Blair launches hard-hitting anti-crime strategy

The Prime Minister has unveiled the government's five-year anti-crime strategy, promising that it would "mark an end of the 1960s liberal, social consensus on law and order".

Today's crime strategy is the third of the government's five-year plans – alongside the recent NHS and education strategies. The details of the plan will be set out in the Commons by Home Secretary David Blunkett later today.

The strategy will have three main elements: to revive community policing; to shift away from tackling the offence to targeting the offender; and to give local communities and police powers to enforce respect on the street.

The latter will see summary justice through on-the-spot fines, seizure of drug dealers' assets, closure of pubs, clubs and houses that are the centre of drug use or disorder, naming and shaming of persistent anti-social behaviour offenders, and the roll out of interim anti-social behaviour orders.

The BBC has reported that measures will include the satellite tracking of Britain's 5,000 most prolific criminals, while The Guardian said that the government will pledge to cut crime by 15% in four years.

In a hard-hitting speech pre-empting the Commons announcement, Mr Blair said: "Organised criminals will face not just the pre-emptive seizure of their assets, but will be forced to cooperate with investigations and will face trial without jury where there is any suggestion of intimidation of jurors. Abuse of court procedures, endless trial delays, the misuse of legal aid will no longer be tolerated."

The Prime Minister said that today's reforms aimed to reinforce John Stuart Mill's maxim – that "with freedom comes responsibility".

Mr Blair said that while the 1960s saw a "huge breakthrough" in terms of freedom of expression, lifestyle, and civil rights – law and order policy still focused on offender's rights. Up to the end of the 80s, governments focused too much on the prevention of miscarriages of justice, he added.

Throughout this period, criminals became better organised, more violent and desperate, and now operate "without any residual moral sense", he said.

When Labour took over from the Tory administration in 1997, there was a "resigned tolerance of failure, a culture of fragmentation and an absence of any sense of forward purpose, across the whole criminal justice system", Mr Blair said.

He added: "People do not want a return to old prejudices and ugly discrimination. But they do want rules, order and proper behaviour. They know there is such a thing as society. They want a society of respect. They want a society of responsibility. They want a community where the decent law-abiding majority are in charge; where those that play by the rules do well; and those that don't, get punished."

"Radical" government thinking, he said, had seen: legislation targeting anti-social behaviour; £1 billion investment into Criminal Justice System technology; mandatory drug testing at the point of charge in high crime areas; the creation of the first DNA database; and there are 12,500 more police than in 1997.

(gmcg)