Ex-Spectator editor nails right-wing lie that violent crime is rising

Martin Shipton

With the help of Cardiff University, a right-wing journalist has exploded the myth that there has been an epidemic of violent crime caused by the arrival of migrants.

Fraser Nelson, who until last year was editor of the Spectator and is now a Times columnist, has written a Substack column in which he takes issue with GB News presenter Matt Goodwin, who like Nigel Farage has claimed that migrants are responsible for a rise in crime.

Nelson writes: “After atrocities like the Huntingdon train stabbing there is shock – and attempts to make sense of what happened. Perhaps demands for ministers to pass a new law, or for police to change tactics. But what conclusions can be meaningfully drawn at this stage? What trends, if any, are discernible?

“The police, now, are quick to state the ethnicity and nationality of the suspect held: black and British. Matt Goodwin, a GB News presenter, puts ‘British’ in inverted commas. His argument is that many recent killers, even if born here, are of non-British descent so their crimes are an indirect result of immigration. This is a common way of seeing crime in Sweden where the phrase ‘foreign background’ is used to bracket together immigrants and their offspring.

“But while Swedish gun crime has soared, British violent crime – knife, gun, common assault – has been falling. High-profile cases shared on social media can give the opposite impression and perspective is easily lost.

“In a post entitled ‘when will it end?’Goodwin says he learned about the train attack from ‘ … a text from a friend who lives outside the UK: ‘What on earth is happening to your country?’ ‘I turned on the news. Another mass stabbing, this time on a London-bound train, which put 10 people in hospital, with life-threatening injuries. Three words, I replied. Mass uncontrolled immigration. That’s what happened to our country.’

“Social media allows such theories to be shared without any fear of contact with actual facts. But for those interested, here are the facts about recent trends in violent crime.”

Nelson goes on to make the point that while immigration has doubled over the last two decades, crime as measured by the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), has halved.

The collapse in crime has come in a country with more children than ever born to immigrants: about a third of all births now, rising two-thirds in London.

Gold-standard

Nelson writes: “The 30,000-household Crime Survey is gold-standard because it’s consistent – unlike police-recorded crime, where definitions change and it’s not designed to be comparable year-on-year. But a survey is only a sample. The CSEW has struggled with sample sizes post-pandemic, jars with police-recorded crime (which shows many crimes soaring) and has other flaws documented by academics.

“Nigel Farage dismisses the CSEW on this basis and says – in effect – look at your phone! Crime is soaring! So given the flaws in CSEW, who do we believe?”

Nelson states that the NHS has hospital data on who is treated for various forms of violence :assault: knife attack, bodily force, firearms etc. Like the CSEW it shows violence trending down for about two decades.

And while the Conservatives say that knife crime is too high, the latest figures show hospital admissions for knife crime injuries at a 25-year low.

Crimewave

Nelson states that it is hard to find any evidence supporting the idea of a national crimewave. He then quotes Cardiff University’s Violence Research Group, whose 2025 report concluded: “Over the past two and a half decades … serious violence in England and Wales has decreased substantially. This message needs to be much better known, not least because it reflects better prevention and because fear of violence, often stoked by reports of rare tragic violent events, corrodes individual and community wellbeing.”

Nelson states: “The overall story in Britain – as far as two decades of police, survey and hospital records can attest – is of violent crime in steady decline. And strange as it may sound to say it, the streets of these islands are perhaps safer now than they have ever been.”