A broad decline in violence provides little consolation amid such sensational crimes
There are two competing narratives about British society. One holds that it is increasingly violent and dangerous. One holds that it is increasingly safe and peaceful.
It might look as if one of these narratives must be wrong. But perhaps both can have elements of truth.
I believe that Noah Carl — the last commentator to defend PC orthodoxies without good reason to do so — is correct that violence has declined in the UK. An ageing population, which drinks less alcohol, which spends more indoors, which carries less cash, which is never far from the gaze of CCTV, and which imprisons more of its antisocial elements has, in general, become a less aggressive one.
So, how can there be any truth to the narrative that Britain is becoming more violent and dangerous?
Well, the type of violent crime is significant. There might be less violence overall but there has been a rise in indiscriminate, public, sensational violence.
Ah, a Pinkerite optimist might say, you just think that because smartphones and social media have made that violence more visible! I’m sure there is some truth to the idea that it is easier to see dysfunction in all its richness in the 2020s than it was before. London really was more violent in the 1990s than it is today but if someone was killed in Peckham there was no footage to be uploaded online. Yet some forms of sensational crime really have become more common.
In the last ten years, these mass stabbing have become more common
Unless we count the Peterloo Massacre, I have found no cases of mass stabbing incidents in the UK prior to the 1990s. Then — during a decade where violent crime peaked in the UK — there was the Rackams knife attack, a knife attack on a Middlesbrough school, a machete attack on a Wolverhampton school, and a nude swordsman attacking a London church (curiously, all but one of the assailants were mentally ill black men, though their violence has understandably been eclipsed in the national imagination by Thomas Hamilton’s far bloodier mass shooting in Dunblane).
In the last ten years, these mass stabbing have become more common — and Britain has experienced a series of grim “firsts”. There was the first mass stabbing to have claimed several children’s lives. There was, last month, the first fatal attack on a synagogue. Yesterday was the first mass stabbing incident on a train. Granted, there will always be “firsts” if one gets granular enough (“first mass stabbing to have claimed three victims in a McDonald’s in Grimsby …” et cetera). But I don’t think I am getting very granular.
This sort of indiscriminate, public, sensational violence will always disturb people more than the “normal” violence of street gangs and pub fights, because, if nothing else, it can strike anywhere and it can claim anyone. There have been 10,000 murders in New York since 2001 but their cumulative impact cannot match the impact of 9/11.
The nature of this violence also makes security measures more depressing and oppressive. Football hooliganism was a lot worse in Britain in the 1980s but most people didn’t go to football matches. Gang violence was a lot worse in Britain in the 1990s but most people did not go to Hackney nightclubs. Now, going to something as family-friendly as a Christmas market, or walking across a location as iconic as Westminster Bridge, means being confronted with anti-terror bollards.
That much of the indiscriminate, public, sensational violence in the UK has been avoidable, in the sense of being perpetrated by people who should have been institutionalised or should never have been in the country to begin with, compounds the horror and the outrage. We all know that violence is ineradicable. Human beings are what they are. But when violent people have been introduced to a society, and when their potential for violence has been ignored, it is harder to accept — and it also raises the question of the stability of the decline in violence in a changing Britain. That there has been a downward trend in violent crime by no means entails that it will necessarily continue. (Look at Sweden — once considered a sort of social democrat utopia.)
So, the Fraser Nelsons of the world have a point. On average, Britain has become a safer place. But people don’t think in such abstract terms — and there is at least some justice in not doing so. Britain can be safer and scarier — and there will be no point in giving people cheerful statistical analysis this week as they cast nervous glances up and down their train.
