I don’t like the elevation of the Lawrence murder to totem status either – the important thing about that one from a policy perspective is not that some thugs killed a kid, but that the police investigated it badly because he was black, leading to the Macpherson report and some positive steps in making the police be less racist going forward.

To be honest, as someone who’s been mugged, burgled and assaulted-occasioning-ABH before now (on separate occasions, to forestall any comedians), I’m quite happy to state that all of these things have had a negligible effect on my life, beyond small amounts of pain or trauma and a day’s worth of hassle sorting things out.

But I guess the only Victims Of Crime who get to have their opinions taken into account are the ones who advocate Hanging and Flogging, not the ones who point out that on a lot of occasions even crimes classed as serious (robbery, domestic burglary and ABH are certainly considered serious) are still mostly trivial and not worth getting too worked up about.

Personally I think it’s sick to describe any murder, even if it was the only in the country over the course of the whole year, as a ‘non-event’.

Your idea of the ‘negligible impact of crime’ is utterly bizarre. Why don’t you go and speak to actual victims of serious crime and tell them that the crime has had a ‘negligible effect’ on their lives. Or do you think things only matter if they have a devastating impact on the lives of everyone in society ‘en masse’. If that’s the case, then most of what we argue about in politics (including left-wing issues) is worth bothering about.

Also, the murders that make it into the news are generally the peaks of the iceburg of much more frequent low-level violence and ‘anti-social behaviour’. But if you think murders are ‘non-events’ then I suppose you think muggings, assaults and harassment are childsplay.

(in fact, you only have a serious chance of dying in a stabbing if you’re a thug who starts a knife fight with another thug…)

I’d be delighted to send a copy to Mrs Newlove, on the grounds that at the very least it would annoy the poisonous harpy a bit…

You should send a copy to Mrs. Newlove, it’ll be such a comfort, I’m sure.

It wouldn’t matter if exaggerating the scale of the problem didn’t make it more likely youngsters will seek to protect themselves with knives and the wider population will needlessly worry about what is a tiny risk for all but a few.

More generally, my ’studied complacency’ isn’t in support of the government of my choice (if you think the current NHS-money-squandering, 42-days-interning, porn-banning, cannabis-upgrading, Iraq-war-supporting, Daily-Mail-appeasing lot would be the government of my choice, you really haven’t been paying attention).

If it exists, which I’d question, it’s in support of the general principle that most public concerns (crime, the economy, immigration, terrorism) are far less severe than they appear, and that we’d do far better in terms of aggregate public happiness if we worried about them less.

Ultimately, even if making the public believe there was a terrible knife crime epidemic did save a few lives rather than making things worse (let’s say it halved the annual rate of teen knife murder, saving about 15 lives), the harm done by making everyone believe things were unspeakably awful (hence scared to go out, spending on steel doors and stab-proof vests, avoiding living in cities or having kids) would be far greater than the good done by saving those lives.

And if you don’t think it’s reasonable to trade off quality-of-life for a large group against life-and-death for a few individuals, you probably shouldn’t be allowed to vote…

Your post gives no hint of that. Surely dead children are too high a price to pay for studied political complacency in support of the government of one’s choice? This isn’t the first time I’ve picked up this kind of omission in your posts.

But yes, I genuinely believe that, given the negligible impact that crime (rather than the irrational fear of crime) has on most people’s lives, the human waste (and, less importantly, the money waste) on imprisoning people and writing them off as members of society is totally ridiculous.