How Britain made it through 2013, the year of living dangerously

by Guest Fri Dec 20, 2013 9:08 am

This should, in theory, have been an awful year for David Cameron – one defined by strife, joblessness, protests and crime. We are midway through a parliament defined by austerity. Youth unemployment is horribly high. The police, prisons, defence and local government budgets have been bludgeoned. And the road back to fiscal sanity looks longer and flintier than ever. Both Labour and the Tories therefore imagined, back in 2012, that this would be a year the Prime Minister would stagger through – maybe he’d recover later, maybe not. But it ought to have been an agonising experience, both for him and for the Coalition.
Instead, 2013 has been the year of disasters that did not happen. Take crime. It was not so long ago that internal government reports were predicting a crime wave induced by unemployment. In fact, the streets have seldom been safer, with recorded offences now standing at a 25-year low. It’s not just Labour that has been wrong-footed: those of us who predicted dire consequences as a result of prison cuts must also feast on humble pie. Yes, the budget has been cut by 20 per cent – but the system has proved able to cope with just as many inmates as the courts wish to sentence.
This was also supposed to be the year when poor pupils didn’t apply to university, deterred by the Coalition’s brutal decision to treble the maximum tuition fee. A collection of 60 academics published a letter predicting that the rise would “increasingly exclude working-class students”. An Ipsos Mori poll of pupils predicted that applications from those with such a background would fall by two thirds. In fact, as we learnt yesterday, both the number and proportion of poorer students getting into university is at the highest level in history. The educational apocalypse never arrived.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/fraser-nelson/10528189/How-Britain-made-it-through-2013-the-year-of-living-dangerously.html

Excellent article, really dispels many myths portrayed by Labour, many of their predictions failed to materialise and much credit has to go to the Coalition .