Tough on crime?

The sound bite that launched a thousand more, the phrase that first imprinted Tony Blair on the nation's consciousness, even if it was actually invented by Gordon Brown, was "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime".

So the Prime Minister will surely be anxious that his Government is sounding confused on crime, and confused about the causes of crime. Worse, that confusion is being spread from the most senior levels of the ministerial ranks. More, that confusion is personified by the two members of the Cabinet jointly responsible for the safety of honest citizens and the punishment of offenders.

David Blunkett is the distillation of New Labour populism. From the day he took over at the Home Office, with a brief from the Prime Minister to turn it into a Department of Crime Reduction, Mr Blunkett has governed by the maxim that a headline a day keeps the dogs at bay.

There's no challenge so complex that the gruff tribune of Yorkshire can't answer the problem by proclaiming a crackdown.

The Home Secretary is a more subtle man than he likes to let on in public, and he is regularly forced to withdraw from instant solutions to more nuanced positions. He has just had to soften his plan to impose a mandatory minimum five-year jail sentence for those convicted of possessing or using illegal firearms.

Even by his standards, a U-turn in the space of 24 hours is pretty breathtaking. This is a personal record for Mr Blunkett. Never mind. It won't be his fault, guv. The Home Secretary will be swift to park the blame on the opposition from those airy-fairy, hand-wringing liberals sitting on the judicial bench who, along with the House of Lords, have so often curbed him before.

The head of both of the institutions that Mr Blunkett most loathes is Derry Irvine. The Lord Chancellor represents the other face of New Labour on crime and punishment. His proudest achievement is the Human Rights Act; precisely the law that senior judges called in to help thwart Mr Blunkett's ambitions to trample over their independence.

Just as unwelcome to the Home Secretary was Lord Irvine's declaration of support for the Lord Chief Justice's instruction to the courts that they should consider alternatives to prison for firsttime burglars in cases where there are no aggravating circumstances. I am not surprised that Number 10 has been quick to put distance between the Prime Minister and his old pupil master. Mr Blair, who famously wanted to frogmarch hooligans to cashpoints to pay on-the-spot fines, is more of a Blunkettite than he is Irvinesque.

Adding a further contradiction to the accumulating pile of them, the Lord Chancellor declares that there are too many inmates already in prison in the very same week that the Home Secretary is steering legislation through Parliament which has the avowed purpose of putting more criminals in jail.

I can think of no area of Government activity in which it is more vital for ministers to speak with a clear and united voice. Muddled messages about crime suggest that the authorities are losing their grip. This feeds public alarm and swells the clamour for knee-jerk responses.

Flailing around by the lawmakers can only encourage criminals to believe that they are beyond the reach of justice. And the judges are left clueless about what public opinion, refracted through the Government, expects of them in terms of sentencing.

David Blunkett is right to believe that violent offenders are only likely to be deterred if they are sent the message that they will be dealt with severely. But I suspect that the Home Secretary's chest-beating proclamations of his toughness have long ceased to have much traction on criminals, if they ever did.

Perpetrators of crime - especially those who gun down teenage girls at a New

Year's party - won't be spun into good behaviour. What's five years to the murderers responsible for the Birmingham shootings when they already face a life sentence?

The best deterrent is the threat of being swiftly caught and rapidly punished. The Home Secretary and the Lord Chancellor should be addressing themselves to why, from offence to conviction, it is now taking longer than before New Labour came to power to bring to justice those who commit crimes.

Derry Irvine is right to suggest that our current prison regime is a hugely expensive way of failing to turn criminals into law-abiding, useful citizens. Perhaps the Lord Chancellor's perspective on prison is shaped by the fact that his own son is doing time in the United States. Over the past 10 years, Britain has followed the American path of incarcerating an ever increasing number of people. The surge in the prison population to record levels has not been matched by a commensurate fall in crime. The least of reasons for this is that more than half of those imprisoned come out only to offend again.

If you want to know an important reason why, have a read of a justpublished report by the Chief Inspector of Prisons on Norwich prison. When she made her official inspection of this average jail, the Chief Inspector found that less than 50 of 250 inmates on one wing had access to meaningful work or education - even though this is supposed to be a "training" prison. As for the jail's antidrugs programme, that was ineffective.

So my modest suggestion to the Home Secretary and the Lord Chancellor is that they should spend a little less time in front of microphones, and a bit more time talking to each other. They should work out together how they are going to reform the police and the courts to ensure that criminals are caught and convicted. Then they should consider how to change prisons so that they don't churn out unreformed characters who are more than likely to offend again.

When they present their ideas to Tony Blair, they will need a slogan which might impress the Prime Minister. I've got it: tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.