John Denham is at war with the ‘broken Britain’ narrative. The Local Government Minster’s speech at Unlock Democracy’s Citizenship Empowerment event on Wednesday left it pockmarked with facts from a Britain not nearly so broken.

Denham recognises that despite reduced crime, Sure Start centres and neighbourhood policing in every area, better school standards, public spaces improved, and many families better off through tax credits, many people still do not feel like they have control over their circumstances.

The recession has underlined how subject to economic winds people are: businesses close, relocate, get replaced by less skilled, less secure work, and Labour’s investment is lost from view.

Into this gap between facts and attitudes comes David Cameron’s broken Britain narrative, a go-to font of fear for certain pundits seeking a frame for their paintings.

Joining them in this gap, Denham has jumped right in with his charge on citizenship empowerment, addressed to the same discrepancy between beliefs and actuality in which Cameron has built his fane.

But if Denham has taken the narrative battle to the Tories, it has not been at the expense of the facts, but at their service: joining them into a picture of progress, whilst Cameron spins political capital from the Doncaster torture.

Central to this push is increasing access to data. Denham wants problems solved more locally, and this cannot be done if only central government has the information.

A billion pounds has been invested in housing since Gordon Brown’s housing pledge in June, but for Denham it is access to data that “gives us the chance both to discuss whether allocations policy is meeting local needs and challenge the many myths which are around”.

There is a risk, however, that there appears a class of people brimful of information, connected via myriad RSS feed updates, blogs, twitter, and a class of people simply not party to the information age.

Here is the difference between Denham’s speech and the speaker at Unlock Democracy’s first Citizenship Empowerment talk: Oliver Letwin.

Denham does envisage an empowered citizenry making use of Fix My Street, Talk About Local, and Health Maps, but he also wants the scrutiny role handed to councils by the Sustainable Communities Act to be extended, so that when you go to see a councilor to complain about a rubbish school, they cannot say that it is not in their domain, because it all is, with the council obliged to keep watch.

In procuring services, the cheapest contract will not be always be the best – councils will be under pressure from their own awareness, unable to isolate the decision from its area implications.

The greater the information at their disposal, the greater the obligation to act on it. A better informed third sector will hold them to it. Empowerment is thus a tripartite relationship, the citizen as strong as his community networks.

“Turkey’s Voting For Christmas”, David Runciman’s investigation into why those who stand to benefit are resisting Obama’s healthcare reforms, described a culture polarised between fact-based and gut-based politics. He signed off with the prediction that this will soon characterise the British political landscape. It is already here.

On one side the ‘Broken Britain’ mantra, on the other the Government tries to make attitudes grow into the service improvement that has left it behind. The Right are peddling myths; Denham and Left Foot Forward are marshalling the facts.

The cross-party Justice Committee today published a report calling for the prison population to be cut by a third, and the extent of British prisons policy is highlighted by the international context.

The eighth edition of the World Prison Population List, produced by King’s College London’s International Centre for Prison Studies, which details the number of prisoners per 100,000 of the population, shows the UK (153) entrenched in second place amongst G7 countries, behind only the USA (756). The UK is also ahead of Turkey (142), Burma (126) and Pakistan (55).

The Justice Committee’s report prioritises the transfer of female prisoners, repeat low-level offenders, drug and alcohol addicts and prisoners will mental illnesses, urging rehabilitation closer to the communities to which they struggle to return.

The Ministry of Justice, however, is working on a £4.2bn prison building plan which, at £170,000 per place, is set to propel the United Kingdom past most of our Eastern European neighbours. Numbers fluctuate but in 16 years the United Kingdom, with an imprisonment rate of 153 per 100,000 of the population, has become the top incarcerator in Western Europe.

This despite the reduction in crimes recorded over the past ten years, and the Government’s expansion of the role of community punishments. Neither has translated into an effective reduction in the prison population, rather the prison population has kept up with prison building, a market judged by Premier Custodial Group to be worth £2 billion annually, with immediate market opportunities worth a further £3.4 billion now in the offing.

In his article in yesterday’s Daily Mail, Francis Wheen claims that our society is the fulfillment of 1970s paranoia. He also has a book out, called “Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia.”

Wheen’s first premise is that “the defining characteristics of the Seventies were economic disaster, terrorist threats, corruption in high places, prophecies of ecological doom and fear of the surveillance state’s suffocating embrace.“ The second is that we are living in the fulfillment of that prophecy. His segue from one to the other is a comment by George Osborne in January last year after the nationalisation of Northern Rock in which the Shadow Chancellor said, “Life in Brown’s Britain is like an episode of Life On Mars” referring to the BBC TV hit drama of 2006 in which a policeman has an accident and wakes up in 1973.

Osborne’s comment is followed by further proof of his theory. It comes in the form of another BBC television programme, this year’s remake of Reggie Perrin, with Martin Clunes in the role formerly taken by Leonard Rossiter. Wheen proceeds through various instances of seventies paranoia: Watergate, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Peter Wright – the former MI5 counter-intelligence officer who believed that Harold Wilson was a KGB agent – all get a look in. It is an interesting portrait of a decade but Wheen does our age a disservice in turning his theory of the 1970s into a theory of now, feeding our residual paranoias to get his book airtime in the Daily Mail.

A year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, as Paul Krugman has suggested, it would appear to be the 1980s and its great deregulation of financial markets, not the 1970s, whose seeds have come to fruition. But Wheen is right, television right now does suggest otherwise.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling has compared Britain to The Wire, a television series thick with violent crime, vehicle jacking and vandalism, rooting his claims in a British Crime Survey report that shows violent crime down 48%, vehicle related theft down 66%, and vandalism down 20%, from 1995 to 2007/08.

Either he does not watch The Wire or he has not read the survey.

Grayling claims that since Labour came to power, “the level of violent crime in Britain has risen dramatically, by 70 per cent,” but the Survey shows crime to have gone down from a high point in 1995 to its lowest point since, in 2009. To quote directly from the Survey, ‘BCS crime is now at the lowest ever level since the first results in 1981.’

Grayling also contends that gun crime is up by more than half. He is right; it rose by 2% in the last year. What he neglects to mention is that this followed a 13% fall in the previous year; if seen it the context of the statistical trend, rather than in light of a fictional television programme, then a 2% rise shows a levelling out, not the “Horrendous drug world of The Wire,” which was how the Daily Telegraph reported the story.

Watch his interview on BBC News:

The Wire shows politicians cooking the books, a practice which contrasts with the preparation of the BCS. This is not Labour Party literature and uses statistics prepared under the National Statistics Code of Practice. It also includes the Police Recorded Crime, which are the statistics the police supply to the Home Office.

Grayling sounds quite content with the fictional, so he probably will not wish to see the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports for the real City of Baltimore last year: 624 violent crimes, 237 murders, 10 rapes and 182 robberies speak of a different world to the British Crime Survey.