Murder rate is one of the best proxies for comparing violent crimes in different countries because it's usually defined more similarly than other violent crimes.

At 1.2 the UK still has higher murder rate than most of its neighboring countries: Germany (0.8), Denmark (0.9), Norway (0.6), the Netherlands (1.1), France (1.1). In that end of Europe, only Belgium (1.7) and Ireland (1.2) is doing worse or equally bad.

The "loads of" EU countries doing worse are mainly some of the new member states from Eastern European, which are much poorer than the UK. Only Belgium and Finland seem like countries the UK would like to compare themselves to that are actually doing worse.