Modern crime: drugs, driving and race crimes

New Centuries, New Crimes

A typical day in Edwardian Britain looked like a Victorian one. Most people walked or used trains. Cocaine and opium could be bought legally over the chemist’s counter. Britain had no settled multi-ethnic population in the way it would after the Second World War, and racial discrimination was permitted by law. By 2000 all three of these things had changed: the motor car had created an entirely new field of criminal law, drugs had been heavily criminalised, and racial and other hate crimes had been introduced to the statute book. This lesson covers what changed and what stayed the same.

A useful frame for the period is change and continuity. Old crimes — theft, burglary, assault, fraud, smuggling — did not disappear; they adapted to new technology. New crimes appeared because new technologies and new social arrangements made them possible. Both are part of the spec.

The Motor Car: A New Crime Category

There were a few hundred cars in Britain in 1900 and over two million by 1939. Cars killed and maimed pedestrians at rates that made the new technology a public emergency. The first Road Traffic Act of 1930 introduced reckless and dangerous driving as offences, criminalised driving under the influence of drink or drugs, and required drivers to hold a licence and insurance. The 1934 Road Traffic Act introduced the 30 mph limit in built-up areas and a driving test from 1935.

Driving offences expanded after 1945. The Road Safety Act 1967 introduced the breathalyser and the legal blood-alcohol limit of 80 milligrammes per 100 millilitres — one of the first uses of scientific measurement in everyday policing. The Road Traffic Act 1988 consolidated the regime: speeding, drink-driving, dangerous driving and driving without insurance all became offences with their own sentencing tariffs. By the 2000s motoring offences accounted for the largest share of court business in England and Wales by volume, even if not by seriousness.

Drugs: From Legal to Criminal

In 1900 cocaine, opium and cannabis were sold openly in chemists’ shops. Heroin was marketed as a cough remedy by the German firm Bayer. Britain’s first restrictions came during the First World War, when the Defence of the Realm Act 1916 banned the supply of cocaine and opium to soldiers. The Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 made these restrictions permanent and brought heroin and morphine under control. The 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act introduced the modern A/B/C class system, with maximum penalties scaled to the harm of each drug.

Drug crime developed alongside drug law. Smuggling networks adapted from older patterns of illegal trade. Police forces created drug squads in the 1960s, and from the 1980s drug-related crime — especially burglary and street robbery to fund addictions — became a major share of recorded offending. By the 2000s the spec describes drugs as one of the most visible new crime categories of the modern period — not because the substances are new, but because their legal status has flipped.

Race Crimes and Hate Crimes

The British Nationality Act 1948 confirmed that Commonwealth citizens could settle in Britain; thousands accepted the invitation, beginning with the Empire Windrush arrivals from the Caribbean in 1948. They met not only a labour shortage but open racial discrimination — signs in boarding-house windows reading ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’, refusal of service in pubs, and racial violence including the 1958 Notting Hill riots. None of this was illegal. Britain had no statute against racial discrimination.

That changed under Harold Wilson’s Labour governments. The Race Relations Act 1965, taken through Parliament by the Home Secretary Sir Frank Soskice, made incitement to racial hatred a criminal offence and banned discrimination in public places. The 1968 Race Relations Act, driven by the Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, extended this to housing and employment. The 1976 Race Relations Act, which Jenkins also drove, set up the Commission for Racial Equality and outlawed indirect discrimination.

Hate-crime law expanded after 1976. The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 introduced racially aggravated offences, attaching higher sentences to existing crimes (assault, criminal damage, harassment) when motivated by racial hatred. The Stephen Lawrence case — the racist murder of a black teenager in south-east London in 1993, and the Macpherson Inquiry of 1999 that followed — pushed Parliament to extend protection: the law later covered religion, sexual orientation, disability and transgender status. By 2010 the Equality Act consolidated this into a single statutory framework.

Cybercrime and Continuity

The personal computer entered British homes from the late 1970s and the internet from the mid-1990s. The Computer Misuse Act 1990 created three offences: unauthorised access (‘hacking’), unauthorised access with intent to commit a further offence, and unauthorised modification of data. Online fraud, identity theft and phishing emails are most often older crimes (deception, theft, harassment) committed via new technology, not entirely new categories.

Continuity also runs through the period. Burglary, assault, criminal damage and old-fashioned fraud remained the bulk of recorded crime. The 2003 Sexual Offences Act consolidated rape and child-protection law that traced back to the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act. People-trafficking laws built on much older anti-slavery legislation. The headline of the modern period is therefore not new behaviours but new legal categories — cars, drugs, hate, computers — sitting alongside very old ones.