A small personal incident allows me to date with a reasonable degree of precision the moment when the Right won the argument on crime in Britain.

Back in the spring of 1995 I was running a little think-tank that had arranged for William Bratton, the New York Police Commissioner, to visit London. At that time, the extraordinary success of New York's crimefighters was a new story, and not one that people in this country knew anything about. Phrases such as “zero-tolerance policing” and “broken windows theory” - describing New York's crackdown on even minor crime - were unknown in this country outside, well, little think-tanks.

So my colleagues and I thought it would be a service to democracy and law and order if we introduced Mr Bratton to Jack Straw, Labour's new Shadow Home Secretary. We called his office, got through to an assistant, and explained who Mr Bratton was, and what was going on in New York. We prattled on about arresting “squeegee pests” before they graduated from aggressively cleaning your windscreen to mugging you, and proposed a meeting. While his assistant politely parried the request, Mr Straw could be heard standing behind him, talking in a stage whisper: “Tell them I'm busy.”

It can't have been much more than six months before Mr Straw was heading to New York, telling journalists that he had discovered the future of crimefighting. Sometime in those six months, in the second half of 1995 was when the Right won the argument on crime in this country.

It is also possible to identify with reasonable precision who won it. Michael Howard did.

Placing Mr Howard in a very short list of the truly significant politicians of the postwar era raises eyebrows (and hackles) every time I try it. It shouldn't. The moment that critics stop confusing their personal feelings about Mr Howard with a cool assessment of his impact, they would surely see that the case for his inclusion is overwhelming.

When Mr Howard took over as Home Secretary in 1993 he set about changing policy on crime. He began to lengthen jail sentences and intensify policing. His soundbite - “prison works” - framed the debate. And he tapped into the new wave of thinking about crime that was taking place on the Right, led by American thinkers such as George Kelling and James Q. Wilson.

Most importantly, his policy began to show results. Within a couple of years, recorded crime of all sorts began to fall. Heavily. And the thrust of his policy has proved as irreversible as the early economic reforms of Margaret Thatcher's Government. Jack Straw's visit to New York was just the beginning. Future Labour home secretaries have had to work within the Howard consensus - they filled the jails, for instance. In the political mainstream, it is accepted that intensive policing and tough sentencing works. The debate concerns how to deliver these things.

It is hard to point to many politicians of the past 60 years who have enjoyed a similar success either practically or intellectually. Isn't it?

All of which sets up one of the great ironies of modern politics. For the Right have become the people who can't take “yes” for an answer. The more that crime falls, the more the Right insists that it isn't really falling. In other words, the more that the Howard consensus works, the more the Right insists that it is not working.

This is odd for two reasons. The first is that the central prediction of the Right on crime is that if you employ more police officers, give them more power and have longer jail sentences, you will cut crime. If crime is not falling, it means that employing more police officers, giving them more power and having longer jail sentences doesn't work. Why on earth would the Right want to argue that?

The second, and even more important, reason why it is odd is that suggesting that crime is rising flies in the face of the facts.

There are two sets of figures on crime - the British Crime Survey (BCS) and the police's recorded crime statistics - and both, in their different ways, tell the same story. The total number of crimes, and crime in almost every one of the important categories, was rising sharply until about 1995. Since then it has fallen consistently and fairly sharply.

Now both sets of figures are flawed. Just to start with, the very idea of an overall crime figure is meaningless. If I pick a man's pocket three times in one year, severely assault him twice in the next year and murder him in the third year, overall crime is falling. That is why it is important to look at different sorts of crime - violent crimes, burglaries and so forth.

The problems with recorded crime figures are well known. They don't include crimes - fraud may be an example - that aren't readily reported to the police. And an increase or decrease in the figures may reflect changes in police activity (their priorities or their detection rates) rather than in criminal activity.

This was why the BCS was created, asking a sample of the population what their experience of crime had been in the previous year. This is a much better method of compiling crime figures. Even so, the BCS isn't perfect. It excludes crimes in which those under 16 are victims and cannot account for criminal activity against commercial premises.

These are serious deficiencies, but not so serious that the survey's overall message should be ignored - especially since the BCS and recorded crime figures are broadly in accord. It is suggested that we are better off trusting our own instincts; that our own experience tells us that things are getting worse - whatever the figures say we “know” that crime is going up. What nonsense.

Why? Because the BCS is already, very precisely, a survey of what we “know” about crime. It is a statistically valid review of our experiences. That is the whole point of it. The rest is just anecdote. Are we seriously supposed to measure what is happening to crime by counting the column inches devoted to terrible stories about victims?

I would say that people are rejecting the crime figures simply because they don't want them to be true. But why wouldn't they want them to be true? If they are not true, it means that everything we are doing isn't working - and that those who want a softer line on crime might have been right all along.

There is too much crime. And crime could be falling faster. Repeat offenders still aren't being sent to jail for long enough. The police aren't being given enough time to do their job out on the street where it matters. We need to go farther, we need to go faster. But crime is falling. Sorry, but it just is.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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