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Liquorice Profile picture
@XiaoVilin99
Feb 14, 2024 • 11 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
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Peaky Blinders has been remarkably effective at making normal people believe that Britain in the 1920s was incredibly corrupt and violent.

It is far better propaganda than any government sloganeering or fiddling with the national curriculum, because it is actually entertaining.
There are now Peaky tours and experiences, Peaky restaurants and even Peaky weddings.

Not since the Krays has organised crime been so popular, and whoever thought flatcaps would come back so hard and fast?


The reality is very different. The Britain of 1920, while materially poor, war-ravaged, and full of ideological strife, was remarkably staid and safe compared even to today. It may even have been one of the safest societies ever to have existed.
This is consistently true across all types of crime, including violent crime.



Britain today is, in fact, a pretty violent country not only compared to its past self, but even compared to its continental neighbours.


By the 1990's, Britain even had roughly double the amount of "street crime" as the US.


There were roughly 65 times as many violent crimes per police constable in 2015 (6.55) than in 1951 (0.1). It is little wonder they do not solve many of them anymore.
One fact that Peaky Blinder amusingly does get right is the easy availability of weapons. There were virtually no gun laws in Britain until the Firearms Act of 1920, while our police, of course, have always been unarmed.
This state of affairs, of a virtually crime-free country in which anyone might carry a gun but the police, should really astonish any remotely thoughtful person.

Whole university departments should be devoted to its study, and yet, all we have are the Peaky Fooking Blinders.
Portraying the past accurately is very difficult, and easy to do badly, often more through laziness than spite.

Peaky Britain is certainly sexed up for our entertainment. It would hardly be fun to watch otherwise, would it?
But it is not real, and while you should enjoy your Peaky Diner and your flat cap, you should not let your view of the past be coloured by this stuff. Image

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More from @XiaoVilin99

Liquorice Profile picture
Nov 3, 2025
@owenjonesjourno It is a lot more complex than this. Police records, for example, show a huge increase in violence against the person over the last few decades. The British Crime Survey does not include many types of violent crime, and is a poor estimate for others.

@owenjonesjourno Trends in homicide are more nuanced than they first appear. Homicide has fallen considerably, though a considerable part of this can be attributed to great advances in emergency medicine rather than necessarily a fall in homicidal behaviour.
@owenjonesjourno Another revealing statistic is how few crimes the police even solve anymore. Ten years ago it was around 15%. Now it is about 5%. This is important as it means behind any one conviction there are roughly nineteen unsolved crimes.

Read 5 tweets
Liquorice Profile picture
Jul 28, 2025
This is Soviet level civilisational gaslighting.


Our country is a violent slum.


Our country is far more violent than its continental neighbours.
Read 8 tweets
Liquorice Profile picture
Nov 30, 2022
This is a crucial point. The right, especially the mainstream, often operates on an ideological level only, and not a practical one. They whinge about wokeness, occasionally making an effort to explain that communism is Bad Actually... and that's it.
For all that the Right often claims to be "anti-intellectual", these people do little other than talking. They hope that if they explain their opinion, often enough, in slow, clear English, as if to a foreign waiter, the system will correct itself.

If the Left is "incoherent" then all that shows is that one doesn't need to be "coherent" in order to win.

Read 5 tweets
Liquorice Profile picture
Nov 30, 2022
Many of around Monbiot's age and background feel this way. The postwar generations grew up in a shabby Britain, still full of bomb craters. They were restless and bored, and their reaction was to try to destroy everything around themselves in a wave of nihilism and spite.
Some of his generation eventually grew up and realised what they had done. Most never did, and never will.
If you want to understand the mindset of these people, and how truly resentful they are of the "stifling" Britain in which they grew up, I suggest you watch "If...", despite it being quite a bad film. It was released in 1968.
Read 4 tweets
Liquorice Profile picture
Sep 27, 2022
This book is quite illuminating, and goes up to the early New Labour years. Image
If you compressed all the crimes committed in Britain in 2000 into a cube, it would be quite big. Image
Lee Kuan Yew is inspired on a trip to London. Image
Read 40 tweets
Liquorice Profile picture
May 6, 2022
People lamenting the state of higher education in Britain fail to understand its purpose, which is in part to hide youth unemployment and make the young pay their own dole via loans, but more vitally it serves Britain's grand geopolitical strategy.
Britain hosts almost a quarter of a million Chinese students. It charges them more than ten thousand pounds a year to let them pretend to have written their own essays for three years, at which point they are given a certificate with fake gold leaf on it, and then sent home.
Back in China, these alumni build tower blocks that fall down, vehicles that explode at random and escalators that eat you. They hold three-hour meetings with "Product Managers" that do not decide anything.
Read 7 tweets

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