This hysteria is about politics, not crime

The proposed law is little more than pandering to the law-and-order concerns of the right-wing press

A couple of months ago, a teacher who lived just up the road from me in west London was stabbed to death by a burglar. The murder of Robert Symons happened in the same street as my gym, which is used by many residents of this affluent suburb. Walking past the end of the road only hours after the murder, and seeing the familiar area sealed off by police crime tape, was a shocking experience. So was the stabbing a few weeks later of John Monckton, a millionaire financier who lived not far away in Chelsea.

A couple of months ago, a teacher who lived just up the road from me in west London was stabbed to death by a burglar. The murder of Robert Symons happened in the same street as my gym, which is used by many residents of this affluent suburb. Walking past the end of the road only hours after the murder, and seeing the familiar area sealed off by police crime tape, was a shocking experience. So was the stabbing a few weeks later of John Monckton, a millionaire financier who lived not far away in Chelsea.

The deaths of both men have been highlighted this week at the launch of a campaign to tackle knife crime. It follows hard on the heels of another noisy campaign for a change in the law, which would give householders greater freedom to protect themselves against intruders. In theory at least, I should sympathise with both campaigns. A while ago, I was woken by a noise in the middle of the night and came down to discover a burglar on my porch. I don't know if he was carrying a knife, but I do remember being scared, angry and unsure what to do. Fortunately, I have a burglar alarm, and when he looked up and saw the alarm box, he crept off into the night, presumably in search of an unprotected property.

It is a pretty frightening experience, disturbing a would-be intruder. But like most women I know - and quite a lot of men - I don't want the right to beat burglars to a pulp or whatever else the people behind this thoroughly misguided campaign would like me to do. Even if I were able to inflict physical damage on intruders, I would much rather that they were deterred at an earlier stage by the fear of detection and arrest.

To argue in favour of such a change in the law seems to me an admission of unpardonable failure on the part of the police; politicians who support it have either accepted this shameful proposition or are guilty of unconcealed populism in the run-up to a general election. (We should never forget, by the way, that the man who started all this unpleasant nonsense, Tony Martin, was a disturbed individual who shot a burglar in the back.)

As any number of level-headed people have pointed out, householders are already entitled to use reasonable force to protect themselves and their property. Perhaps the Government's legal officers could issue clearer guidelines about how much force is reasonable, but the proposed law seems to me little more than pandering to the habitual law-and-order concerns of the right-wing press. Much the same could be said, I'm afraid, about the demand for knives to be treated as seriously as guns, as though the country is suddenly plagued by a spate of drive-by knifings.

It is already an offence to carry an offensive weapon. Knives are not the same as guns, for obvious reasons, including the fact that some people have legitimate reasons for carrying them. Introducing a minimum jail term of five years for carrying an object with a blade longer than three inches, as the campaigners demand, might even encourage criminals to carry firearms, which they can use to threaten their victims without physical risk to themselves.

Yesterday, however - and this in itself should give us pause - the campaign received the backing of the Daily Mail, which condemned what it called "the burgeoning knife culture" in this country. But it is not just the right-wing press which claims to have identified this terrifying new scourge - the paper quoted a number of grieving relatives, all of whom had dreadful stories. One of them was Richard Taylor, father of the murdered schoolboy Damilola, whose killer or killers have never been convicted. Condemning the UK's current knife laws as useless - they have "no effect at all", he was reporting as saying - Mr Taylor added his voice to the campaign, adding that the Government had to realise that "enough is enough".

Now, it is possible to sympathise with Mr Taylor, who is still waiting for justice four years after his son's death, while also pointing out that it had nothing to do with knives - the boy bled to death on his way home from school in south London after being stabbed with a broken bottle. The inclusion of Mr Taylor's comments was as emotive as the rest of the paper's coverage, which was clearly intended to create the impression that the entire country is in fear of attacks by knife- wielding thugs.

So here's a statistic the proponents of a new law don't mention: a couple of months ago, the Metropolitan Police revealed that "knife-enabled" crime in London had fallen by 5.5 per cent compared with the same period in 2003. There was more good news: "gun-enabled" crime fell by 12.7 per cent, and residential burglary in the capital went down by almost 11 per cent between April and October this year.

Of course these figures are not much comfort to bereaved families, and it could reasonably be argued that levels of reported crime in London and the rest of the country are still too high.

It was announced in the spring of last year, for example, that the clear-up rate for rape in London had risen by 3 per cent - but that still meant that three in every four reported cases remained unsolved. Three years ago, the Government set up the Police Standards Unit to address the fact that some police forces are much less competent than others when it comes to clearing up crimes. It is still "engaged with or collaborating with" eight forces in England and Wales in a concerted attempt to improve their performance.

At the same time, there is evidence to suggest that the high-profile murders of Mr Symons and Mr Monckton are atypical - and therefore a poor foundation for highly controversial changes in the law. The huge media attention given to the two west London killings conceals a startling fact, which is that, according to new research, affluent people are much less likely to be murdered than the rest of the population. The murder rate among the richest 10 per cent of the population is half the national average, while the poorest 10 per cent of Britons are 182 per cent more likely to be murdered.

According to the new study, carried out by the universities of Bristol, Sheffield and Edinburgh, this asymmetry also extends to the methods used by murderers: while residents of affluent boroughs may live in fear of attackers with knives, it is actually the poor who are most at risk from blades or broken glass. There are class distinctions even in murder, it seems, and the affluent are much more vulnerable to being poisoned or strangled.

As soon as we look beyond individual tragedies and slogans, in other words, a more complicated picture begins to emerge. Politicians are being urged to rush new laws on to the statute book when the need for them is unproven, and a much more pressing question is how to make policing more effective.

It is a sad fact that a climate of fear is already part of the general election campaign, and our politicians have responded by competing with each other to show who is toughest on crime. Tony Blair and Michael Howard may not have actually used the words, but the message to voters is clear: "I'm hard, me."