Getting the knives out

Ms Smith appears to be redefining her job as Potty Ideas Tsar with her latest knee-jerk reaction.

Having decided that she needed to rewrite history, following the outraged response to her earlier potty idea about conducting knife-wielding young people around casualty wards full of their victims, Ms Smith denied point-blank that she had ever broached the idea.

She then proceeded to cap it with an even more ludicrous suggestion, apparently with prime ministerial approval, that the families of around 20,000 violent or disorderly teenagers will be warned that they face eviction from their council houses, should their offspring offend again.

Quite apart from the fact that this would constitute the most outrageous instance of collective punishment that this government has ever proposed, and it has proposed some stinkers in its time, it is also probably the least effective measure imaginable.

Only new Labour could possibly believe that the addition of homelessness to the woes already suffered by families, burdened with violent youngsters in their midst, would make any positive difference, or could transform the lives of those youngsters into shining examples of social responsibility.

And the appalling class bias of focusing exclusively on council tenant families is beyond belief, coming as it does from a supposedly Labour politician.

But Ms Smith's suggestions follow a fairly well-worn track in new Labour's scheme of things. Any nutty suggestion carrying the likelihood of winning the support of the tabloid muckrakers seems to be preferable to looking objectively at the issues and producing policies which address the reality, rather than the populist perception, of difficult issues.

Even the definition of "knife crime" is in itself misleading. Nowhere does Ms Smith say in which way this differs from "gun crime," "gang crime," "youth crime" or "street crime." In fact, of course, it doesn't.

If the government had the nerve to admit it, the huge majority of crimes covered by these useless definitions are directly or indirectly drug-related and the growth in them relates to the continuing failure of this administration's drugs policies.

It is high time that the government accepted that it is useless to continue throwing millions upon millions of pounds into a futile and unwinnable "war on drugs" and looked into other alternatives to a completely unenforceable prohibition policy.

It may or may not be an answer to all the woes of street crime, but the decriminalisation of drugs would remove at a stroke the turf violence, the weapons culture, the waste of police resources, the dangers of adulteration and the links with other criminal activities associated with illegal drugs at present.

Undoubtedly, even the suggestion of such a policy will be controversial and contentious, inflaming fundamentalists on both sides of the argument.

But if the government is ever to find solutions, it must first stop confusing cause and effect and strike at the real roots of crime. And understanding the link between drugs, poverty and violence would go a long way to clarifying the issue.

There is far more to the subject than can be dealt with here, but, at some stage, the problem must be properly analysed, not compartmentalised out of existence.