Civitas

Robberies of personal property in London is a good figure to take. The Home Office is directly responsible for London's policing. There's been no significant change in how robbery is defined. The category of "robberies" has hardly been affected by changes in recording practices by the police. The British Crime Survey has too few cases of robbery for it to be of much use, so the Home Office uses the police figures. The figures are right up to date, so officials and ministers cannot claim that things have (unprovably) improved since the figures were collected.

For all these reasons, the usual slipping and sliding between one set of figures and another is not possible here.

On the assumption that the December 2004 figure will be very low at 2,500, robberies in London would have fallen from 48,000 in 2001 to 36,000 in 2004.

But as late as 1990 there weren't as many as 36,000 robberies in the whole of England and Wales!

Taking the generous and hopeful estimate I suggested above--that the figure for London for December 2004 might be only 2,500--as late as 1961 there weren't as many as 2,500 robberies a year in the whole of England and Wales.

In the year David Blunkett became Home Secretary, 2001, there were 5,900 robberies in Lambeth alone. The national figure for robberies did not exceed 5,900 until 1969.

It is scarcely an occasion for popular celebration when the figure for Lambeth alone in the first 11 months of this year is 2,419. For this is more than the national figure of robberies for the full twelve months of 1961, 2,349, just before the cultural revolution began to shower its blessings upon us.

No the wonder people "fear" that crime is growing. People would have had to be extremely stupid not to come to fear crime. The stupid thing is to say that the fear of crime is "as much the problem" as crime itself.

David Blunkett has officially written as Home Secretary on "the family". But for him, as his Home Office's paper in July 2004 on community and crime made explicit, "the family" has virtually nothing to do with marriage.

He has revealed by his own conduct, furthermore, that he has no conception at all that he has done anything wrong, or that anybody can still be so benighted as to think he could have done anything wrong, in having a baby by another man's wife.

As the father of her child he has a full claim, according to his moral code, to all the social rights of parenthood. He must have been as gratified as I was amazed that he had Fathers4Justice parading for him over the weekend. I had always thought that they supported the wronged husband, not the infatuated interloper who wrongs him.

The incidental disclosures emerging from the affair show that such attitudes, such conduct and such claims are now regarded as entirely normal in the political, administrative, media and celebrity circles within which David Blunkett has spent the last few years. He leaves the Government with his "integrity intact".

The Blunkett case has made plain what before could be only suspected, that there was no chance at all that any possible connection between the dismemberment of the family and the rise in crime would be contemplated by such people, much less that they should favour any marriage-friendly policies.

Much better to believe (or feign) that crime is at an historically low level. (Is it possible that self-deception in own's own interest can be so powerful as to make such a statement a genuine error, rather than just a barefaced lie?)

For if crime is at an historically low level, and is sinking even lower, then obviously the sexual and parenting culture of the ruling, commenting and entertaining classes--now imitated and embraced as their own by most sections of society--cannot be held responsible for the non-existent high crime rates. "The fish rots from the head"? Not here, it doesn't!

It's the lower classes that are to blame. Hand out the ASBOs! Finger printing all round! More surveillance cameras will do it!

In the meantime ... improve rewards for any arrangement except permanent marriage as the basis for procreating and rearing children. Impress upon children in the schools that (with one exception) any "partnership life-style" is just as good as any other.

Denounce (in words approved today by a Daily Telegraph staff writer) criticism of the extra-marital adventures of Mr Blunkett's married lover as "nasty, sub-Saudi-Arabian, stone-the-adulteress stuff". [Comment, Daily Telegraph, 21 December 2004.]

Did you see any "sub-Saudi-Arabian stone-the-adulteress" stuff? Neither did anybody else. It was, the Daily Telegraph blandly tells us, the "sub-text" of "some of the stuff being put about". All we enlightened life-style people have to do is to decipher the code of these nasty sub-Saudi-Arabian adulteress-stoners and expose their real message. All partner life-styles are equal, but some are more equal than others, and life-long monogamy is not among them them.

(Is it a racial slur and backward to say that something is abhorrent because it is Saudi-Arabian, but not a racial slur and progressive to say something is abhorrent because it is nasty and sub-Saudi-Arabian?)

The Blunkett affair shows that, however much they lack self-knowledge and however much they wallow in their own self-serving justifications, we now enjoy political and media elites that are wonderfully well adapted to carrying out these tasks with genuine if self-deluded enthusiasm.

And let's be grateful to Mr Blunkett. Without so much as a nod towards the strengthening of life-long monogamy, and indeed giving a considerable shove that weakens it, he has reduced the robbery rate of personal property in London, so that there were "only" 33,700 robberies of personal property from January to November this year, and crime is at an "historically low" level.

By the way, from 1897 until 1941, there were never more than 400 robberies a year of personal and business property combined in all the cities, towns and villages of England and Wales put together.

These are not my figures. They are the Home Office's.