Governments have been hiding a secret from us for years about crime statistics and unemployment

“We are determined to restore trust in crime statistics and are currently considering how they should be collected and published in future,” said Theresa May yesterday – just as a totally unbelievable set of figures in crime was released.

The nearest thing Britain has to George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth from the book 1984, the Home Office has been issuing mass incredibility under various Governments since the early 1970s. Collected by police caught seven times bending the numbers since 1980, and also based on consumer interviews by BCS (self-assigned memory of crime is accepted by the MRS as the least reliable form of research), some 66% of those interviewed about their crime experiences say….they don’t believe the figures.

The police service itself admits that at least half of all crime goes unreported (this figure, by the way, is based on nothing at all I can find). And of course, many things reported as a crime are not recorded as a crime if the police don’t prefer charges – in 85% of cases, they don’t. The reason is simple: the Crime Prosecution Service is bankrupt.

None of these factors raise confidence in the numbers. But the real reasons people don’t believe them are, in a way, encouraging: first, they don’t reflect people’s life experiences; and second, the idea of falling crime alongside bursting prison populations is so silly, Jonathan Swift must be turning in his grave at not having thought of it.

With talk of buying special prison ships and letting most offenders out early, how is any sane Brit going to take seriously stats that claim crime fell by 9% last year – or that reported crime fell by 8%? If 85% of the crime isn’t reported in the first place, how can this be?

The answer is sensational – and the result of an exhaustive Slog investigation. It shows that while the number of criminals is going up, crime is indeed going down – thanks to criminal unemployment. Now at last the full sordid truth can be told of how successive governments deliberately left unemployed criminals unrecorded, and hid them in prisons all over the country.

“The rate of highwayman joblessness is almost 100%” said a Home Office insider, “and casual housebreakers have been forced to take on voluntary work. It’s a national tragedy”.

No? Well, it’s almost silly enough for that sort of nonsense. This time, however, we have a Home Office chief statistician in charge with just a scintilla of honesty and reality in his make-up. The bloke – one David Blunt – tried to keep a straight face as he said there were 6.5 million fewer victims of crime in 2009/10 than in 1995 – and then admitted, “Yes – I do find the results surprising”.

You and 67 million others, chum.