Bored observers of British politics, a group which must be counted in tens of millions, may have the notion at the back of their minds that crime is the one topic the political class can address with fluency. The peace and plenty brought by the end of the Cold War and the pound's expulsion from the Exchange Rate Mechanism gave Tony Blair the chance to address other issues: astonishing inequalities of wealth, the enfeeblement of public services, Europe and the endless conflict in Northern Ireland.
With the exception of Ireland, Blair chose not to seize a moment which is unlikely to be repeated for a generation. He is now said to be worried about his place in history. There is wisdom in the prime ministerial fretting. He filled his days with populist measures which, as the turn-out at the 2001 election showed, weren't particularly popular. His guaranteed crowd-pleaser was meant to be toughness on crime. Now the world is facing recession and worse, that ought to be a consolation for the waste of his first term. The Government ought to better placed than any to cope with al-Qaeda.

All the bombs that have fallen on Afghanistan cannot obscure the obvious fact that al-Qaeda is a global criminal conspiracy rather than an enemy confined to central Asia. Policemen and spies are far better placed than the crews of B52s to stop the destruction of the next World Trade Centre. Dealing with criminal novelty has been the Government's apparent obsession. Blair began the arms race with Michael Howard on crime when he was in opposition, and ensured that each session of the last Parliament was presented with at least one anti-crime Bill when he reached office. New crimes demanded new punishments, which Third Wayers instituted with relish. Most have been on the statute book for long enough for us to judge their worth. How's Tone been doing?

'This is the only effective way. We will punish persistent burglars. If someone continues to commit burglaries, the public deserve to be protected.'

(Jack Straw, January 1999)

Before they were thrown out, the Conservatives tried to out-Blair Blair. If burglars were convicted of three offences, they were to receive automatic three-year sentences. New Labour inherited the law, but Straw said he wouldn't enforce the punishment. At the beginning of 1999, the Government was being battered by Peter Mandelson's home-loan scandal and the order went out to Ministers to come up with something, anything, which would distract the press. Mandatory sentences were back.

Beverley Hughes, the Home Office Minister, was asked on 6 December last year how many burglars had gone down. No mandatory sentences had been imposed, she said. Harry Fletcher, the spokesman for Napo, the probation officers union, explained that mandatory sentences would raise the prison population by about 5,000 a year. The stuffed jails would burst.

The Government knew this better than anyone else and included a get-out clause in the small print of its 1999 order. Courts had to impose mandatory sentences unless there were 'specific circumstances' which made them unjust. As judges hate being told what sentences to give - mandatory punishments take all the fun out of being a judge - the courts have found specific circumstances to give sentences they think fit the crime in each and every case.

'There are a lot of complaints about youngsters out on the streets until late at night. I see them when I'm driving back from the Commons and wonder where their parents are.'

(Jack Straw to The Observer , June 1996)

This was my fault. I phoned Jack Straw in 1996 and for no particular reason said that, naturally, New Labour wouldn't want to follow the American example and impose curfews on children out after dark when it came to power. Straw burbled that curfews hadn't occurred to him before but, on a second or so's reflection, they seemed an excellent idea .

He called an hour later and said that he hadn't meant to say what he had said. He asked me to pull the piece. I refused. Because we published his ramblings, Labour was forced to save Straw's face by promising to allow children under 10 to be curfewed from 9pm to 6am.

I felt a stab of guilt. Nothing should stand in the way of a good story, as journalists know, but martial law for tots seemed a high price to pay, even for a front-page lead. Fortunately for what passes for my conscience, not one local authority applied for a child curfew order. Councillors reasoned that it was impossible for the police to tell the difference between a nine-year old and an 11-year old and officers' energy would be better spent chasing criminals rather than going after children who had done nothing wrong.

Rather than admit it had made a mistake, the Government extended the upper-age limit on curfews to 15 in August. Fletcher's probation officers have just finished a survey of local authorities and police forces. Not one has asked for the under-15s to be curfewed either.

'The Criminal Records Bureau would be an important step towards stopping dangerous people working with young people. We do not believe this will lead to any abuses on the part of those seeking the assurances that the sight of the certificate will give.'

(Paul Boateng, December 1998)

The Criminal Records Bureau is the most revealingly doltish scheme the Home Office has produced in years, or perhaps months, displaying, as it does, characteristic techno-utopianism and mundane incompetence. Some 10 to 12 million employees a year are meant to get a certificate which tells their bosses what crimes, if any, they have committed. If the records were accurate, an old lag trying to go straight would be unemployable and have to return to thieving.

Criminal records are anything but. A secret study by the Metropolitan Police found an 'overall error rate of 86%'; 85% of these were 'major errors, ie those that could potentially lead to the possibility of financial compensation awards to those affected'. In other words, the records were libellously wrong.

The Commons Home Affairs Committee found that two-thirds of entries on the police national computer were also inaccurate. There were errors of commission and omission. An innocent man might be down as a rapist while a convicted child abuser might have nothing more on his record than a few petty offences. There has been a vast amount written recently about what officers should do with paedophiles on their patch. No one pointed out that the police records are so abysmal the odds are the cops don't know if there is a paedophile on their patch. The bureau was meant to start work in July 2001, then Ministers muttered that it couldn't get going until the autumn; now they say it won't be producing certificates until the spring. Expect more delays.

I could go on and I will. In the autumn, Blair promised courts which would be open until midnight to deliver instant justice to thugs. Over Christmas it slipped out that the pilot projects had had to slash their opening hours. The Prison Service said it couldn't open jails in the middle of the night to let convicts in without running the risk of inadvertently letting other convicts out. Before that, there was Blair's threat to allow the police to march yobs to cashpoints, which was laughed to a deserved death.

I hope the point has been made. The more legislation government passes, and the more headlines it gathers, the less time it spends making sure that the basics of the bureaucracy work. Much of what Blair and Howard did displayed a contempt for proles who could be appeased with gestures while their masters carried on with business as usual. Mandatory sentences for burglars and kiddie curfews were probably introduced with the expectation that they would never be used. The case of the Criminal Records Bureau is more serious. Every attempt to introduce new technology to the criminal justice system has been a disaster which has reduced its capacity to monitor risk.

I'm sorry to keep banging on, but 11 September should have frightened even this government into asking not only whether the computers worked, but whether MI5 and MI6 were properly staffed with Arabic speakers and had managers who weren't stuck in a Travellers' Club fantasy world. There are two pieces of fresh evidence which suggest complacency. Before Christmas, the MV Nisha was boarded because blundering intelligence sources said it was a floating bomb. After Christmas, we reported that Richard Reid, the man with the explosive foot, had been identified as a danger by security services which had then done nothing about him.

We shouldn't be surprised. The 1990s have taught us it is easier for governments to pass hard laws than ask hard questions.