he thought about this reveals something about his generation's mindset. For millions of people such as my father, duty towards others was one of their major concerns. The concept of duty – and honour – were strong.

But the British now tend to think in a different way. How many now are worried, above all, about their responsibilities to others? Some are, of course, and they can be heroic in caring, for example, for disabled members of their family. But more generally, there is now almost a national ethic of selfishness. The whole character of the British people has been revolutionised.

Why?

Why have we changed from being a society so law abiding that George Orwell wrote in 1944: "An imaginary foreign observer would certainly be struck by our gentleness; by the orderly behaviour of English crowds, the lack of pushing and quarrelling... there is very little crime or violence."

He would be astonished if he returned today. In a recent survey by the Jill Dando Institute, fewer people in Britain than in any other major European country said they would confront a group of 14-year-olds vandalising a bus shelter.

I suspect this is largely because we are aware these days that there are some very dangerous 14-year-olds around.

There is an enormous contrast here: in 1931, during Orwell's lifetime, there were three crimes a year for every police officer. By 2001, that figure had rocketed to 44.

Why has family life, too, changed beyond recognition? The big, extended family was very important in the 1950s.

Michael Young – who, incidentally, was the author of the Labour Party's 1945 election manifesto – studied the way the working class lived in the East End of London. He was impressed by the many thriving, supportive, extended families. A woman shopped for her elderly uncle. The young were baby-sat by the old. Contacts between members of aunts, grandparents and cousins were frequent.

Now, in place of these vibrant, extended families, there has been an explosion of unmarried parenting. Often children go entirely without contact or support from the father's side. And the mother herself may
also lack contact with her own father.

What has caused these massive changes in British society? The research I did for my book, The Welfare State We're In, led me to think that, strange though it may seem, this transformation has been brought about largely by the development of the welfare state.

The welfare state was created, of course, with good intentions. It was meant to provide a safety net for the unfortunate. But, as an unintended by-product, it changed the way we live and the pressures which each of us feel in our daily lives.

Previously, we had powerful reasons to be good people.

Imagine yourself, for a moment, to be a working man living a century ago. You are almost certainly a member of a friendly society, like the vast majority of industrial workers. Being a member of a friendly society (there were hundreds of them) means that you have insurance against being unemployed or of becoming incapable of work.

Let's imagine that you get sick. You are seen by a doctor employed by the friendly society, and then visited by other members.

These are people you see at meetings of the local branch of the society. They live nearby. If you need some help, they will willingly offer it.

But if they see you out in the garden, perfectly fit and well, they will know that you are cheating your fellow society members. You would be shamed in your own community. This represents a strong pressure on you to behave well and to be honest. It encourages a sense of responsibility and honour.

You are married. But note how you persuaded the young woman to marry you. She chose you with care because she knew that the state would not give her support if you turned out to be work-shy or irresponsible.

So she wanted a man who would be reliable and provide for any children you might have. To get this wife and have a family with her, you had an incentive to prove yourself a good, trustworthy man.
Over and over again, the absence of a welfare state left in place natural pressures on people to be decent. But the modern welfare state has taken many of these away. It has said to poorer women: "Don't worry if the father of your children can't provide; other taxpayers will." It has said to men: "Don't worry if you don't feel too good, you can stay on incapacity benefit for years on end and we probably won't know if you are working on the side."

If claimants have lied, there is often no punishment and no public shame. People don't really care if you cheat a whole nation's taxpayers – not like they would care if you were cheating them and their friends personally.

The impact of the welfare state on the character of Britain is pervasive. There is not the room here to look at the effects of other parts of the welfare state: the keeping of alienated children at state schools; the discouragement to saving provided by means-tested benefits, now being enhanced by Gordon Brown's convoluted and inefficient system of tax credits; and the impact of permanent mass unemployment – which has only existed since the introduction of the welfare state – on people's morale and attitudes.

Yet these add up to powerful forces shaping our lives and changing our culture.

There are, of course, still some people who are marvellously kind and decent. But how many children being brought up today understand the culture and the way of thinking that led Admiral Nelson, on his deathbed, to say "Thank God, I have done my duty"?

To buy a copy of The Welfare State We're In from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop for £12.99, call free on 0800 0153232. Postage and packing costs £1.95. Order on-line at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk

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Useful figures on using prisons to fight crime:

"Anti-prison campaigners are, of course, fond of claiming that jail does not work, pointing to the high levels of re-offending among ex-convicts. But this is to ignore the crucial point that when a criminal is locked up, it is physically impossible for him to commit any offences.

"He may return to his life of crime once he is released, but at least when he is inside, the public is safe from him.

"There are sobering statistics to show just how many crimes he might have committed had he not been locked up. According to a Home Office survey in 2000, the average inmate committed 140 crimes in the 12 months before his admission into custody.

"On that basis, if we locked up 10,000 more offenders a year, we could prevent 1.4 million offences, saving the public purse a fortune as well as reducing aggravation for law-abiding citizens.

"The indisputable fact is that, according to police records and the authoritative British Crime Survey, crime levels have fallen when more offenders have been sent to prison.

"Yet the conjunction of a rising jail population and declining crime causes the anti-prison brigade to descend into tortuously illogical thinking and intellectual absurdities as they refuse to face up to the facts."

This is from an article by David Green in the Daily Mail

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Unfortunately the Express does not publish online so I can't link to an excellent article by Simon Kernick, a novellist, with the headline "How law and order has been betrayed by the crazy Human Rights Act". It would be good if a copy of this article could be deposited with the porters of every QC in London and at the offices of all solicitors.

In brief, he describes how Lisa Potts saved children from being hacked to death with a machete and was herself badly injured as a result. She could not work for at least five years and was awarded £68,000 compensation. Since then, £2.7 million was awarded by the prison service to a prisoner last moonth allegedly for negligence over a failed suicide bid. The sum of £72,000 was paid to another prisoner who fell over and hurt his back.

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In researching the article (see previous entry) on prison sentencing, I came across the following facts and figures:

In January 1993 there were 41,561 in jail in England and Wales. The current population is 77,004 (according to BBC Online).

When Labour came to power in 1997, the prison population had increased to more than 60,000, a rise of about 45 per cent in four years.

The prison population is currently 143 per 100,000 of total population in England and Wales. In other words, 0.143% of the total population is in jail.

The equivalent figures for other countries are:

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Unedited version of my article in today's Daily Express:

Anybody reading this newspaper would have been proud to have had Tom Grant as a son or brother. He left school last year with A grades in history, politics and French. He had been captain of football and was awarded Oakham School's W.W.Holman prize for 'Promise, Endeavour and Achievement'. Only two weeks ago, he returned to his former school in Rutland and the headmaster, Dr Spence, remarked "He seemed so alive and so buoyed with enthusiasm". Everything we know about Tom Grant suggests he was a particularly fine, young man, with a strong sense of responsibility.

It was because of his sense of responsibility that when he saw an argument on the train getting to a dangerous point, he intervened. He paid for the decision with his life. He was stabbed to death. He had been on his way from Glasgow to Paignton to see his parents.

Yesterday, on the very same day we heard of the Tom Grant's death, an interview was published in The Guardian with the chief judge of this country: Lord Phillips. Lord Phillips is at the peak of the legal profession. As Lord Chief Justice, he is influential with the judges who make important decisions every day. So what did he say? That fewer criminals should be sent to jail. He expressed concerned that prison overcrowding was "absolutely fatal" for efforts to treat convicts. He said judges should not send people to prison unless they really have to and that "the sensible place for rehabilitation is in the community".

It is tempting just to throw ones hands up in despair.

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Kiyan Prince, 15, was stabbed to death with a knife last week outside his school, the London Academy in Edgware, North London. Since then it has emerged that two of the classmates of this promising young footballer, one aged 14 and the other 15, have been found guilty of the knife murder of an asylum seeker.

Some parents at the school have been quoted saying their children are terrified of knives. There has been a plea for the children who go there to be checked for weapons, to make the others safe.

All this comes soon after a series of knife crimes recently including the fatal stabbing of Christopher Alamene, 18, in Sheerness, Kent.

If ever there were a moment when the public would want the Prime Minister to offer a really convincing lead, then this was it.

But yesterday in parliament, when he was questioned about how he was going to deal with the growing knife culture, how did he respond? Tony Blair said that he was "hopeful" that the amnesty for turning over knives to the police, which started yesterday, would be successful. He claimed that such amnesties had "worked successfully some years back". He also mentioned that the minimum age for buying a knife would be increased and that further kinds of knife were being added to the 'offensive weapons' list.

It is impossible to believe that this little collection of measures will be at all effective. The scale of the problem was small only a decade ago. Now it is growing rapidly. Previous amnesties did absolutely nothing to stop the growth of the knife culture.

The figures are astonishing. The number of people prosecuted for carrying a knife rose by nearly 60 per cent in the five years up to 2004 - a huge rise in a very short time. There is plenty of reason to think it is getting much worse.

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The revised and updated paperback edition of The Welfare State We're In is published tomorrow. As part of the publicity for the launch, I have written an article that appears in the Sunday Telegraph today. Here is an extract:

According to research published last week, Britons have the worst reputation for yobbish behaviour in Europe.

Three-quarters of Europeans think Britain has a problem w