Blair talks tough but soft on crime

Tony Blair is said to be agonising over his legacy. He is desperate to be remembered as a great leader.

Yet if today’s prison crisis is any guide, he is most likely to be remembered as the man who promised everything and delivered nothing.

The Labour Party had 13 years in opposition and has been in power for nearly ten years.

It came to power promising to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.”

Anyone might have guessed that a tough line on crime would put more criminals behind bars. So where, given all that time to plan and prepare, are the extra cells?

Today, the prison system is in chaos because this Government has failed in its most basic to separate decent, law-abiding families from the criminals who prey on them.

It has happened because at the heart of New Labour there is not the political will to match tough promises with deeds.

This Government is infested with the trendy belief that prison does not work and that villains can be rehabilitated by community “punishments”.

Honest people know better. They know that prison works perfectly because, for the time the villain is locked away, he or she can do no more harm.

Prison is the one sentence that criminals fear. Yet today, thanks to massive incompetence and muddled thinking at the very top, courts are unable to impose prison sentences which are richly deserved.

The way forward?

In the short term, temporary cells must be provided, even if it means using police stations and mothballed army camps.

There is a powerful case, too, for repatriating thousands of foreign prisoners to serve their sentences in their own countries.

But in the long term there is no substitute for building more prisons - and for imposing more custodial sentences, instead of giving offenders chance after chance.

Tony Blair wanted to leave a legacy of law and order. His true legacy is unsafe streets, feral gangs and hardened criminals who know they need not fear prison because all the prisons are full.

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Nuclear threat from rogue dictatorship

North Korea, a rogue dictatorship run by an unpredictable megalomaniac, has tested a nuclear warhead.

Who could have imagined that this backward land with a starving population would join the ranks of those with the power to destroy the planet?

This is a dangerous day for mankind.

We can only hope that firm diplomatic pressure by China and other nations in the Far East persuade North Korea that owning this frightful new technology will bring more difficulties than it solves.

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