Criminal bar stool rant

Statistics reveal fact-free Farage is full of it claiming Britain is lawless

- ALAN JOHNSON

NIGEL Farage says that if elected to government his Reform Party will halve crime. It's a bold pledge but the Labour government I was a part of did just that.

By the time we left office in 2010, overall crime had halved. Not something we shouted about, just something we did.

With more police on the streets and antisocial behaviour at its lowest level ever, public satisfaction with policing had never been higher.

How do we know crime halved? In an ordered society, we rely upon independently verified statistics, properly compiled and publicly available.

We do not depend on that know-all down at the local pub who sits on a bar stool loudly expressing his fact-free-opinions to anyone who'll listen.