A Guardian article covering reasons for UK citizens to be optimistic. This is also one of the most compelling arguments I've read in the Roe vs. Wade debate...
Blair should be alarmed that, despite the figures, people still think things are getting worse in the public services
Polly Toynbee
Friday October 21, 2005
The Guardian
In just four months the public has changed its mind radically. People may still rank Labour safely above the Tories: no surprise there, considering current Tory self-obsession. But Labour should be seriously alarmed that people suddenly think everything is getting worse and expect little to improve.
That is what they tell Mori in its latest depressing delivery index on attitudes towards public services and the economy. "There has been a 180 degree flip from optimism to pessimism," Mori says. This comes despite hard facts showing that the NHS, education and crime reduction are steadily improving all the time. No doubt things could be better, but the outcome figures do show steady progress. Yet the public, which was optimistic in May, now thinks that everything is on the slide. (Private polling for Labour confirms it.) And Mori finds that confidence in the NHS has taken the worst tumble.
Take yesterday's annual crime figures for September. They were good, they really were. Burglary is down 17%, car theft 10% and violence 7%, according to the British Crime Survey, which is the best measure because it picks up on more crimes than those recorded by the police. No doubt this morning's press will blaze with shocking headlines suggesting that no one is safe in their beds; deliberate misinterpretation of the figures will use the quarter's recorded crime figures - also down in almost every case - and knowingly distort them. Recorded violence has risen because of a new system demanding that police write down every minor fracas: one man hitting two people outside a pub is two crimes. Michael Howard plastered the land with election posters claiming violent crime was rising. That wasn't true, any more than it is true when David Davis says, as he does all the time, that "violent crime is continuing to spiral out of control".
Why has crime fallen across the western world since the mid-1990s? Cars are better defended, homes better protected, televisions and DVD players too cheap to steal. Policing is better. Labour can claim credit for a blitz on crack houses, street robbery and crime hot spots. Above all, unemployment is down - though good times increase casual violence because they provide more money to drink and fight. One startling theory from the US economists Steven Levitt and John Donohue is that crime falls in proportion to the rise in abortion. US figures show that crime fell steeply about 18 years after the Roe v Wade case legalised abortion. Unwanted foetuses would have grown up as neglected children, with many turning to crime - the missing cohorts of criminals. I checked UK figures and found the same correlation: abortion reached high rates by the late-1970s and crime rates started falling sharply from 1995.
Multitudes of grand theories abound, but on one thing every expert is agreed: crime is falling. As it falls we keep redefining as reportable crimes events that were once too slight to attract police notice. Antisocial behaviour is the "new" phenomenon hurriedly filling the vacuum in our anxieties.
What should seriously alarm Labour are this year's figures showing the public fear of crime rising again after it had begun to fall. Why do people fear so much? To be sure the press is appalling, turning graphs on their heads to find a scary headline. Television drama makes lurid rape-and-rip serial murder look like an everyday event, while Crimewatch milks fear shamelessly. But none of that has changed in the past four months.
Labour should ask itself why people's trust in policing rose steeply just before and during the general election, only to plummet soon afterwards. Was it because Labour MPs and ministers went out and argued the case for the success of their crime and policing figures during that time? Then the first thing Tony Blair did when he came back from the election was thunder on about boys in hoodies, respect and Asbos. He made it his number one message, to the dismay of many of his ministers looking for third-term optimism and a vision of progress. So the public gets the message that crime must be bad because the prime minister himself keeps saying so. It's the first thing he has done again on returning to parliament: chasing his own tail, demolishing his own success.
But even more alarmingly, the NHS has taken the most drastic hit in public esteem. In May, people were optimistic: 9% more voters expected the NHS to improve in the next few years. Quite right too. Waiting lists are falling exceptionally fast (before private provision kicked in, that is). Labour politicians stomped the country singing the praises of the health service and promising better to come. But four months on, people changed their minds. Now, a 9% increase has turned into an 11% decrease, as people expect the NHS to get worse. Mori says that public expectations of the NHS are close to the worst recorded. How did Labour allow that to happen?
Here is a good guess. The whole service is being thrown into turmoil. It is unknowable how much will fetch up in private hands as the NHS becomes a mere purchaser. Cries of anguish come from inside the service about likely closures due to the instability of cash flows. Insecurity grips those in community services who don't know who will employ them. No one knows how to pay off debts - by no means all the hospitals' fault - and there is despair among battalions of good managers who have to re-apply for their jobs for a third time under yet another Labour reorganisation. "Reform" must be done, says the prime minister. Why? Because the NHS is rubbish, riddled with waste and inertia. That is the implication of his impatience. Is it any wonder the nation believes him? One million unhappy NHS employees go home and tell perhaps a further 10 million people that the system is in chaos. No wonder Mori detects a plummeting public optimism.
There is a time before elections for all on the centre-left to rally support for Labour to keep the Tories well and truly trounced (with nose pegs if need be). But when elections are over, it is time for ministers and MPs to question which direction they are being taken in. It is time for ministers to voice concerns outside their own narrow silos, whatever the protocols. It is a time for new ideas and creativity, but also time to speak out against very bad ideas. A lot of that was voiced in myriad fringe meetings in Brighton and a deal more of it murmured in hotel bars and corridors. Apart from a few cabinet deadwood drones put up to defend anything and everything, there is alarm at the leader's accelerating "reforms" in virtually every department. Reckless marketising radicalism is his dying phase.
He will be gone, but a more dangerous opposition will capitalise on this public disappointment. It is time ministers took their wider responsibilities seriously as they see how much public optimism has been squandered in just four short months.
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