This idea of David Cameron's that we're living in "Broken Britain" and of the Sun that we are witnessing "Anarchy in the UK" has been eating at me a bit. And with Dave's essay in the Telegraph outlining his ideas for mending his broken Britain by branding ten year old boys as failures and keeping them down a year at school got me looking out crime statistics.

I suspect this might not be what Dave had in mind (no, really!), but one thing sticks out in the British Crime Survey attitudes to crime, and in particular fear of crime. That the better educated you are, the better the newspaper you read, the more you earn, the less likely you are to fear crime, and the more accurate a perspective you're going to have as to the real levels of crime and anti-social behaviour going on in Britain.

Another interesting thing is that when people are asked about their perceptions of levels of crime throughout the country compared with in their local area, all groups are about half as likely to perceive crime as a growing problem in their local area, where they have on the ground experience, compared with nationwide.

So, what can we conclude, if anything, from that? Clearly, where people rely on the national media, and particularly the tabloid newspapers, for news of what's going on around the country, they get the impression that there's a lot more crime going on "somewhere else" compared with what they see and hear about in their local area. Are they just wearing rose-tinted spectacles when it comes to their own area? Maybe - local pride and disbelief that "such a thing could happen here" might be very influential. But more likely we are being manipulated by the media for whom crime, and particularly the nastiest most vicious sort of crime, sells newspapers.

So yes, a better educated nation will be less fearful of crime because they won't have to rely so much on sensationalist news reporting to form their opinions. Better still would be if our politicians stopped pandering to this tabloid agenda and feeding their appetite for fear-mongering with populist speeches and snappy but misleading headlines.