At a press conference on Monday in which Reform UK announced the Tory police and crime commissioner for Leicestershire and Rutland was joining their ranks, as well as former prison governor Vanessa Frake, I asked Nigel Farage a simple question.
But his answer wasn’t what I expected.
I asked the Reform UK leader if the six-week campaign on law and order, with the tagline “Britain is Lawless”, was in fact project fear scaring people into voting for his party.
He utterly rejected that claim and responded to me saying: “No, they are afraid. They are afraid. I dare you, I dare you to walk through the West End of London after 9 o’clock of an evening wearing jewellery. You wouldn’t do it. You know that I’m right. You wouldn’t do it.”
I am not afraid to walk in the West End of London after 9pm wearing jewellery.
I have done it many times before and will continue to do so… but perhaps that is because I do not own a Rolex.
However, just because Farage is wrong on that point, doesn’t mean he isn’t tapping into other legitimate fears across the country.
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Snatch theft does worry me, hence why I now have a phone case with a strap attached to it that I can put around my body.
And I worry about knife crime in my area and what the impact could be if I were to have children – on the weekend someone was stabbed to death a stone’s throw from my house.
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However, if we look at the statistics, it is invariably a more nuanced picture than Farage or social media might have us believe.
According to police reports, thefts from a person in London are almost five times the national average, and they’ve been going up since the pandemic.
And the Office for National Statistics (ONS) also notes that thefts outside of the home, eg phone snatching, has increased.
However, possession of weapons has fallen in London by 29% over the last three years.
And according to the ONS, crime in England and Wales is 30% lower than in 2015, and 76% lower than 1995.
And it is a similar picture for violent crime.
In short, am I right to be more worried that snatch theft and knife crime in London is increasing? Yes, and no.
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But Nigel Farage is tapping into voters’ emotions – their feelings that the country is broken. It’s a picture the Conservative Party helped to create and the Labour Party happily painted to great effect during the general election campaign of 2024.
And the more politicians of all colours tell voters that “the system is broken”, the more voters might start to believe them.
That is what Nigel Farage is banking on.
