Latest news with #societalcollapse
The Independent
21-07-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
How realistic is Nigel Farage's promise to cut crime in half?
N igel Farage claims that he has a plan to 'cut crime in half, take back control of our streets, [and] take back control of our courts and prisons '. The Reform leader says that 'we are facing nothing short of societal collapse', wants to build emergency 'Nightingale prisons ' on Ministry of Defence land, and has semi-promised to send convicted murderer Ian Huntley to El Salvador (admittedly a bit of a vote winner). It's an ambitious package, but there are questions about its viability... Is Britain facing societal collapse? No. If it was, you wouldn't get back alive from the pub or be able to get petrol or bread. Is crime up? On some measures and in some places, against certain given periods of time, it is up; on other measures, it's down. The variations in the way crime is measured are one issue – it's risky to go by the number of crimes recorded by the police, because people will sometimes not bother to report them, especially the less serious matters, so statisticians treat these figures with caution. The other way of measuring crime rates, which should also be adjusted for changes in population, is by conducting surveys among the public – but not everything is included. Somewhat confusingly, Farage seems to think that the survey data is unreliable because people have given up telling the police about, for example, thefts that might affect their insurance. That doesn't make sense. Types of crime also necessarily change over time; there are very few thefts of car radios or bank blags these days, but there's massively more cybercrime and fraud. Even in London, described by Farage as 'lawless', not all crime is up; there's a long-term trend down in murder and rape, for example, and there are still plenty of tourists. So fact-checking any politician on the subject of crime is virtually impossible. All such claims need to be treated with the utmost care. What about the costings? Farage presented a 'costings sheet' that purports to show that the whole massive package – recruiting 30,000 more police, opening new 'custody suites', restoring magistrates' court operations, building prisons, paying rent for offenders deported to prisons in El Salvador or Estonia, and the rest – would come to £17.4bn over a five-year parliament: a mere £3.48bn per annum. The costings seem to be optimistic, based on some arbitrary assumptions such as always being able to cut costs to a minimum. They are not independently audited by, say, the Institute for Fiscal Studies – and if it were really all so cheap to do, the Tories and Labour would surely have taken the opportunity to transform the crime scene and turn Britain into a paradise long ago. As for funding even the admitted £17.4bn, there are no specific named savings elsewhere, just some recycled claims about the (contested) cost of net zero and the supposed economic miracle wrought in Argentina by President Milei. Probably not enough to calm the bond markets under a Farage government. Is the UK 'close to civil disobedience on a vast scale'? So Farage claims. His critics say that his 'I predict a riot' remarks tend to have a self-fulfilling quality to them, as seen in the 'Farage riots' in Southport and elsewhere a year ago. Essex Police, who are currently dealing with violent unrest in Epping – perpetrated by 'a few bad eggs', as Farage terms it – won't thank him for his comments. And the anecdotes? Uncheckable, just as Enoch Powell's were in the infamous 'rivers of blood' speech in 1968. We may never know whether, for example, a former army sergeant was denied a job as a police officer because the force was 'having trouble with its quotas' or for some other reason. Reform's tactics are also reminiscent of the Trump playbook, demonstrating an obsession with incarceration and policing by fear. If Farage could build a British Alligator Alcatraz on a disused RAF base in Suffolk, he probably would. But using grass snakes, presumably. Can Farage cut crime in half in five years? It feels implausible. If he could, then presumably he could abolish crime altogether if he were given a decade in office. The 'zero tolerance' approach sounds fine, but if the pledge that every shoplifting offence, every whiff of a spliff, and every trackable mobile phone theft has to be investigated is taken literally – as he seems to intend – then even 30,000 more officers wouldn't be sufficient, and the expanded court and prison system would collapse. Much the same goes for 'saturation' levels of policing deployed on stop-and-search exercises in high-knife-crime areas. Sending many more people to jail is also very costly, but, more to the point, the recent Gauke report explains why prison doesn't work and just makes everything worse. To get crime down under Reform UK, we'd need to turn the UK into a police state.
The Guardian
21-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Nigel Farage on UK crime: how do his statements stack up?
Nigel Farage has launched a six-week campaign and policy blitz, pledging to halve overall crime in the first five years of a Reform UK government. At a press conference on Monday, the Reform leader made a series of claims about crime levels in the UK and government efforts to lower them. In an article teeing up his proposals for the Daily Mail, Farage wrote that 'over the past 20 years, crime has become commonplace across Britain' and that ministers seemed to be spending money on 'everything except keeping the people of this country safe'. Here are some of his main claims and how they stack up. Crime has rocketed since the 1990s Farage's central argument is that crime has risen so much that the UK is 'facing societal collapse', while politicians are in complete denial. He wrote on Monday that total crime is 50% higher than it was in the 1990s. He told reporters that the crime survey for England and Wales was 'based on completely false data' and that 'if you look at police-recorded crime … there are some significant rises in crimes of all kinds, particularly crimes against the person'. He went on to argue that the true figures were even higher than the records showed, because 'most of us now don't even bother to report crime'. In fact, the Office for National Statistics regards the crime survey for England and Wales as the more accurate metric of long-term crime trends, because it includes incidents that haven't been reported to the police and is unaffected by changes in how crime is recorded. It is unclear what Farage's claim that it is based on 'completely false data' is founded on. The ONS also says police-recorded crime 'does not tend to be a good indicator of general trends in crime' and should only be used in conjunction with other data. ONS analysis of crime survey and police-recorded crime data concludes that crime against individuals and households has generally fallen over the last 10 years, with some important exceptions including sexual assault. There have been long-term decreases in violence with or without injury, theft offences and criminal damage since the mid-1990s. There are, however, some increases in the short-term. The latest survey shows a 33% increase in fraud last year, and a 50% increase in theft from the person compared with 2023. People in the UK no longer feel safe Farage claimed that 'people are scared of going to the shops' or 'to let their kids out' and that 'witnessing and experiencing crime has become normalised'. It's true that a significant proportion of British voters – 22% according to YouGov's poll tracker – regard crime as one of the biggest issues the country faces. Crime ranks behind the NHS, however, cited by 33% of people, and immigration and asylum, cited by 53%. One concrete data point Farage mentioned was that 57% of women felt it was unsafe to walk on the streets of London, which came from a Survation poll carried out this spring. Other parties don't care about crime Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion Farage claimed to be 'astonished there's been so little debate in Westminster amongst all the political classes on this issue'. In fact Labour and the Conservatives put pledges on crime at the centre of their manifestos in the run-up to the July 2024 election, and both parties are spending a considerable amount of time debating and legislating in this area. One of the government's five driving 'missions' is to halve serious violent crime and raise confidence in the police and criminal justice system to its highest level. London is lawless Farage made a series of claims about crime in London, including that tourists were increasingly reluctant to visit the capital and that wealthy people such as the oil magnate John Fredriksen were leaving. Fredriksen – a Norwegian-born Cypriot billionaire who is selling his £250m mansion in Chelsea – in fact cited Rachel Reeves' tax changes as the main reason behind his decision and said the UK was becoming too much like Norway. He has said nothing about crime. Farage also said one in three people in London had been subject to phone theft. This appears to have come from a survey of 1,000 people by a UK fintech start-up called Nuke From Orbit, rather than the police-reported figures that Farage said he preferred. According to the Metropolitan police, 80,000 phones were reported stolen in London in 2024, which suggests the crime affected far fewer than one in three people. The Reform UK leader did cite some official figures, including that shoplifting in London was up 54% last year compared with 2023, which came from the ONS.
ABC News
03-06-2025
- Business
- ABC News
Why do societies collapse and what does it mean for us?
Does every society have a use-by date? The fact that we're not bumping into Aztecs or Byzantines around the place does suggest that they all end at some point. States can slowly decline and fade, or morph into new entities, while a few simply collapse in on themselves. "This is something which has haunted even the most powerful of empires," Luke Kemp, a research affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, tells ABC Radio National's Late Night Live. "It's natural to look over our shoulders at the wreckages of the past and wonder if we're going to end up the same way." Human history stretches back around 300,000 years, but we only made the move from hunter-gatherer communities to states about 5,000 years ago. Dr Kemp, whose upcoming book is Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, calls a state "a set of centralised institutions that impose rules on and extract resources from a population in a territory". They appeared in Egypt and Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) before spreading around the world and becoming modern day "Goliaths" like the United States and the People's Republic of China. All states across history have eventually ended and a societal collapse is perhaps the most dramatic coda. It's "when you have multiple systems of power all go down. Not just the state but also the economy and potentially the population [as well]", Dr Kemp says. And for anyone worrying about the imminent societal collapse of Australia, there's a bit of good news. "It's actually surprisingly rare for all [of a state's] systems to go down at once," Dr Kemp says. One of the best examples in history of societal collapse is perhaps one of the least known. Around the year 1000, Native Americans created a city called Cahokia on the Mississippi River near today's St Louis. This was the first proper city in the present-day United States. With 10,000 to 15,000 people, Cahokia was bigger than many European cities of the time, including London. It was a place of kings and elites overseeing a great experiment in urbanism. But when Christopher Columbus and other Europeans started arriving in the Americas from 1492, the city had disappeared and no comparable cities replaced it. "Within about 150 years, it starts to fall apart," Dr Kemp says. Coinciding with a period of drought and flood, the city was entirely abandoned. "All the key power structures you would associate with a modern state fell apart … [and] much of the culture changed as well," Dr Kemp says. "But even more interesting is that the people there seem to intentionally forget about this experiment with urbanism … There are no oral traditions, no stories about it. "It's almost like they wanted to forget about it and leave it to rot in the swamps of the Mississippi." After centuries of European domination, Rome — or the Western Roman Empire — fell in the 5th century. Rome was sacked by Germanic Visigoths in 410, and then in 476, Germanic leader Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus. It seems to fit the brief of a societal collapse. The military fragmented. The economy plummeted. Trade broke up into local levels. The elites fell apart. But Dr Kemp says it's a much more complex case than say, Cahokia. "Some power structures did continue … The ideological basis of Rome, which by that stage was the church, actually continued to grow in power. It became the connective tissue across all of Europe after Rome fell," he says. "Many of the cultures, customs and even garbs that the Romans had were carried on by the [new] Germanic rulers." And in Dr Kemp's eyes — even with Pax Romana and all those aqueducts — the collapse of Rome wasn't necessarily a tragedy. He explains the Roman model: Conquer a territory. Use the riches and resources of the new territory to conquer more territory. Repeat. And he says meanwhile, most of the benefits of the empire were channelled back to the capital. "It was a very large-scale pyramid scheme," Dr Kemp says. "Its collapse was in many ways a good thing for a lot of people. If we look at skeletons in Latin Europe after the fall of Rome, people seemed to get taller and healthier. "So I think we've been handed down a set of stories which have emphasised collapse — and probably overemphasised how bad it is." Dr Kemp and his colleagues have crunched the numbers and found the average life span of a state throughout much of history has been 326 years. But there is a big range on either side of this number. For example, the Byzantine Empire lasted for 1,000 years, while China's Qin Dynasty lasted for just 15 years. And the largest states, or "mega-empires covering over a million square kilometres", were more fragile, with an average life span of 155 years. From Rome to Cahokia to many other examples of collapse, Dr Kemp says there's one key culprit. "We tend to get a bit too preoccupied with looking at big external shocks," he says. These can be things like plagues or enemies at the gates, which can be part of, but not the whole story. "You find that different societies handle these [external shocks] pretty well, but then they seem to become weaker … This is largely due to the fact that inequality seems to increase over time." So Dr Kemp calls inequality "the master variable behind crisis and collapse". On the flip side, after picking through the details of states from the Hittites to the Spanish Empire, Dr Kemp has a theory about what gives a state longevity. "Democracy and inclusive institutions seem to be the big things that encourage states and societies to often last longer." He cites research from Yale University that looked at how different societies coped with the Late Antique Little Ice Age of 536–660, when three different volcanic eruptions led to cooling temperatures around the Northern Hemisphere. It found that some societies were more resilient to temperature swings than others — and that a big predictor of resilience was how democratic and inclusive their institutions were. So of the world's roughly 200 countries, which is next in line for a societal collapse? "It would be very easy for me to say one of the countries in the Horn of Africa … Or Yemen for instance, which is in a state of civil war," Dr Kemp says. "But today when we do have a collapse, such as the collapse of Somalia or Afghanistan, it tends to be very short-lived. Resources are mobilised to make sure that a new state is propped up very quickly." Instead, Dr Kemp paints a picture less about individual states collapsing, but the possibility of something far bigger. He is much more concerned about the "world as a whole", given we all live in a "global, interconnected system". "If we're really thinking about a global collapse, then the things we have to start worrying about today are things like nuclear war, climatic change and dangerous new technologies," he says. "All of those, once again, are built upon large systems of inequality." And he says, while we can't put clear numbers on the likelihood of this kind of a collapse, the possibility of a "catastrophic" global event in the coming century has him worried.
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Arizona man called into The Ramsey Show for advice on how to protect his family in case of ‘societal collapse'
Chris from Phoenix is worried about 'huge civil unrest' resulting from a collapsed dollar — and he doesn't think President Donald Trump or billionaire Elon Musk can fix the situation. The dad of two young daughters called into The Ramsey Show and asked co-hosts George Kamel and Dr. John Delony for their thoughts on how to prepare for a 'societal collapse.' Chris says he's worried about the growing national debt and that he imagines 'in several decades it being unmanageable and perhaps collapsing the dollar.' Even if Trump and Musk could fix the situation, he doesn't think it could be 'sustained long enough to where you wouldn't cause huge civil unrest.' 'Do you all personally own any physical precious metals, gems, have visas or even ammunition for the purpose of protecting against societal collapse?' Chris asked during a recent episode of The Ramsey Show. Thanks to Jeff Bezos, you can now become a landlord for as little as $100 — and no, you don't have to deal with tenants or fix freezers. Here's how I'm 49 years old and have nothing saved for retirement — what should I do? Don't panic. Here are 5 of the easiest ways you can catch up (and fast) Nervous about the stock market in 2025? Find out how you can access this $1B private real estate fund (with as little as $10) Dr. John Delony describes himself as a fellow worrier who's also concerned about the ballooning national debt, but he doesn't have any jewels hidden in his backyard (though he does have a deep freezer with about a year's-worth of meat in it). Delony also urged Chris to ground himself in the present, because 'if you've confirmed in your mind' that a tragedy is coming your way in the future, 'your body responds as though it's happening right now,' said Delony. And that takes you away from being in the moment. And this isn't necessarily helpful. So what can worriers like Chris do to prepare for the unknowable — and live more in the moment? Before getting into precious metals (or bullets), Delony suggests going back to basics. For example, before getting into bio-hacks to improve your longevity, you'll want to master the basics first — like exercising and eating right. The same goes for finances. 'Do I owe anybody any money?' Delony said. Is his family 'actually free?' Going back to basics means being financially 'free.' That's where good financial habits can help: building up an emergency fund, paying off debts (starting with high-interest debts, like credit card debt and loans) and investing in a diversified portfolio. Read more: Want an extra $1,300,000 when you retire? Dave Ramsey says — and that 'anyone' can do it Trying to think through how you'd handle an 'epic wild west scenario is a waste of time and energy,' said Delony. 'It's just a distraction from being present with your daughters.' He suggests taking a 'news fast' for the next 60 days — not looking at news or social media — and doing something else instead, like playing with your kids or going out for a hike. 'That's not me putting my head in the sand,' he said. Rather, it's about getting out of that 'anxious state into a world that I can actually impact, which is my family, my home.' If there was an economic and societal collapse, 'gold's not going to solve it,' said Kamel. 'We'd go back to the bartering system, trading for food, water, fuel.' As Dave Ramsey said, 'At no time has gold been used as a medium of exchange in a crashed economy since the Roman Empire.' Kamel says he doesn't own any gold and 'if we make decisions based on fear, we end up poorer — not richer,' he said, adding that he avoids precious metals and 'wouldn't use it as a hedge against anything.' One of the greatest hedges — if not the greatest hedge — is 'robust, connected relationships with your neighbors,' said Delony. And you 'can't buy that off of Amazon.' If Chris is truly concerned about the world imploding, 'get to know the people around you, have them over for dinner, become friends with them, talk about values.' Here are 5 'must have' items that Americans (almost) always overpay for — and very quickly regret. How many are hurting you? Rich, young Americans are ditching the stormy stock market — here are the alternative assets they're banking on instead Robert Kiyosaki warns of a 'Greater Depression' coming to the US — with millions of Americans going poor. But he says these 2 'easy-money' assets will bring in 'great wealth'. How to get in now This is how American car dealers use the '4-square method' to make big profits off you — and how you can ensure you pay a fair price for all your vehicle costs Like what you read? Join 200,000+ readers and get the best of Moneywise straight to your inbox every week. This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.
