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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/05/blair-afghanistan-liberal-interventionism

Tony Blair still preaches the gospel of liberal interventionism, but in Afghanistan the lack of a well-resourced plan is fatal

The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday 12 July 2009

In the article below, we misquoted Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Young British Soldier". "When you're left wounded on Afghanistan's plains" should have been "When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains" and the correct "An' go to your Gawd like a soldier" was changed to "And go to your Gawd ..."

When you're left wounded on Afghanistan's plains
And the women come out to cut up what remains
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
And go to your Gawd like a soldier

There's no heroism to be found in "The Young British Soldier", Kipling's poem written after the Afghan war of the 1880s: simply acknowledgement of the country's mythic savagery and resilience, which must prompt us to ask again if the sacrifices being made by British infantry in Helmand, most recently by Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe and Trooper Joshua Hammond, have any more lasting purpose than the conflicts of Empire?

Other questions follow. Will the American surge of 10,000 troops master the province we have struggled to subdue? Is there an overall workable strategy in place? And can we afford the cost of the war and the lives lost?

No flicker of doubt seems to exist in the soldiers' minds: a few days before he was blown up with Hammond and six other men, the much admired Thorneloe gave an interview in which he didn't question the mission. Nor did he complain about his men's equipment, though if the British had had the helicopters the Americans have brought with them, he might not have been travelling in the much criticised Viking armoured vehicle.

The politicians seem equally certain. Last year David Miliband said: "Sixty or seventy years ago the armed forces defended Britain on the white cliffs of Dover. Now to defend Britain we have got to be in the toughest areas of the world ... So the purpose of the mission is absolutely clear. It is to make a sure that Afghanistan does not become a safe haven for people who want to plot against the UK."

Is it really as straightforward as that? Ten days ago in a public interview with Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, in New York, Tony Blair recalled the speech he made in Chicago a decade earlier, when he outlined his ideas on liberal interventionism - "the right to intervene for humanitarian purposes ... and to remove a regime that was brutalising its people". How much is liberal interventionism still riding in the sidecar of this mission? A lot has been said about the cruelty of the Taliban, the children attending schools for the first time and the building of a civil society with elections due in August. Is this simply about "winning hearts and minds", or do the residues of Blair's Chicago doctrine still lurk?

This is a good moment to recall the theory of Gilles Dorronsoro of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who wrote in January: "The mere presence of foreign soldiers fighting a war in Afghanistan is probably the single most important factor in the resurgence of the Taliban." That same point was hinted at by a British commander quoted in Patrick Bishop's book, Ground Truth. Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, who led 16 Air Assault to Helmand, made an odd aside in a report back to London before the real trouble began: "There is not to my mind an insurgency in Helmand. But we can create one if we want to."

The idea that we might be creating a war by stimulating resistance is haunting, especially when you learn from The Power of Numbers, to be published by Policy Exchange this week, that the average age in Afghanistan is 16. Compare that to the average age of Americans (35) and Europeans (38) and you see the enormous advantage the Taliban have in a country that is full of young men and where life is cheap. We are apt to forget the society we seek to influence and the lives affected in the process.

The British toll has reached 171, with many more wounded and maimed. We have a constant responsibility to review our presence in Afghanistan even though most policymakers continue to believe that containment of the Taliban and al-Qaida several thousand miles away is an acute issue of national defence. But we can't do that if there is no clear strategy, and resources are diminishing.

"We are wasting precious lives," says Paddy Ashdown, who until January was to be the UN's plenipotentiary in Afghanistan, "because our politicians will not get their act together. Unless there is a single strategy operating to a single set of priorities, speaking with a single voice, we are not going to win this battle."

The fear is that we have drifted from a policy of extending control and consolidation - "take, hold and build" - to a point where we can only hope to contain, with all the senseless loss that entails.

It all comes down to resources, which are threatened as never before, because of the collapse of public finances. "The armed forces we had," a recently retired general told me, "were designed to do one medium-scale enduring operation. So the big strategic mistake was when we committed ourselves to Afghanistan when we were already committed to Iraq. Inevitably we were not going to have the resources to do either properly. "

This is where the military feel the punishing impact of Blair's liberal interventionism, what the general describes as a "fantastic amount of wishful thinking" when it came to matching aspiration with resources. "The military is like a business. We were quite well capitalised but now we need to rebuild the business. We are losing trained and experienced people because individually they have decided that they've had enough and don't want to do it [Afghanistan] again."

Rebuilding seems unlikely, given the government's prioritisation - and indeed the opposition's - of frontline services over the real frontline in Afghanistan. In a review for the Royal United Services Institute last week, Malcolm Chalmers says the best estimate is that the Ministry of Defence will make a real-terms cut over the next six years of 10%-15%. But if the economy fails to recover, even taxes may not prevent deeper cuts. That would bring our military to the level of that of Belgium or Holland, according to the general. Fighting a war in Afghanistan would be almost out of the question.

"Why is it that other countries are able to give their armed forces what they need," asked Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, after Thorneloe's death, "when they need it and where they need it, but under the current government we are unable to do the same?"

He knows the answer: the money has gone elsewhere - an 85% increase in spending on health over the past decade, 63% on education and 50% on public security and order. And he knows that his party can do little to alter circumstances where spending on public order and safety has risen to nearly equal the defence budget.

What is disturbing, and why Ashdown says that a defence review is a day one item on the next prime minister's desk, is the possibility of an overspend of about 27% of the entire annual defence budget. Meanwhile, the general observes: "The world is becoming increasingly unstable and dangerous. To put your finances in such a state that you cannot afford to defend the country properly seems to be very irresponsible."

I cannot help thinking that a lot of that responsibility lies with the man I watched in New York explaining his mission to intervene. We must wonder to what extent intervention, for whatever reason, is the cause of rather than the solution to the old problem of Afghanistan.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/19/adults-children-paranoia-surveillance

Adults will find it hard to interact with young people if hysterical paranoia means they are all viewed as potential abusers

A few weeks ago in a schoolroom of 12-year-olds, a boy with big ears, a radiant smile and, as it turned out, dyslexia excitedly began asking me questions before the class had even started. They were by far the most interesting I received all day and sparked an idea for my next children's book.

So it's not just children who will forfeit something valuable in the boycott by authors such as Philip Pullman and Anthony Horowitz of the Vetting and Barring Scheme run by the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA). And it is not just authors who object to the new laws. There are many part-time and volunteer workers who coach sport, entertain, teach after-school music, drama singing or dance and stage events who will decide to spend their time doing something else because they are insulted by the idea that they must prove to the ISA and the Criminal Records Bureau that they are not a paedophile.

Much will be lost, but that is to be expected given the mood of fear and suspicion that has taken root in our schools over the last decade and is doing so much damage to relations between adults and children, and to the children themselves, who are growing up in a surveillance society. It still seems extraordinary that ContactPoint, the children's database that allows access to the details of every child in England and Wales to hundred of thousands of officials, yet not to parents, came about without any fuss. What were we thinking of to allow the construction of such a pointless and sinister apparatus?

Another part of the great suspicion is that schools have become besotted by biometrics and CCTV systems that enable teachers to monitor pupils through the day and, in some instances watch, them in the changing rooms and classroom. At Notre Dame school in Norwich, they are using CCTV to monitor pupils in the lavatory block.

Nothing is being left to chance. A school in Bedfordshire recently banned parents from attending sports day to guard against paedophiles. The man in charge of the event, Paul Blunt, from the East Bedfordshire Schools Sports Partnership, was quoted as saying: "If we let parents into the school they would have been free to roam the grounds. All unsupervised adults must be kept away from children. An unsavoury character could have come in and we just can't put the children in the event or the students at the host school at risk like that." The result of this freakishly protective attitude is that parents weren't allowed to watch their own child compete in the egg and spoon race. What kind of madness is this?

I'll tell you. It is the madness that suggests authority knows best how to guide and protect the lives of our children and, as in the ContactPoint database, that parents must take second place to the needs of the state's protection. It's a kind of Stalinism that promotes the fear of bogeymen, doubts our worth as parents and demands we must prove ourselves to the state before enjoying the simple - and, yes, innocent - delight of a contact with a child who is not our own.

A moment should occur in every child's life, when he or she meets an adult from outside the family and that adult takes an interest in them as a person and shows the child that they have something to offer. This is an important part of becoming a successful individual and I imagine most people reading this remember with pleasure - retrospective awe, in my case - when someone outside school and the family valued them for what they were. Now these contacts are to be policed with a formal structure of suspicion that implies to the child that every adult who has not been checked is a potential abuser. Philip Pullman last week said of the new law, which he likened to Clause 28: "It seems to be fuelled by the same combination of prurience, sexual fear and cold political calculation."

These impulses in a society are difficult to plumb, but the current fear and suspicion strike me as part of some profound doubt we have about ourselves, which manifests itself in these nightmarish visions of fairy-tale evil as well as a blind faith in technology. Reason and proportion need to play a much greater part in our deliberations about the safety of children than they do at present.

But it is a complex problem. Mistrust is so often the basis of relations between the state and the public under this government that it is unsurprising that the pattern of suspicion is repeated in relations between school authorities and their charges. I have argued that the government's attitude infantilises the public and reduces personal responsibility at the same time as enhancing the power of the state. It seems paradoxical that the process is being mimicked in schools, where the whole point, surely, is to allow children to mature into adults and learn responsibility.

Our aversion to risk plays a part in all this, but it must be said that disproportionate supervision is something that schools have warmed to without much pressure from the public or the government. The walkout by politics students at the Davenant school in Loughton when their headteacher installed a globe camera in the classroom was a sign that school authorities were going too far and students rightly ridiculed his explanation that this was to facilitate teacher training.

The spin involved in introducing such systems is always interesting. Pupils at King Edward VI Five Ways grammar school in Birmingham, for example, have been angered by the introduction of electronic fingerprinting, which was presented to them as an easier way of paying for lunch. It emerged that once the school has captured fingerprints, it will be used for daily registration, which I must say is one of the more chilling developments I have yet come across.

Presumably, police will be given access to the school database on demand, but that is clearly not the only worry. A member of the Welsh Assembly, Mark Isherwood, suggested systems that store fingerprints as unique numbers can be hacked, as the US government's National Science and Technology Council has proved, and the fingerprint retrieved. "In future," he said, "fingerprint templates will be used to authenticate passports and bank accounts. Biometrics are extremely valuable and need to be kept in a secure environment."

The sensible course would be to give pupils a unique number or swipe card, but then that would deprive school authorities of the mild thrill of control that lurks in the decision to install one of these systems.

We place our faith in systems and procedures that - frankly - have not earned it. Last week, a woman who left her four children, the eldest of whom was nine, in a park while she went to a shop found her name had been listed with the Criminal Records Bureau. She had done nothing wrong, was found guilty of no crime, yet the report by police will jeopardise any application she may make for a job working with children or vulnerable people.

Hearsay, rumour and unfounded suspicion are now known in the trade as "soft information" and this will be the currency of the new procedures brought in by the Independent Safeguarding Authority in the autumn with a reminder to all concerned that they have a duty to share information. It is tragic that a body set up following the murder of the two Soham schoolgirls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, will deprive children and adults of so much valuable contact, but the more significant point is the generally toxic - Pullman's word - effect that suspicion has on our society.

"Suspicion," Thomas Paine wrote, "is the companion of all mean souls and the bane of good society."

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/henryporter/2009/jul/16/photography-police-view-delete-images

Photographer Alex Turner has been arrested by Kent police for being "too tall" in an action which must cast further doubt on the collective sanity of Kent Police (see Kingsnorth) and which also suggests that some police forces are now really behaving as if we lived in police state, a phrase that I have been reluctant to use.

In his blog, Turner gives a full account of being stopped by two men in Chatham High Street, after he took a picture of a fish bar called Mick's Plaice, which stands between Specsavers and a shop called Mr Flower and advertises jacket potatoes and an all day breakfast in a colour scheme of bold blue and white. The men said they worked for Medway Council.

"I saw a badge attached to one of the men's waistband and saw the logo of Kent Police. The men asked me why I was taking pictures in the High Street.

I told them photography was a hobby and explained what and who I had taken pictures of and why".

Turner continues, "I asked them under what authority they were making their request. They did not provide a clear answer to this question in that they failed to state the legal authority under which they were making their enquiries."

Because they neither stated their authority nor properly identified themselves, Turner refused to answer their questions. The men summoned uniformed police. Turner took photographs of two officers as they approached him reproduced with blurred faces on his blog – and arrest followed. He was handcuffed held in police van and then questioned by two plain clothes officers. "They spoke about the threat of terrorism. They were keen to seek my agreement with regards to the views they expressed, both about the threat of terrorism and the suspicious nature of people with cameras and especially those who chose not to provide identifying details about themselves when requested to do so."

He was searched while still handcuffed. The officer told him to take off his trainers and patted down the soles of his feet. At some point the officers made a veiled threat about Turner's ability to continue as photographer.

"Whilst sharing their views about the threat of terrorism officer xxxxx [name redacted] stated she had felt threatened by me when I took her picture. I cannot recall exactly what she said but I do recall her referring to my size and implying she found it intimidating at the time (I am 5ft 11in and weigh about 12 stone)."

Turner concludes with this, "I believe the way I was treated was unjustified and wholly disproportionate. I assert that officer xxxxx misused her powers of arrest and demonstrated a poor understanding of the law in relation to arrest, the use of force, the use of detention, photography in public places, obstruction and the ... Terrorism Act 2000. Furthermore I assert that officer xxxxx is unsuitable to act as a police officer or at the very least requires further training if she is intimidated by a male of an unremarkable stature taking a single picture with a camera pointed in her direction."

Clearly something has to be done about the police attitude to photography and filming. This week it was

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/henryporter/2009/jul/01/glastonbury-protest-songs-concert

liberty central hosts a virtual protest concert – film your song, put it up on YouTube and send us the link

Watching a little of Glastonbury on TV, I was stuck by the emptiness of so much of the songwriting: the absence of protest or even the mildest objection to the things that concern that audience – climate change, a rubbish parliament and the attack on liberty. Maybe the BBC's coverage failed to highlight this kind of music, or perhaps there is not much protest writing about.

Whatever the reason, liberty central now steps in to fill the gap with a virtual protest concert. You are invited to film your song, put it up on YouTube and send us the link. And the first song comes from Nick Laird-Clowes, formerly of the Dream Academy (Life in A Northern Town, The Love Parade, The Edge Forever), a collaborator with David Gilmour and composer of several film soundtracks.

Laird-Clowes was asked to write the music for Nick Broomfield and Christina Roberts's film about the Kingsnorth Six, A Time Comes, and in the early hours of the next day came up with this song, which he wrote and then sang into his iPhone. Broomfield and Roberts used the music but not Laird Clowes's song, Mayday, which is more generally about protest. It is, however, dedicated to the Kingsnorth Six "who put themselves at risk for safety of future generations, and for lovers of free speech and liberty everywhere". It was recorded over the May bank holiday weekend with vocals and guitar by David Gilmour. Last week Piers Thompson shot the promo for the complete song.

I like it a lot and although I am no judge of these things, it seems to me to have that crucial quality of the protest anthem, a sharp turn of phrase and a good chorus that you can yell at the top of your voice. Any more? Billy Bragg? Neil Tennant? What are your favourite protest songs? Is there a Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger or Barry McGuire for the modern age?

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/audio/2009/jul/09/newsoftheworld-newsinternational

The morning we meet for Politics Weekly, the Guardian had just broken news that another paper, the News of the World, may have hacked into the phones of thousands of public figures, paying off one victim, with a cool £700,000... Observer columnist Henry Porter tells us what it means.

We cover the pressing political angle: the editor of the paper until 2007 - Andy Coulson - is the current press adviser to Cameron and as things go, could be spinning from number 10 within the year. Henry knows Coulson and - after vouching for Coulson's likeability - thinks that whether he knew about or not his position may be untenable. Porter's co-columnist from the Obs has a different point. For Nick Cohen, the story sets back the campaign for freedom speech being waged against overly powerful libel laws.

Then we cover attempts to reform two almighty institutions - the boys in blue and peers with blue blood (translation of florid description: the police and the Lords).

In the wake of another report into police responsibility for the death of newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests, Porter believes the lack of transparency surrounding how the police made their decision makes the case for elected police officials even more pressing. Cohen questions how much the mayor of London Boris Johnson knew - after all the mayor sits on the Metropolitan Police Authority.

Then to reform of the House of Lords. They've spent 13 years promising it and next week we will finally get their last attempt at it - a bill will be published that will, at the very least, abolish the principle of hereditary peers. But is that enough? And even if the government were to propose further reforms, do they have the political time, capital and chutzpah to get any more fundamental reforms through? Michael White marvels at the Lords energy and commitment and thinks they will survive. But aroud the table, the answer all round has only two letters.

And as the death toll continues to rise in Afghanistan, we ask is there a a plan? Nick thinks they are fighting a just war, but wonders if Afghanistan can afford its level of commitment. Henry Porter thinks the problem is that there is no clear strategy.

Tuck in.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/jul/08/hacking-privacy-news-of-the-world

If Murdoch's papers really believe in public interest they should disclose all details of illegal phone hacking

The major threat to privacy is assumed to come from the state. But Nick Davies's story in the Guardian today – about News Group's payments to settle cases that could reveal details of an operation to use information from intercepted text messages sent by many well known individuals – shows how privacy is equally threatened by determined commercial organisations.

News of the World (NoW) journalists used information obtained by hacking into the phone of Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, and after reaching a settlement with Taylor suppressed hundreds of pages of evidence. In 2007, the NoW reporter Clive Goodman was found guilty under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and sent to jail – but Davies's investigation shows that the practice was much more widespread than suspected. Phones belonging to MPs from all parties, including Tessa Jowell and John Prescott, were hacked using a private investigator named Glenn Mulcaire, also jailed in the 2007 trial.

As well as trying to suppress documentation, News Group initially denied keeping any records or notes of the messages. This turns out to be untrue: among messages transcribed were those to Sir Alex Ferguson and Alan Shearer. Significantly, Rupert Murdoch's company has denied interceptions of this scale to a parliamentary select committee and the Press Complaints Commission. This jeopardises any claim the company may make in the course of exposing well known figures. The company's credibility is now seriously called into question.

More disturbing is the possibility that because of the company's influence in British public life, the Metropolitan police could have stayed its hand when considering more widescale prosecutions. It is now incumbent on the police to explain publicly why the investigation was not brought to the sort of conclusion the public would expect for this level of alleged criminal activity.

One officer suggested that two or three thousand mobile phones had been hacked. If true, it would speak of a programme of interception with reporters from the NoW ordering from a menu supplied by the shady investigator. The public needs to know to what extent Murdoch's papers indulge in this illegal activity: it is legitimate matter of public interest, the very thing cited by the NoW as it pursues people such as Max Mosley, whom they bugged and filmed in a sado-masochistic sex session.

Mosley received £60,000 after the paper had fought and lost the case on a spurious public interest defence, which seems even harder to swallow now we know the extent of its spying programme. There is no doubt that executives understood how damaging the revelations about phone-tapping would be because they paid over seven times as much (£450,000) to Gordon Taylor.

The cover-up has failed. The Press Complaints Commission needs to reopen its investigation and call executives before it. The parliamentary committee will almost certainly want to know if it has been deceived, and to take evidence again. Nigella Lawson, Patsy Kensit, Jude Law, Anne Robinson and many others are owed an apology as well as an explanation. So are less well-known individuals who have attracted the NoW's interest.

Those members of the government who have supported the state's acquisition of so much personal data and have now been subjected to the NoW's hacking operation may think that privacy laws that guarantee the communications of innocent individuals from unscrupulous corporations, as well as the state, are long overdue.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/henryporter/2009/jul/07/police-g20-protests

Today's report shows that, following G20, police don't just need to change their tactics but their whole attitude to political protests

The highly critical report into the policing of the G20 demonstrations makes it clear that it is not just the tactics used by the police that must change but the whole attitude to political expression on the streets.

"As a police service," said Chris Allison, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police, we have clear duties under the law: to facilitate protest." You will find many senior police officers who say the same, but it is amazing that it took the death of Ian Tomlinson and more than 250 complaints about the G20 operation, including 50 of using excessive force, for this to be articulated in public so clearly.

Allison says he wants to move forward – code that asks people to forget what happened. That won't be possible until we see demonstrations policed with a respect for those expressing their legitimate views. Kettling is clearly an inflammatory tactic, which was responsible for a large amount of the trouble and violence. Despite hard lobbying from senior officers, that must end.

The atmosphere over the G20 summit wasn't helped by a media operation, which predicted violence ahead of the demonstrations and encouraged police officers to think that confrontation was inevitable. This was no doubt designed to deter people from attending, but what it may have done was allow certain police officers to believe that they had the full support of the government whatever they did. This predictive briefing must also end.

At the G20 demonstrations, it certainly looks like some of the rights laid down in the Human Rights Act were breached – those concerning freedom to assemble and protest, and of course privacy. One of the more sinister activities of the modern police is the collection of data and images from Forward Intelligence Teams, which seem to act in an intrusive and overbearing manner. As the Panorama programme, Whatever Happened to People Power, showed last night, Forward Intelligence Teams are filming people who attend perfectly legal meetings and political protests. Often they are collecting their car numbers so that individuals can be tagged on the ANPR system for future monitoring. This must also end.

Today's report, Adapting to Protest (pdf), by Denis O'Connor, the chief inspector of constabularies, is welcome. A key sentence is, "What the review [of policing protest] identifies is that the world is changing and the police need to think about changing their approach to protest." That must be evident after the large number of citizen journalists filmed the police and, in the case of Ian Tomlinson, acquired vital evidence concerning his death.

The police have to understand that every action they take on these occasions is likely to be recorded. They cannot simply close down the cell phone network or interrupt the web as the Iranian and Chinese authorities have done over the last few weeks. In Britain, there is a new generation of protesters who are sophisticated, know their rights and are adept at using modern technology and the internet. To police a demonstration on climate change in the same way as you would the industrial troubles of the 80s is clearly inadequate, particularly as climate change demonstrators have the express support of Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change secretary, who has said that they were essential to maintaining pressure on the government.

It is essential the police bring themselves to an understanding of the legitimate aims of demonstrators, who in most cases could not be more honourably motivated.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/henryporter/2009/jul/06/asbo-alan-johnson

If you want a symbol of all that is vindictive and, frankly, dumb about New Labour it is the asbo. Until Alan Johnson became home secretary, this key Blairite response to antisocial behaviour looked as though it was quietly being allowed to die. But as Matt Foot writes in the letters column of the Guardian, Johnson has revived the policy in the run-up to a general election, which if nothing else is evidence of the government's complete lack of new ideas.

More than that it is the retreat from reason. Many, but not all, problems of crime and disorder can be laid at the door of individual responsibility. The asbo addresses symptoms but rarely the cause of a problem, and it seeks to control behaviour that should never be the subject of a court order, especially one that is so easily granted. As Foot writes, asbos are extremely difficult for anyone to stop, as the only test for the court is evidence that someone behaved in a way "likely to cause alarm".

An asbo hearing is predisposed to grant the order because of the very low requirements of evidence. Hearsay, gossip and rumour are all admissible so it is completely wrong of Johnson to suggest that they are difficult to get.

If a police officer or official goes before the court to say something is true, the court is inclined to believe what they are told. The important point is that on the basis of untested evidence a person may eventually be given a jail sentence for breach of an order that is much longer than the maximum sentence available for the offence; sometimes the antisocial behaviour in question does not even fall into the category of a crime. For instance there is no offence of whistling, but if you are forbidden from making loud noises in public and then are caught whistling, as Dean Bailey from Dulwich was, you risk a prison sentence. The asbo undermined the principles of evidence and was the first measure in a legal trend that allowed the authorities to penalise individuals on the basis of a belief, or their own determination to sort out a problem – for instance the order granted against a pensioner in New Malden who could not stop her dogs barking.

The asbo is a weapon of a petty-minded regime which seems long ago to have given up any concern about the causes of crime. It has become a means of persecuting those who inconvenience society as Foot says, the mentally ill, the elderly, drunks, drugs addicts, beggars and streetwalkers. The young are penalised for hanging about on street corners, drinking in public and rowdy behaviour, all of which are undesirable but which are also the result of deep social problems. It seems extraordinary that the Sentencing Guidelines Council is considering proposals that would jail a first offender for breaching an abso and send young people to a detention centre for four months.

Yes, there are a lot of appalling people out there are who behave in appalling ways; yes personal responsibility needs to be encouraged but the asbo does very little to achieve a change of heart or behaviour in the individual, which is why so many are breached.

With his less-than-brave response to the unpopular ID card and his reinvigoration of the asbo, Alan Johnson is proving himself to be an unimaginative Blairite foot soldier content to finesse New Labour laws rather than challenge their basis.