A friend of mine, who we’ll call him Brian, is a businessman. He’s a pretty successful one. Every year, his profits have been gradually going up.
But Brian has problems. He gambles. He uses cocaine. He says his life is going well, because his profits keep going up, but this feels like an excuse for a dangerous lifestyle.
This is how I feel about Fraser Nelson discussing crime statistics. Nelson might not be wrong — as Noah Carl has argued — that violent crime rates have declined. But this doesn’t mean that Britain is doing well.
The general reduction in violent crime, after all, is not a result of successful policies or people becoming nice. It is the result of an ageing population meaning that there are fewer young people — and of the police having access to more expansive and modern technology. Once, if someone was shot or stabbed in London it was difficult to find a suspect unless there were witnesses. Now, CCTV is everywhere, and detectives have access to DNA evidence and cell site data. There might be no fewer real and potential killers but more of them get caught.
The problem, then, is not that violent crime has increased. It is that it should have declined far more. Unfortunately, mass migration has brought a lot of dangerous men onto British streets, and a failure to properly incarcerate dangerous men — British or foreign — keeps them there.
Right-wingers should not have to resort to the kind of hysterical apocalypticism that encourages people to speculate that they might have to wear stab-proof vests in London. We can oppose Nelsonian complacence on its own terms.
In this spirit, I wanted to register some mild disagreements with my excellent colleague Sebastian Milbank’s recent piece on British life. Sebastian writes:
The utilitarian experiment of governing society via selective statistics and scientific management has catastrophically failed, and has rendered otherwise intelligent men and women into a kind of wilful idiocy, unable to accept the evidence of their senses unless it can be translated into data.
Now, my disagreement here is only partial. It is certainly the case that statistics can be misleading. If the Mayor of Sludgeville argues that the data demonstrates a decline in road accidents in 2025, one might need the context of The Great Sludgeville Limousine Pile-Up of 2024. So, today Chris Bayliss makes an eloquent case against governments using surface-level GDP growth to mask economic decline. But it is not excessively cold and bloodless to point out that this economic decline can be captured by other statistics. The problem isn’t using systematic data. It is misusing it.
It is simply wrong, in the opinion of this author, that the establishment has had a primarily “social scientific worldview”. It gives the Blob far too much credit. The establishment is not technocratic — it is managerial. It is less concerned with data when it comes to policy than with human rights law and incoherent pseudo-democratic concepts like “stakeholders”. Technocrats, whatever their potential deficiencies in cultural and moral terms, would at least have had the brains to be warier about Mirpuri migrants and to try and get the occasional power station built.
“Much of the battle between data and anecdote comes down to an inability to bridge individual experience with recorded trends,” writes Sebastian. It can be true. But we are often able to bridge this gap. See the dynamite statistics that have been uncovered relating to violent crime or social housing. The grounds of empiricism might be incomplete but they are fertile.
Some years ago, it was common for “post-liberals”, as they would now be called, to argue that the establishment focused on economic matters at the expense of cultural concerns. The problem with this argument — which the author recalls being convinced by and promoting — was that the establishment was not in fact preoccupied with economic growth. Its economic prescription entailed short-termism and managed decline. The argument that it was too in thrall to economic growth was far too generous – akin to arguing that a complete slob was too focused on exercise at the expense of diet.
If we are going to take a path it can’t hurt if it is well-lit
Arguing that the establishment thinks too empirically seems similar to this. It is no doubt true that the great and good in Britain do not have a rich enough sociocultural perspective. But they are also far too often blind — and wilfully blind — when it comes to the data. When Lewis Goodall sneers his face off about discontented populists, he isn’t thinking too empirically. He isn’t thinking much at all. Fraser Nelson, meanwhile, has an essentially moral commitment to multiculturalism. Stats are largely an excuse for promoting cultural preferences. None of this has much more to do with science than my cheerful references to the speculative health benefits of taurine have to do with my energy drink addiction.
Evidence is not enough when we are making policy. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, the empirical can illuminate different paths but it cannot determine which one we should take. That said, if we are going to take a path it can’t hurt if it is well-lit.
