Most of the nonsense which Mr Blair spoke in order to get himself elected has been forgotten. He has not been held to account. But occasionally the propaganda which served him so well is remembered. The absurd lies are finally exposed. This week it has been his crime policy.

One of Mr Blair's most famous pieces of propaganda was the promise that, if elected, he would be "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime".

But this week the British public has been made very well aware that the government over which he presides did not build anything like enough prisons to house the steadily increasing number of criminals. In other words, he simply was not "tough on crime". That was a lie.

In addition, the failure of his government to build sufficient prisons has made crime worse than it would otherwise have been. This, rather unusually, has now been pointed out by a judge:

Judge Richard Bray jailed two men over a fight outside a pub, and told Northampton Crown Court: "I am well aware that there is overcrowding in the prisons and detention centres. That is not going to prevent me from passing proper sentences in each case.

"The reason our prisons are full to overcrowding, and have been for years, is because judges can no longer pass deterrent sentences."

He added: "What message does it send to criminals when they are told in the dock they will only have to serve half the sentence the judge thinks appropriate?

"Until politicians wake up to this fact, criminals will continue to re-offend and the prison population will continue to rise ever higher."

Of course, while Mr Blair 'presided' over the failure to build prisons, the person who should probably take the main responsibility is Gordon Brown. He was acting prime minister for domestic policy. His men at the Treasury will have been the ones telling any Home Secretary who wanted to build prisons, 'sorry, money is too tight'. So the great extent of the rise in crime is yet another failure of this government that probably can be put down to the actions of Gordon Brown.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Politics

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