it's not a trend

The following are axiomatic, right?

• Britain is one of a number of 'broken' societies in which civilised life is being rapidly eroded by steadily rising crime.
• Knife crime is a particularly serious problem and it is fair to talk in terms of an epidemic of these kinds of offences.
• Central government, local government and the police have combined to wage a 'war' on hard-pressed motorists, reaching for ever more draconian financial penalties in order to raise revenue.

The thing is, none of these statements are true. Last summer, the Office for National Statistics noted that by 2010, levels of crime in England and Wales had fallen to their lowest levels for thirty years. It was further noted, however, that two-thirds of people surveyed believed that crime was in fact becoming an ever more serious problem. The biggest gap between reality and public perception was demonstrated in the area of knife crime. The same study revealed that the murder rate is falling and that gun crime has fallen by 36% since it peaked in 2005-06. The report also showed that fixed penalty fines issued for motoring offences had halved since 2005. Overall, in 2009-10, crime levels in England and Wales were at their lowest since the British Crime survey began in 1981.

This is the Broken Britain you've heard so much about.

There may be a number of reasons for this big gap between the real world and how the public perceives it. Some will be attracted to the theory of oppressive governments seeking expanded powers of arrest, detention and surveillance with the spurious justification of keeping us safe from harm. Others may prefer to lay the blame at the door of our newspapers, seeking to sell copies and flog advertising space off the back of sensationally distorting the mundane truth that this is a fundamentally safe, peaceful and well-ordered country. Both may be at least partly true and there may be any number of additional factors at play. What remains clear, though, is that talk of statistical trends should be treated with a healthy dose of scepticism by anyone interested in not being manipulated.

One notable exponent of spinning a trend out of a few incidents (or even just one incident) seems to be Daily Mail firebrand Melanie Phillips.

Writing this week, Phillips reports on the strange and sad tale of a five-year-old child named Sasha Laxton, whose parents decided to avoid classifying him as either a boy or a girl. She quite rightly points out that however well-intended this was meant to be, the effects are unpredictable and may well be harmful.

So how big a problem is this?

"Sasha's parents," writes Phillips "are by no means a one-off aberration. Last year, a Canadian couple insisted they would also raise their baby, Storm, as a gender-neutral child."

So that's two nutty sets of parents, then. How many more at there? Well, although Phillips contends that "in certain circles, this is becoming a fashion," she declines to cite any more examples. True, she finds what sound like reasonably worrying cases of academics or public bodies making strange-sounding pronouncements about the desirability of talking down differences between the genders. But she offers no further examples of actual families raising actual children according to such principles.

Keeping in mind the falling crime figures and the widespread perception that the opposite is true, you may agree that it is wise to remain healthily sceptical about the evidence of worrying trends even when frightening or unwelcome incidents are reported very regularly. Surely that level of scepticism should be even higher when just two isolated cases of potty parenting are put forward to support Melanie Phillips's argument that "far from ushering in a better world", this approach to children and gender "threatens to stamp out the individual right to know what we are, and to rob us of humanity itself."

The tone here is so shrill that it seems hard not to conclude that Phillips was desperately reaching for some hysterical bullshit with which to fill her column on Sunday and that she came up with a particularly outlandish piece on this occasion. The Mail peddles fear of change and difference. That's what it does. But Phillips runs the risk of trying so hard to deliver the goods that she'll up looking like an especially deluded fantasist. 

get 'em down in camden town

never stop snapping

Why is it a good idea to have a half-decent camera with you all the time? Because photos that become favourites can be about capturing the ephemeral glimpse. Come back a year, a month, a week, a day, an hour or even a minute later. Even the colours and textures of a favourite building may not be around forever:

everything is electrified

today, quite by chance: another stumble into the Collective/Camden Town Unlimited gallery space. this time: a small collection of pictures by London figurative artist Joe Simpson. taking a break from his usual concentration on portraits and scenes with a cinematic quality, Simpson has assembled some works themed around electricity pylons, telegraph poles and grand skies. quotidian poles and pylons are among the taken-for-granted objects closely examined here at/by this is my england. so a little time among these silent structures in the white quiet of the long planky room, exchanging a few words with Simpson himself and then pushing off back to workaday world. again. pleasant interlude. the exhibition continues until 29th Jan. and pieces can be bought at prices between £40 and £650

Joe  Simpson + pylons

fake

according to 'experts' (who?), this little offering on Oval Rd. NW1 ain't a Banksy. still quite nice though, innit?

at it again

the camden sloganeer is at it again,
but these time he's having a pop at beans
not banks

OUR OFFICE

trail

dealing in disappointment

Imagine living in one of the most affluent countries in the world. You always have more than enough food to keep you alive and in good health. You have constant access to clean drinking water. Your bodily waste is transported efficiently from your home to a sewage treatment plant that you have never visited. Your home is always warm, well-lit and dry. You are gainfully employed and a system of rules and laws ensures that your employer cannot force you to work in dangerous or insanitary conditions. In every week, you have at least two days set aside for leisure and to manage your personal affairs. A number of additional full days can also be set aside for you to take holidays. If you have children, they are provided with an education and are not expected to work for a living before reaching adulthood. Most of your fellow citizens are essentially law-abiding so the streets of your home town are safer and cleaner than in the towns of most of the world's countries. A number of industries exist purely to provide people like you with things and activities to keep you amused - professional sport, publishing, television, movies, video games etc.

But you are dissatisfied. You are dissatisfied because every day you see images of people whose lives appear to be much more comfortable and interesting than yours. They have more money. They appear to have many friends and to be adored not only by those around them but by millions of strangers whom they have never met. They are better dressed than you, wearing more expensive and well-made clothes, which fit them better and which are combined to form more stylish outfits. They have more attractive facial features than yours - better bone structure, no blemishes, straighter and whiter teeth, better behaved hair. They seem to burst with almost excessively good health and move with graceful ease. They wear wristwatches that cost as much as you earn in a half a year. They drive cars that cost as much as you earn in several years. They live in homes that cost more than you will earn in your whole working life. They are routinely congratulated for even their smallest achievements. They constantly receive compliments. When they express opinions, their thoughts are listened to carefully and shared via newspapers and other media. When they consent to be interviewed, it is inconceivable that they should be asked any questions that might cause embarrassment. To ensure this does not happen, contractual arrangements are put in place and carefully enforced.

You press your nose up against these lives. These lives are played out on your TV screen. These lives are described, down to the most banal detail, in magazines that you can buy in the supermarket, at the petrol station or in the ticket hall of a railway station. There exists a subspecies of journalists, employed only to gush enthusiastically about the minutiae of these lives. All the time. Every day. Over and over.

They look down on your from billboards. They smoulder at you during the advert breaks. You would recognise their voices with your eyes closed. You see their faces more often than you see your own mother's face. You see them thousands of times a day. Millions of times a year. As you drive to work, voices on the radio are chattering excitedly about their lives. When you get to the office, colleagues stand around the water cooler discussing these people's exploits.

On the same day, you are asked two questions. You are able to answer the first question much more confidently than the second one.

1. "Which of the Kardashian sisters is the eldest?"
2. "Can you explain the difference between the terms 'Great Britain' and 'United Kingdom'?"

The makers of numerous products and services imply that a little of the glamour will rub off on you should you spend your money on their wares. So you buy them. You borrow money to buy them. For a long time, you borrow this money in the belief that the next time you move house, the profit you make on the sale of your home will wipe out the debts you have accumulated buying these things. It's like a miracle. You get a modest pay rise. This allows you to borrow enough to afford a bigger home and pay off your credit card bills and personal loans. 

But then that stops working.

Even when it did work, the clothes, cosmetics and haircare products did not have quite the same effect on you as they seemed to have on the people on the billboards.

(video by Jesse Rosten)

stick 'em up