Never one to let petty little details like facts get in the way of a good bit of spluttering rage, Britain's favourite (formerly) Nazi-supporting newspaper, The Daily Mail, has flooded the front page of its website with what can only be described as purple-faced ranting in response to the death-by-knife of a minor cast-member in the next Harry Potter film. To people like the Mail's creationist, anti-vaccination journalist Melanie Phillips, it probably seems like babies are now emerging from the womb, knife-in-hand, looking for their next alcohol-fix. It seems to be a commonly accepted belief now that society has become more violent in recent years, but is it actually true? Let's look at the facts...

I may have slightly over-exaggerated the Mail's beliefs above, but not by much. "Another family destroyed by knives", "Knife crime UK: Two more victims", "MELANIE PHILLIPS: The deluded children's Tsar", "JAMES SLACK: How Labour's soft justice cost 2,500 lives", and "Family's fury at Children's Commissioner" occupy the top five positions on the Daily Mail website today. Dear old Melanie refers to an "epidemic of violence", and the overall message is very clear - "soft" liberal policies have led to an explosion in knife crime in Britain, with our children being slaughtered by the thousand as the government watches and twiddles it's thumbs.

As always, the Daily Mail is outdone by its own readership when it comes to real ranting. "Mike" from "UK" says: "I grew up at a time when many people had turned their backs on Christianity but they still held on to Christian values. Those values are now mocked and have been replaced by secular humanism. We are led to believe that we are just clever apes, animals with no soul. There is no absolute right or wrong, just opinion. Is it any wonder that society is falling apart." Yup, not only are do-gooders ruining the country, those bastard atheists are turning us all into monkeys.

But enough twaddle! What are the actual facts? Well the most reliable statistics we have come from the British Crime Survey (p6) , which attempts to eliminate "noise" in the data due to recording and reporting changes. These show that overall crime has fallen by 44% since it peaked in 1995, while violent crime particularly is down 43%. The truth is that violent crime has plummeted since the mid-90s, and is currently holding roughly steady.

This little nugget of knowledge makes the next set of statistics (p10) from the BCS even more puzzling. 42% of people believe that crime in their local area has increased compared with 2 years ago, and 63% believe that crime nationally has increased, 33% of those saying that there is "a lot more crime" now.

Clearly there is now a massive discrepancy between British people's beliefs about crime, and the actual reality. The most likely explanation of this is the constant onslaught of media scare-mongering from the likes of the Mail, and I suspect that the difference in perception of local and national crime supports that hypothesis. In other words, the media are now writing about a story that they themselves created in their own imaginations. It is a horrible insight into how distorted the public debate about such an important issue actually is, that 60% of people have completely the wrong set of facts in their minds.