I can’t help taking an interest in lists. Those programmes on the TV that list the 50 best comic moments, or the 50 best songs, or for that matter the 50 worst songs, can always hold my attention for a while.

So I was struck by Jane’s Country Risk, a list published this week by Jane’s Information Services and which ranked countries according to their stability, prosperity and security. Despite terrorist threats and the other problems we face on the world stage, the UK was ranked 8th best in the world. The USA was 22nd and Switzerland, usually seen by most people as a country of great peace and prosperity, was also rated well behind the UK at 17th. In fact, the only large country ahead of the UK was Sweden!

A few months ago another of these ‘lists’ showed that for the first time in one hundred years, living standards in Britain were higher than those in the United States. Not only that, the list compiled by the respected Oxford Economics consultancy showed that overall living standards in the UK were now also higher than France and Germany and most other developed nations.

Of course, lists are just lists but they do often highlight the difference between public perception and reality. To listen to some people you would think the UK was a bad place to live when, despite our problems, it is actually one of the best places in the world to live.

These lists also highlight the difficulty that politicians and public servants have these days, when everyone is a cynic and the media seem determined only to to report bad news. We don’t just have to tackle the real problems we face as a nation we also find ourselves battling to deal with the perception of those problems.

Crime is an obvious example. To read the media, and sometimes to read my post bag, you would think that Britain is becoming a lawless place. In fact, by every measure, crime is falling overall. If you doubt me look for yourself on the Kent Police website which shows that for Kent as a whole crime is down in every single category. In Thanet, overall crime has fallen by 4.3% over the last year and although violent crimes show a slight increase, crime in all other categories is down with domestic burglary falling by more than 20% and criminal damage by 11%. And before you reach for your pen to tell the Gazette that the police figures only record reported crime, the British Crime Survey which includes the experience of crime in the UK, both reported and unreported, shows an even bigger fall.

That does not mean the battle against crime has been won, not by a long way. The fact that violent crime is falling less fast than other sorts of crime and is increasing slightly here in Thanet is particularly worrying, but it does mean things are going in the right direction. And, as neighbourhood policing teams are rolled out in all our local communities, perhaps we will see an even faster fall in the figures as well as a fall in our perception of crime.