Justice & Law Quote by Polly Toynbee

Toynbee’s line is built like a trapdoor: it starts with policy critique and drops you into a theory of political manipulation. The sting is in the pivot from “crime is falling” (an empirical claim) to “let them stay scared senseless” (a moral indictment). She’s not merely arguing that Labour has mishandled crime; she’s accusing a governing culture of choosing fear over facts because fear is electorally useful. The sentence performs the very thing it condemns: it yanks the reader emotionally, then dares you to notice how easily that works.

The subtext is about message discipline and the asymmetry of attention. Falling crime is slow news; panic is fast news. By implying that “no one tells the voters,” Toynbee points at the whole relay system - ministers, party strategists, tabloids, even broadcast incentives - that can prefer sensational framing to statistical reality. “Paradigm” is a loaded, almost academic word dropped into a punchy polemic: crime becomes the template for broader “policy disasters” where perception management substitutes for competence.

Context matters. British Labour in the late 1990s and 2000s lived under constant pressure to prove it was “tough on crime,” competing with Conservative law-and-order theatrics and a media ecosystem primed to treat disorder as a national mood. Toynbee’s intent is to puncture that bipartisan script. If voters are “scared senseless,” the critique isn’t just about policy failure; it’s about a democracy being governed through adrenaline rather than evidence.