MALADROIT is the term most accurately applied to Sir Keir Starmer’s regime. In its political DNA is the tendency to veer to the right and for a party supposedly devoted to the parliamentary representation of the labouring classes this is proving fatal. Possibly even the Caerphilly by-election has not plumbed the depths to which Labour might fall in the estimation of voters.

Two interlinked questions are particularly important in judging just how skewed is No 10’s understanding.

Every electoral outing is proving that by mimicking Nigel Farage’s narrative on immigration Labour has fashioned a rod for its own back.

Fraser Nelson is the editor of The Spectator, the organ of that section of the bourgeoise and its hangers-on who regard themselves as sophisticated intellectuals. He can be expected to have an ear to what our rulers think.

How then to understand his social media intervention which points out that crime has fallen as immigration has increased?

That this explodes the carefully nurtured disinformation on which Reform UK and its further-right outriders feed is welcome in what has become a discussion so unsavoury it is hard to join in without becoming soiled.

The poisonous media around the mistaken release of a migrant prisoner is a case in point. Some poor functionary will take the blame but the real cause of such cock-ups is the woeful underfunding of a criminal justice system that has been disorganised by funding cuts under just about every government.

Add to this a drug prevention regime, crime prevention strategy and serially disorganised probation service. Health professionals, prison staff and probation officers’ unions make this point repeatedly.

Perhaps another explanation for Nelson’s view is that our ruling class know full well that small boat arrivals comprise under 3 per cent of total immigration and it is employers who are driving most immigration into Britain, because British capitalism is serially unsucessful in upskilling the existing population.

This month Oxford University’s Migration Observatory updated the data and concludes that rates of incarceration and criminal conviction are broadly similar for foreign and British nationals. Taking into account age and sex, the share of non-citizens in jail is lower than among British people and is lower among older groups.

Once the idea gets about that overall crime is substantially down and that migrants are a bit less likely than British people to finish up in jail, some of the poison might go out of this issue.

Sexual crime is a more explosive issue and the government’s handling of the grooming gangs inquiry is as inept as its posturing on immigration.

Quoting the Office for National Statistics, Rape Crisis UK says more than one in four women have been raped or sexually assaulted as an adult and one in 18 men have been raped or sexually assaulted as an adult. One in six children have been sexually abused.

For the year ending March 2022, it was estimated that 1.1 million adults (1.7 million women and 275,000 men) experienced sexual assault in England and Wales.

Grooming gangs specifically are engaged in organised crime, and their criminal abuse of girls runs alongside other criminal activities, notably drug-trafficking. Criminal networks often rest on personal and family ties and the ethnic or religious profile of a gang in a particular area may reflect this: the wider statistics show that associating sexual abuse with a particular ethnicity or religion is misleading and does victims a disservice. The current prominence of what amounts to grooming and human trafficking for sexual abuse by the white, rich and powerful circle around Jeffrey Epstein surely illustrates that.

And for the Labour movement it is to the legions of victims that we must pay attention, both in shaping public policy and in changing human behaviour.