OF ALL statements made by government ministers, the most fatuous are their attempts to explain away the links between crime and unemployment. An insult to the majority of decent, unemployed people, they cry, thus committing the sort of logical fallacy that their expensive educations should have taught them to avoid. Crime is a matter of individual responsibility, they insist. And so it is; but the Conservatives have promoted a doctrine that makes self-interest, expressed through the market, the main motivator of economic and social behaviour.

A document prepared by Sir Clive Whitmore, the top civil servant at the Home Office, leaked to the Independent last week, concluded that 'perhaps the biggest single intervention affecting the level of crime and criminality might be the ability to offer the next generation of young people better prospects of realistic full- time employment'. This was thought to be 'embarrassing' to ministers, and no doubt was. But it merely reflected the weight of evidence. Almost 70 per cent of convicted offenders referred to probation officers for pre-sentence reports last year were unemployed. Those who are unemployed are three times more likely to commit crimes than ex-offenders with jobs. Throughout the 20th century, property crime has risen during a recession. Against all this, ministers cling to the failure of academic studies to show that unemployment actually causes crime. But the inability to show that anything causes anything - that watching violent videos makes people more violent, for example, or even that neglecting to teach reading makes children illiterate - is a peculiar failing of social scientists. We should rely on common sense, as most members of the public do. According to a poll last month, more than 70 per cent think that unemployment causes crime, against only 10 per cent who think that the Government's solution of locking up more offenders will help.

But why, ministers ask, can the unemployed not behave like their forefathers in the 1930s, standing stoically on street corners, occasionally mounting bicycles to inquire politely if there is a job in the next village, making do and mending while always (of course) preserving 'dignity'? One answer is a mundane one. Most crime is committed by young people and, between the wars, they were proportionately fewer of them, both in the population as a whole and among the unemployed. A second answer is a familiar one. The consumer society was in its infancy and, in the areas of high unemployment, scarcely a gleam in the eye: no cars, no videos, no televisions. There was less private property to steal and little to advertise its availability.

But a third answer may be more important than either. Britain in the 1930s was still a class-ridden society, and it remained so until well after the Second World War. The working classes, who bore the brunt of unemployment, knew their place. The poverty of their expectations, to use Aneurin Bevan's phrase, restrained them. It was perfectly possible for unemployed people to blame their plight on a combination of lowly birth and impersonal economic forces. How different now. Governments have highlighted their efforts to remove obstacles to social mobility. Class still counts, but nobody can deny that the divisions are less rigid. Sixty years ago, the poor lacked what sociologists call 'role models' for meritocratic success. Now, although those from privileged backgrounds still dominate the law, the City, industry and politics, there are plentiful examples of people who have climbed the ladder. Each of the last five Prime Ministers came from humble backgrounds; John Major and Lady Thatcher rarely allow us to forget it, implying that, if they could make it, why can't others?

In other words, it has become more difficult for the unemployed and the deprived to blame anybody but themselves. It is one thing to be unsuccessful because of birth or upbringing, quite another to be told you are failure because of lack of personal initiative or enterprise or, simply, intelligence. The same problem faces inner-city American blacks, as they see a burgeoning black middle-class. Unable to taste success in the official market, as it were, many of the unemployed turn to another market where stolen goods and drugs circulate. It is a tribute to the strength of older social values that more have not done so. The paradox is that, by continuing to emphasise individual responsibility, ministers may encourage more people to turn to crime.