Potholes everywhere, shoplifters rampant – today’s Britain looks as broken as it feels | Simon Jenkins

This is what happens when power over public services is stripped from local councils and handed to Whitehall

Every day in Britain the police are failing to arrest about 670 shoplifters. Down the road, your median wait in A&E is three hours. Meanwhile the number of care home beds has fallen by 18% in a decade, and the recent budget will cut them further. Prisons are bursting. Schools are turning away autistic children. Meanwhile, the Treasury is promising to spend £1.6bn filling in 7m potholes on England’s roads – presumably with gold.

Something is badly wrong with Britain’s public sector. In the US in the 1990s, “broken windows theory” was used to explain New York’s sharply rising crime rate and a fall in the public’s sense of security. The trouble was said to lie in the city’s visible environment. Walls were covered in graffiti, trains were dirty, beggars harassed passersby. New York’s police chief, Bill Bratton, ordered the city to get to work. So called low level crime was given more attention by police. Graffiti was cleaned, litter cleared, youths made to behave and beggars moved on. The effect was extraordinary: felonies such as assault and burglary fell by more than 40%.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

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