English to Russian Social Sciences Government / Politics Anti-Social Behaviour

Crime’s salience with voters feels ancient but is actually new: until the 1970s it hardly featured in elections, and it was only when Mr Blair began to fight the Tories for the territory that headlines proliferated. Perhaps most important, the public’s view of what constitutes a crime has widened astronomically. “There has been a shift in the expectation that anti-social behaviour would be handled in the community to an expectation that the state would deal with it,” says Tim Bateman, a policy adviser at Nacro, a charity that tries to cut such offending. Now that national politicians have taken on problems such as graffiti and noisy neighbours, “crime” has become a far broader category: more important to voters, if the pollsters are to be believed, than health or education. It remains to be seen if it is a good thing that responsibility for nuisance behaviour now lies with the central government. But it is clear that no party can now hand it back.

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