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from
Mises Website
It will demonstrate, contrary to official narratives, that both overall levels of crime and violent crime have been increasing, not decreasing, as the size of the state in the UK has gotten bigger.
It will also expose how the Labour government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from 1997 to 2010, deliberately obscured real crime data with estimated crime rates based on survey data as opposed to the real numbers.
I will
demonstrate that, contrary to popular opinion perpetuated by
progressive myths, life was much safer in Britain during the era of
classical laissez-faire from the 1850s to 1911.
The Labour Party continued this madness under Gordon Brown who broke the record in 2008 by passing 2,823 new laws, a 6% increase on even his megalomaniac predecessor. 2
In 2010, Labour's last year in power before handing over the reigns to the Blairite social radical, David Cameron, there was a 54% surge in privacy cases brought against public bodies, 3 and the Cabinet were refusing freedom of information requests at a rate of 51%. 4
The vast number
of new laws under Labour does not count the 2,100 new regulations
the EU passed in 2006 alone, which apparently is average for them.
Many of these, naturally, were red-tape regulations.
To give you an idea: 6
There are many more...
However, there were also some more serious breaches of civil liberty. One common tactic of the Blair government was to use a moral panic to pass radical new legislation.
For example, in 2006, he passed the Terrorism Act that overturned habeas corpus and gave the British police the right to detain anyone for any reason for 90 days.
At the time, this got widespread public support because of the recent 7/7 bombings in London.
This means that, in the UK, the police can arrest you without you necessarily having committed a crime if they can brand your activities as "terrorist" or "extremist."
Although
these laws were ostensibly brought about to combat Islamic
terrorism, the ever-expanding definitions of "far right" and
"extremist" demonstrate how they can be weaponized against the
British people.
The Count Dankula case, for example, in which a man was arrested for "hate speech," then tried and made to pay a fine for telling off-color jokes about the Nazis on Youtube. 8
Then there was the young woman who was found guilty of being "grossly offensive" for posting Snoop Dogg lyrics on her Instagram account. 9
And, most recently, the political activist Tommy Robinson was arrested and tried in mere hours for recording outside a courtroom. 10
In each of these cases, despite some protests against
the legal rulings, the media broadly sided with the courts, citing
the technicalities of the law - in the former two cases section 127
of the
Communications Act 2003 (another Blair special)
- and brand
anyone who would protest "far right" or "extremist."
Here are eleven warning signs: 11
The British state has become increasingly Orwellian in its gaslighting of the British public since at least 1997 with near-total complicity from the media.
In a recent article for
Quillette, I argued that this has been the case in both
Britain and the USA for years. 12
During a period in which both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party have become increasingly statist and interventionist on both an economic and civil level, we have been continually told that one of the positive effects of ever-increasing government control is that society is becoming more peaceful.
This is the narrative, for example, of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature - Why Violence Has Declined. 13
In the first few months of 2018, the shocking increases in instances of violent crime in Sadiq Khan's London, which in the past year has seen rises of,
But this
story told by The Guardian - of a general trend down in crime over
the past twenty years followed by a sudden and inexplicable spike - is simply not true, as I will demonstrate in this paper.
"New Labour" were famous for the efficiency of their propaganda machine.
American readers will no doubt be aware of Mr. Blair's complicity in making exaggerated claims about Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" in the run up to the war in Iraq, but few readers - British, American, or otherwise - will know that the Blair government was also lying about the extent of crime in Britain.
The Labour Party, who were so much about media perceptions and political spin, needed to find a way to show on paper that their "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" agenda was making good on its promise.
So, in 2003, Tony Blair permanently changed the way crime is reported in the UK by introducing the National Crime Recording Standard' (NCRS). 18
Up until that point, crime in the UK was reported using hard data drawn from actual arrests and convictions from the police. However, from that point onwards, the official statistics were to be drawn from the British Crime Survey which estimates crime based on a survey of 50,000 people aged 16 or over.
This works much like how television companies produce estimates for their show ratings. So that means that the statistics you see quoted in newspapers like The Guardian are not hard figures, but estimates drawn from surveys.
Whatever the merits of this method, it produced a graph for the Blair government that looked like this:
Of course, this takes a huge number of crimes out of the data.
For example, as it was introduced in 2003, because only over 16-year olds could be interviewed, crimes against minors were not registered in the official statistics.
Also, because interviews had to take place in private properties, street crime habitually would not show up in these numbers.
Of course, so-called "victimless" crimes - fraud or online crime - do not show up in this data either. Once you start to account for some of these caveats, it becomes more obvious why this extraordinary change in methodology would produce a downwards trend in the data.
In fact, it was explicitly designed so that, because of
these changes, it could not be compared with numbers before 2002.
This massive margin of error means that the real crime rate becomes a matter for debate as opposed to a question of hard evidence. It seems to me that this was a deliberate choice by the Blair government.
Hence, we now find the BBC wondering about what the real crime rate might be. 20
And this is where the true extent of the Orwellian nightmare of the Blair and Gordon Brown years dawns:
"Post-truth"
did not start with Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump - Tony Blair was
doing it from the minute he stepped into office...
Incidentally, once the leader of the Tories, David Cameron, became prime minister in 2010, Chris Grayling became the Secretary for Justice and, to my knowledge, was happy to let this little detail slide and continue with the survey-based methodology.
It is
funny how power can change the incentives for action...
So violent crime
convictions increased by more than ten times the growth of the
population. 22
Both claims seem extraordinary:
The methodology that measures
victims through estimates from survey data clearly is not getting
this correct.
So the size of the repressive apparatuses of the state have increased greatly, and with it the total number of criminals.
It is clear that with less personal freedom and a bigger and more invasive state comes less personal responsibility and greater lawlessness.
It is also clear that as the British state has become more top-down in orientation than in its common-law past, it has levied increased coercive legislative power against the British people it supposedly serves.
The state is now behaving in
an openly
Orwellian manner with near-explicit contempt for the public.
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