I moved to the UK from a country with high levels of crime. In my time living in South Africa, I was involved in one armed invasion of my home, four muggings (one of which turned violent and which I have the scars to prove) and three smash-and-grabs at robots (yes, that’s what we called them – traffic lights for the uninitiated). So, sadly, I’m intimately familiar with what it feels like to feel unsafe.
This also means that I may not, in fact, be the best person to write this post, because my personal threshold for what counts as “dangerous” is admittedly likely to be higher than most. I’ve lived in a place where going out after dark meant actively risk assessing whether you’d be robbed, hijacked, or merely shouted at by someone selling knock-off DVDs. The UK, in comparison, has always felt like a genuinely safe place to be, especially considering I get to look out of my windows with nary a burglar bar in sight.
With all that said, the longer Reform’s little summer “Britain is Lawless” extended fannywobble campaign goes on, I’m finding myself wondering more and more whether the point isn’t to make people safer – it’s to make them scared. Of course, it’s not just any fear they’re selling – it’s a very particular kind, with London’s name printed on the packaging in bold black letters.
Because something to keep in mind throughout this whole palaver is that “Britain is Lawless” isn’t really a statement of fact. It’s a slogan – a brand. And just like any good brand, it’s been well and thoroughly market-tested, focus-grouped, and rolled out to every commentator-influencer who is keen on a quick bit of attention.
The way they’re going about it is also very simple: take a handful of statistics, strip them of any meaningful context, and present them as evidence that the country – and especially the capital – is sliding into a completely uncontrolled and chaotic hellscape. Put the playlist on repeat, ideally with a high-contrast video of shoplifters or police tape, and you can sit back and let fear do the rest.
The fear economy in action
As many of you will know, I live in London and have done so for years now. I regularly work in some of the most deprived areas of this city – the forgotten bits a politician would only ever visit if there’s a camera crew in tow – and I can tell you that, yes, of course there are problems. Major ones. But the way this campaign tries to depict London is pure parody, and not even very good parody at that.
Looking at how the Reform posse is talking, you’d be forgiven for thinking that stepping off the Tube at Brixton, Tottenham or White City means being instantly enveloped in a smoky haze of rioting, while Albanian gangs loot the Sainsbury’s Local. But cut to reality, and the picture is usually far more mundane, if not peaceful.
Now, by saying this I’m not discounting the real signs of decay that can be seen in parts of the capital (and the country at large if we’re being honest) – the closed-up shops, the sometimes-uncollected rubbish and the genuine struggles of communities that have been systematically underfunded and ignored. These problems are real, they matter and they deserve serious solutions rather than scapegoating. Except that’s not what Reform is aiming for.
Instead, they’re flogging away a fantasy apocalypse because that’s exactly how you get a fear economy to work. It’s not necessary to actually prove that something is happening – you just need enough people to believe it could be happening, and the moment you have that belief percolating in the daily discourse of our lives, you can attach it to any number of convenient scapegoats. For Reform in particular, the choice is obvious: migrants. Preferably “illegal” for maximum potency, but really, any foreign-sounding name will do in a pinch.
The brilliance – or rather, the brazenness – of this way of doing things is that there’s really no need for reality to cooperate in any meaningful way. You can calmly point out with reams of evidence that overall crime in England and Wales is roughly half what it was in the 1990s. You can cite the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which shows violent crime has dropped by around 50% over the past decade. You can note that Britain remains one of the safer countries in the developed world – ranked 30th most peaceful globally – and that most crime is committed by UK nationals, not migrants. You can quote Fraser Nelson in The Times, hardly a left-wing firebrand, calling the “lawless” label unsubstantiated.
It won’t matter one iota. Because the market isn’t buying safety – it’s buying the feeling of danger, and London, with its millions-upon-millions of people, endless camera-ready moments, and a mayor the right loves to hate, is the perfect place to harvest it from.
Perception beats statistics in the same way that a horror film beats a crime report. A figure from the ONS showing a long-term downward trend in crime is a single, sober number. A video clip of a shoplifter running out of a Tesco Express in Haringey, framed with grainy CCTV and a caption screaming “LAWLESS LONDON UP 54%”, is an emotional punch straight in the gut. In Reform’s model, one trumps the other every time.
Finding the perfect scapegoat
Like any savvy manufacturer/marketeer, Reform have identified their core demographic with pin-point accuracy. Their summer of lawlessness exercise isn’t aimed at people actually experiencing high crime – it’s pitched at people experiencing high coverage of crime. The target audience is not the 17-year-old in Croydon who is rightly worried about getting mugged, it’s the 57-year-old in Cheshire watching GB News and seeing their worst suspicions about London being confirmed. The point isn’t that they’ve been a victim – the point is that they could be, because a Reform MP on telly has just very loudly told them so.
Once the audience is primed, the next step is to link their fear to a culprit. The campaign’s messaging loops repeatedly back to the idea of an “illegal migrant crisis” as a “national emergency for women,” peppered with lurid statistics that collapse spectacularly under scrutiny.
Farage’s claim that Afghans are 22 times more likely to commit rape than UK-born people was debunked by Sky News in short order. The assertion that 40% of London sexual assaults are committed by foreigners was similarly dismantled, with the data showing foreign-born individuals are actually underrepresented relative to their share of the population.
But in the fear economy, the correction never seems to snag the headline. You can debunk it, footnote it, explain it in excruciating detail, and Christ alone knows that I, and many others, have done so until we’re blue in the face, but the emotional residue remains. Migrants here serve a dual purpose: they are both the external threat and the internal weakness, blamed for the crimes and for supposedly draining the resources needed to prevent them. If crime is bad, blame the migrants. If policing is bad, blame the migrants for that too.
The playbook for shutting down debate
There’s also a part of this that’s getting increasingly ugly.
If you in any way try to question any of the narrative being relentlessly shouted at you:
- point out that crime statistics don’t support the hysteria,
- suggest that evidence-based policing might work better than performative cruelty,
- dare to mention that the vast majority of migrants are not, in fact, criminals and are more likely to be providing care for your nan than nicking your watch
and the response is as predictable as it is revolting.
You’re a rape apologist.
You’re a nonce.
You don’t care about “real victims.”
It’s the conversational equivalent of throwing a sucker punch mid-conversation and running away. There’s less than zero engagement with evidence, not a single attempt at reasoned debate, just straight to the most inflammatory accusation they can possibly muster. I mean, why engage in any meaningful way with a counterargument when you can just shout “PAEDOPHILE!” and snigger away like a teenager at your phone.
The speed of this response tells you everything you need to know. These are not people genuinely concerned about crime or victims – they’re people who’ve weaponised the language of protection to shut down inconvenient truths. They’ll scream “what about the children?” while in the very same sentence trivialising child abuse by throwing the accusation around like confetti at anyone who dares to disagree with them.
It’s morally bankrupt and it’s really gross, but it’s also tactically brilliant. Because who wants to be called a rape apologist in public? Who’s going to risk their reputation to defend nuanced crime policy when the alternative is being branded a predator by keyboard warriors with a bunch of numbers in their name and Union Jack avatars?
The result? Any sort of rational discussion becomes pretty much impossible. Evidence-based policy gets instantly drowned out. And anyone with actual expertise in crime reduction – social workers, probation officers, researchers who’ve spent decades studying what actually works – choose not to engage at all rather than wade into the cesspit.
This very largely isn’t about protecting anyone – it’s all about protecting a narrative from scrutiny. Because the second you start having grown-up conversations about crime: about poverty, addiction, mental health, the collapse of youth services, you have to confront the real reasons why some communities are struggling. And that means looking at fourteen years of austerity, not just pointing at the first foreigner you see on a bus-bench and lobbing accusations at them.
When fear becomes policy
This brings us to the question of what exactly happens when this manufactured outrage actually has to produce something concrete? When the slogans have to become policies and the promises have to survive actual implementation and operationalisation?
Like any mass-produced product, the campaign has quality-control issues. The promise to recruit 40,000 new police officers is being sold to the public as a silver bullet, but nobody seems willing to explain how they’ll go about funding it. The Times, when the Tories suggested this number (because Reform is also not very good at original ideas), has estimated that it would cost £18.5 billion a year and Reform’s explanation boils down to vague mutterings about “waste cuts“. The deportation pledges sound decisive until you hit reality – you can’t deport foreign nationals without agreements in place, and many of the supposed “foreign criminals” are long-term residents, some who have naturalised, who would have to be repatriated to countries they may not have seen since childhood.
None of Reform’s policies are designed to survive first contact with reality. The job of the campaign isn’t to govern, it’s to galvanise. The pledges are like the “serving suggestion” on the packet – decorative, implausible, but just enough to make the customer imagine the product will change their life.
If “lawless Britain” was just cynical marketing, it would be tiresome but relatively harmless. Unfortunately, the fear factory produces externalities. Talk down your country loudly enough and people will start to believe you – including people abroad.
Australia and Canada already warn travellers about crime in the UK (though as the inimitable Emma Monk debunked, this has been the case since 2016 and 2019), but Reform’s rhetoric acts like a megaphone. Tourism suffers. Investment hesitates. And while they’re busy filming in “dangerous London”, I’m on a Victoria Line platform at half-past-ten at night with other weary commuters, apparently in the middle of a hellscape, surrounded by people eating crisps and minding their own business. Funny how no one’s screaming.
It also has internal consequences. When a political movement tells the public, day after day, hour after hour, that the system is broken beyond repair, they risk normalising lawlessness rather than curing it. Convince people the police have “lost control of the streets” and some will decide to take matters into their own hands. Keep linking migrants to crime without evidence and you don’t just risk racial tension – you invite it. We’ve already seen summers where inflammatory language fed directly into unrest.
The real endgame
What makes “Britain is Lawless” such a perfect case-study is how openly it admits what it’s doing. This has gone well beyond the genteel dog-whistle policies from the Tories and has turned into a veritable foghorn. They post polls that say people think crime is rising and treat them as proof that crime is rising. They cite isolated spikes – shoplifting in London, pickpocketing in Westminster, knife crime in a few cities – and let the audience extrapolate to the whole country. They know fear doesn’t scale proportionately to reality, it scales proportionately to visibility, and in the digital era, visibility is infinitely manufacturable.
The hashtag #BritainNeedsReform, pinned to every post, is a reminder of the point: not reform of policing, or justice, or sentencing – those are just wallpaper. The product is Reform UK itself, and fear is the loyalty scheme. You don’t have to deliver the fixes if you can keep selling the problem.
I remain very tempted to shrug this off as just Farage being Farage – the perpetual campaigner, more comfortable behind a lectern than in a committee room or doing the actual job expected of him as an MP. But running a country’s political conversation through a fear factory is exceptionally corrosive. If every public issue is reframed as an existential threat, the only possible response becomes emergency measures, and emergency measures, in the wrong hands, have a habit of sticking around long after the sirens have stopped.
The boring reality is that many effective, real solutions to crime – properly funding police, investing in youth services, addressing poverty and addiction – are the kind of unglamorous, long-term work that rarely fits on a campaign poster. There’s no adrenaline hit in announcing you’ve increased the budget for probation services or improved coordination and integration between social care and policing. But these are the things that actually reduce crime in the real world. They’re just bad for the fear business.
And that’s the final irony of the Great British Fear Factory – it thrives on the same problems it claims to want to solve. Solve them, and you put yourself out of business. Keep them simmering – never quite boiling over, but always just on the edge – and you can keep your customers coming back. Which is why the “Britain is Lawless” line is so carefully non-specific. If crime goes down, they can still say Britain feels lawless. If crime goes up, they can say “we told you so.” It’s the perfect closed loop, an outrage economy with no off switch.
So the next time someone shares a “Britain is Lawless” post, ask them for the data. When they claim migrants are behind every crime wave, ask them to show their working. When they promise simple solutions to complex problems, demand to see the costings.
The sense of fear only works when we stop asking questions. And the people selling it are banking on us being too polite, too tired, or too intimidated to call bullshit when we see it.
Don’t be. The Britain they’re selling doesn’t exist – but the fear factory keeps running, and the damage is very real indeed.
This article is republished with kind permission of The Bear. Read the original on his Substack here.
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