Moral Panics, Knife Crime & the right
The knife attack on a train at Huntingdon on Saturday night which injured eleven people is any rail traveller’s worst nightmare. The actions of the train driver and a crew member- who remains very ill in hospital- stopped it from being any worse. Thoughts must be with them, their families and all the emergency workers who sped to give assistance.
Unfortunately and predictably this has not been the note which all commentators, politicians and media have struck. Some have tried to whip up what the sociologist Stanley Cohen called a ‘moral panic’ (1972)
Wiki describes it thus
A moral panic, also called a social panic, is a widespread feeling of fear that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society.[1][2][3] It is “the process of arousing social concern over an issue”,[4] usually elicited by moral entrepreneurs and sensational mass media coverage, and exacerbated by politicians and lawmakers.[1][4] Moral panic can give rise to new laws aimed at controlling the community.[5]
Without wishing to add to that a relatively modest example can be found in the words of Tory Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp who has stated that knife crime is not only a problem (it is) but an increasing. The BBC have reported that based on ONS figures for England and Wales over the last 12 month period knife crime has declined slightly as have knife murders. Philp was a Minister in the last Tory Government which said it had introduced some of the toughest knife crime laws in Europe.
BBC Verify on knife crime
Earlier this morning, Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp was on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme speaking about Saturday’s knife attack on a train bound for London.
He says “there is a very worrying trend of knife crime across the United Kingdom – last year approximately 250 people [were] killed using a knife, about 50,000 knife offences were recorded as well”.
There is no single knife crime statistics publication in the UK but as far as England and Wales goes, police recorded 51,527 offences across both nations in the year to June 2025, according to the latest figures, external published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
However, these figures show knife crime is falling by 5% compared with the same period last year and 7% compared with five years ago. Homicides involving a knife also fell by nearly a fifth in the latest year to 196 offences, compared with 239 the year before.
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