Recent opinion polls show a public convinced that crime is soaring – and apparently all too ready to believe Nigel Farage's summer narrative of a Britain that's lawless and broken.
But the Reform UK leader's "populist" campaign on social media is "truth adjacent", said Fraser Nelson, former editor of The Spectator, in The Times, and "a distorting lens" through which voters "no longer see the country they actually live in".
What did the commentators say?
"Our society, for all its faults, is probably safer, richer and better than any before it," said Nelson, noting that, over the past 20 years, according to the Crime Survey of England and Wales, violent crime has halved, robbery is down by 60%, burglary down by two-thirds, and bike theft and car theft by 50%. But because some particularly visible crimes, such as shoplifting and snatch theft, are "genuinely surging", people's perceptions are unbalanced, and the overall fall in crime is hard to believe.
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But it's these visible crimes that "make people feel threatened by disorder", said John Rentoul in The Independent, and Farage has become "more active" in highlighting them, in his role as "head of a social media movement" and also at GB News, a TV channel "dedicated to portraying the country as a hellhole".
"Well, if Britain is broken," said Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times, "I merely ask, 'Compared to what?'" We're not in the 1970s "when the UK stood out as the European straggler". Nostalgia for some better yesteryear is "so hard to argue against" but the dropping crime figures "would have to be extravagantly wrong" for the "preachers of social collapse" to be "even remotely right".
Of course, there are always immigration figures to add into the inflammatory mix. There's "one migrant arriving in the UK about every 11 minutes under Labour", said Michael Knowles and Conor Wilson in the Daily Express. The "fiasco" of small boat arrivals has "surged" past 50,000 since Keir Starmer came to power.
And, "for all the progress we've made" on crime, there's been an increase in people "living below the breadline", said Zoë Beaty in The Independent. The number of children living in relative poverty is double the rate of the 1970s, and "an incredible 56% of people living in poverty in the UK are in a working household".
What next?
Even if Britain isn't broken, people believe it is, which is a big problem for Starmer, said The Independent's Rentoul. So the prime minister should take "visible and forceful action on the things that people care about": "shoplifting, phone snatching and graffiti" and, "above all", asylum hotels and stopping the boats. So far, Starmer has "tried to do all these things" but only "limply".
That means Nigel Farage "is the political winner, who plays the 'broken Britain' tune to great effect", said Dominic Lawson in The Times. But, for all his "claims that he's the last chance" for the nation, his "astoundingly profligate policy proposals" make "Liz Truss seem like a fiscal puritan".
