Nigel 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.

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       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?

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       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.