Philip Wolmuth/reportdigital.co.uk

IT IS hard to believe that such appalling crimes could have been committed by anyone so young. Two boys in the north of England were subjected to a sadistic attack that caused parents across the country to shudder. The anguish of the children was awful enough. But in a grotesque twist, their tormentor was also a child, not yet even a teenager. The attacks had been carried out “solely for the pleasure and excitement” of it, the judge in the case said. What has society come to when such evil is found in those so young?

That was in 1968. Mary Bell, the daughter of a Tyneside prostitute and supposedly the victim of repeated abuse herself, became Britain's most famous child-killer when, just 11 years old, she was convicted of strangling two young boys. Now, a similar case is causing people to wonder again whether society has gone to the dogs. Two brothers from the South Yorkshire village of Edlington, aged ten and 11, were convicted on January 22nd of torturing and sexually abusing two younger boys in an ordeal that left one of them close to death.

The case was highlighted by David Cameron, the leader of the opposition, who on the day the boys were sentenced launched a chapter of his Conservative Party's election manifesto dedicated to dealing with what he calls Britain's “broken society”. The Edlington case was not “just some isolated incident of evil”, Mr Cameron said. Connecting it to four other infamous examples of callous brutality, he declared that it raised “deep questions about what is going wrong in our society”. Britain is experiencing a social recession to match the economic one, he reckons.

Those good old days in full

Was Mary Bell's Britain better than today's version? An increasing number of people seem to think so. Opinion pollsters around the world find that people are usually gloomy about the future, perhaps because it is inherently more uncertain than the past. But Britons are getting even more downbeat. When Labour came to power in 1997, 40% of the population thought the country was becoming a worse place to live in. By 2007 that had risen to 60%. A year on, and a year into Gordon Brown's spell as prime minister, the malcontents numbered 71%—and that was before the financial crash. There has been a “surge of nostalgia” for the good old days, says Ben Page, head of Ipsos-Mori, a polling firm.

Chief among people's worries is their security. Under Labour, fear of crime climbed until by 2007 it had become the issue that pollsters identified as the main complaint among voters. (Since then worries about the economy have eclipsed all else.) The heightened fears are a puzzle to criminologists, who point out that over the past 15 years Britain has experienced a steady, deep fall in crime. The statistics are notoriously hard to interpret, but according to the British Crime Survey, the Home Office's most reliable measure though still far from perfect, crime overall has dropped by 45% since its peak in 1995. A big chunk of that fall is owing to reductions in vehicle theft and domestic burglary, for which alarm manufacturers and increased householder vigilance probably deserve as much credit as the police. But violent crime has fallen too. It is now almost half what it was in 1995, and no higher than in 1981 (see chart 1).

Looking more carefully, the big fall in brutality has been in domestic violence, which has dropped by a staggering 70%. (No one is sure why; the best guess is that an improving economy has kept men out of the house and given women enough money to escape if they need to.) Violence at the hands of strangers—the prospect that probably drives fear of crime more than anything else—has fallen by far less, and in fact rose in the most recent reporting period. Robbery has not gone down as much as burglary, perhaps because personal security has not improved in line with domestic security. But it too has been falling.

This sort of upbeat, wonkish analysis enrages those who insist that, for ordinary people, Britain is a more frightening place than it once was, whatever official statistics might say. In parts of the country, and some of the time, that is bound to be true. Until recently the Home Office crime survey did not interview under-16s. Nor does it weight serious crimes more heavily than mild ones, which means that a drop in bicycle theft could cancel out an increase in assaults. The Conservatives say that this has masked a rise in rare but serious crimes—particularly gun and knife crime.

The evidence is mixed. Gun crime has in fact been pretty flat nationwide. Data on knife crime are poor, but some doctors say that they are dealing with more stabbings, and the number of murders involving “sharp instruments” (bottles as well as knives) has risen slightly. Murders using guns increased alarmingly during the first few years of Labour's time in office, but have since dropped back down. Indeed, the day before Mr Cameron made his “broken society” pitch it was announced that the total number of homicides recorded by the police was at its lowest in 19 years.

Children at risk

One of the clearest long-term trends relates directly to the Edlington question. Parents have probably never been more worried about their offspring, but the truth is that children seem to be less at risk now than in the past. The number of killings of under-15s has “collapsed” since the 1970s, according to Colin Pritchard of Bournemouth University. Professor Pritchard calculates that in 1974 Britain was the third-biggest killer of children in the rich world. By his reckoning it is now 17th, following a 70% drop in child homicides. To be on the safe side, he did the analysis again, including cases where the cause of death was undetermined; even then the number of cases had halved. He credits closer co-operation between police and social services, which kicked off in a big way in 1979.

Children also seem to be committing fewer serious offences themselves. Martin Narey, a former Home Office big cheese who now runs Barnardo's, a venerable children's charity, points out that the number of under-16s being convicted of the gravest offences is at least a third lower than it was in the early 1990s. There are fewer Mary Bells about, not more.

If the world outside the front door is safer than it used to be, what of the world within it? Families have certainly changed: most obviously, marriage has gone from being the norm to almost a minority pursuit, in line with most of Europe. The number of couples getting married has halved since the 1950s; within five years, the majority of British babies are expected to be born to unmarried parents. Britain's divorce rate is among the highest in Europe—though it is also at its lowest since 1979.

The marriage question has become an unexpected flashpoint of the election campaign, with the Conservatives vowing to promote it through a tax break for married couples and gay civil-partners, in contrast to Labour and the Liberal Democrats who refuse to favour marriage over unmarried cohabitation. Everyone agrees, however, that two nappy-changers are better than one. Here, Britain has a problem: single-parent families are about three times more common than they were in 1970, following a big rise in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

At the same time, parents have been getting older. The average age of first childbirth is now 28, driven up by people's desire to settle down later. Teenage pregnancies have been falling too, though they remain among Europe's highest. Despite a small uptick in 2007, the latest full year for which figures are available, rates of conception among 15- to 17-year-olds in England and Wales were almost 11% lower than in 1998, and among 13- to 15-year-olds they were almost 8% lower. Figures for the first three quarters of 2008 confirm the broadly falling trend.

The real eye-opener is a long-term series including older teenagers. Conception among 15- to 19-year-olds has dropped by nearly a sixth since 1969 though there are more girls of that age (oddly, the number of pregnancies has started to rise again since 2003). And fewer still are becoming mothers, owing to a steep increase in abortions after they were made legal in 1967. Today, only half as many girls between 15 and 19 bear a child in their teens as when their grandmothers were that age (see chart 2).

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An under-reported fracture in the way Britons live has been caused not by fecklessness but by wealth and good health. Far more people are living alone. There are twice as many lone pensioners as there were in 1961, because the elderly are living longer and can afford to keep their home when their partner dies. The number of younger people who live alone has more than trebled since then because singletons are postponing marriage and earn enough to have their own place until they couple up. More wealth means less need for sharing accommodation with flatmates, so despite a big increase in unmarried cohabiting, there has been an overall drop in the number of households containing unrelated adults. Social patterns may indeed have become more fractured, but the biggest changes have been made out of choice.

The vice squad

That may not produce a happier society. Britons make plenty of appalling decisions in other aspects of their lives, including binge-drinking and drug-taking. But some bad habits are being kicked. Smoking is falling, among adults and children, and Britain's rate is now one of the rich world's lowest (see chart 3). Alcohol consumption rose alarmingly towards the end of the 20th century, even as it fell in many other countries (see chart 4). But Britons over 15 still rank a sober tenth in the OECD, and there have recently been tentative signs of a decline in drinking by both adults and children. That is not the end of the matter: Britons' penchant for less frequent but more sozzling drinking sessions than most others leads to public disorder and violence. And years of binge-drinking have left a lasting health problem in the form of increasing cirrhosis of the liver and the like. But things do seem to be looking up.

Among teenagers an interesting trend is emerging: the number of young people who abstain completely from alcohol is rising, but those who do drink are guzzling more. Something similar is happening with the consumption of drugs. Over the past five years there has been a fall in overall drug abuse, driven mainly by declining interest in cannabis. But consumption of cocaine, a less common but more dangerous drug, has doubled, and it is now more popular in Britain than almost anywhere else in western Europe. It seems that while the majority are sobering up, a dedicated minority are partying on.

Less crime, less killing, fewer teenage mums, far fewer fags, perhaps a bit less drink and drugs: why is it that the idea of “broken Britain” rings true with so many, when it seems far from reality? Partly, it is because people's ideas about the state of society are simply inaccurate: the average voter reckons that four out of ten teenagers have children, for instance, whereas in fact perhaps three in a hundred do. Official statistics to the contrary are viewed with suspicion after successive governments have relentlessly massaged them.

Another reason is that other countries sometimes seem to be dealing with their problems more quickly than Britain. It is galling to see Italy, say, cutting back fast on the booze. In America, too, voices of right-wing doom who once urged the righteous to set up firewalls against contagion from the Sodom and Gomorrah around them are now seeing heartening signs there of social “re-norming”.

The view from Witney

Yet Britons refuse to do the same, and for this their newspapers, which seldom look on the sunny side of life, are much to blame. “NAME THE DEVIL BOYS—WE MUST NOT LET THEM HIDE”, roared the Mail on Sunday on January 24th, quoting the parents of the Edlington victims. Newspapers were no less lurid a century ago. But there is one big change: a shift in readership from local papers to national ones. Mr Cameron's comfortable Witney constituents are dropping the Oxford Mail in favour of national titles or the television, which report the most gruesome stories from across the country, not just the county. In this way local crises, such as an outbreak of teenage stabbings in London in 2007 and 2008, become national panics, causing fear even in regions where the problem does not exist. And bad news travels best: the fact that London's teenage-murder rate quietly halved last year was not widely reported outside the capital.

Britain has plenty of things to worry about; it would be absurd to suggest the contrary. But the big ones are not sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. There is a statistically small class of people, including a number of underskilled young whites and Caribbeans, who are being left behind in a general march toward the light. Many of those who were already at the bottom of the pile are finding it impossible to get out from under and join in. And this is serious.

Household income rose by an average of 2% a year between 1996-97 and 2007-08, but on most measures it ended up more unequally distributed than at any time since at least 1961, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank. The proportion of young people aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training (NEETs) changed little between the end of 2001 and the end of 2008 despite a (pre-recession) buoyant labour market and lots of government attempts to help them connect with a job. Though measured unemployment is relatively low, the number of those who do not look for work because of real or fancied incapacity is very high.

At the root of it all is an education system that has long failed to educate the great mass of children usefully. It is showing its limitations more than ever now that manufacturing jobs for the unskilled are vanishing. For all the government fanfare about better-than-ever national exam results (partly achieved by grading fluffier subjects more sympathetically), in international tests the trend is downward. Data collected for the OECD's PISA study in 2000 ranked British 15-year-olds eighth among member countries in maths, with a total point score, 529, that was well above the average. In 2006, with a below-average score of 495, they came joint 18th. So too with reading: British pupils were seventh in 2000 with 523 points but joint 13th in 2006 with 495. The 2009 data are unlikely to show a radical improvement. The most sobering aspect is the persistent gap in achievement between the very best and the very worst. Despite that, in 2007 Britain was educating a smaller proportion of its 15- to 19-year-olds than it did in 1995, on OECD figures. Of other member countries, only Portugal recorded a drop.

Government can do a lot to improve education, partly by pushing supply-side reforms vigorously. New Labour started to do this, then flagged; the Tories, whipped ahead by Michael Gove, the shadow education secretary, are now the ones with the forward-looking ideas about education. But what about the other things?

Expectations that the state can improve social behaviour across the board have increased sharply. Take crime. Tim Newburn and Robert Reiner of the London School of Economics point out that, hard though it is to imagine now, crime was not widely considered a partisan issue until the 1970s. It crept into political debate then and gained prominence from Margaret Thatcher's accusation during the 1979 election campaign that Labour was “soft” on crime. Responding to the Tory challenge, Labour increased sentence lengths and sent more petty criminals to jail, swelling the prison population by a third to 83,000.

At the same time, the definition of crime has expanded. Labour has repeatedly vowed to squash not only crime but also “anti-social behaviour”, attempting to tackle it with measures such as the “ASBO”, a court order aimed at muzzling noisy neighbours and the like. Alan Johnson, the home secretary, has indicated that he intends to fight this year's election focusing on the nuisance caused by anti-social youths, a target that a generation ago would have seemed a silly little thing for the national government to be worrying about. Hooded youths hanging around on street corners and their equivalents have always given people the jitters; it is only recently that the government has promised to banish them, and disappointed people when it discovered it could not.

Ironically, some government policies have helped the more mobile poor up the ladder at the cost of concentrating deprivation more strongly than before. The sale of much council-owned social housing, for instance, gave ambitious working-class families the chance to move out of impoverished estates. But it has simultaneously turned those areas into zones of uniform, concentrated, workless deprivation of a sort that did not exist at the beginning of the 1980s, when more than a third of British homes were council-owned.

It is in these small pockets that the social improvements of recent decades may have been felt least. Drinking is down overall, but a minority is drinking harder; most types of crime are down, but certain types of violence persist; total drug use has fallen, but some of the most harmful drugs are getting more popular. The evidence supporting the existence of a “broken society” is thin indeed: all the more reason to focus on those who languish outside mainstream society altogether.