BLAIR SAVAGES CRITICS OVER THREAT

TONY BLAIR launches an unprecedented assault today on the legal and political establishment, accusing it of being 'out of touch' with the people – and pledges new moves to 'hassle, harry and hound' suspected criminals from Britain.

In a passionate public exchange of emails with Observer columnist Henry Porter, the Prime Minister vigorously defends his stance on civil liberties and sketches out a new fault line in British politics over individual freedoms, crossing the traditional divide between right and left.

Admitting frankly that some of his own party as well as many Tories and the Liberal Democrats are ranged against him, he insists nonetheless that he is on the side of-popular opinion and will not retreat, adding: 'I truly believe they are out of touch with their own voters.'

Critics such as Porter or Lord Steyn, the ex-law lord who recently accused his government of authoritarian tendencies and creating 'oppressive' immigration laws, had respectable motives but 'the practical effect of following the course you set out is a loss of civil liberties for the majority,' Blair concludes.

He outlines controversial new steps, ranging from seizing assets from suspected drug dealers – which could see anyone stopped with more than £1,000 having the money confiscated – to draconian new restrictions on the movements of those suspected of involvement in organized crime.

Even if they are not convicted of a crime and there is insufficient evidence to try them, suspects could be banned from associating with certain individuals or traveling to certain places, in order to disrupt trades such as human trafficking. Blair’s approach, to be fleshed out in a major debate about Labour's future after May's local elections, reflects a growing cross-party conviction that liberty is the new battleground for British politics.

Last week senior Tories launched a new grouping, Conservative Liberty Forum, with the blessing of David Cameron, which will debate issues ranging from CCTV to anti-terror legislation, and advise his policy review on fresh ideas to promote liberty.

'This will be one of the big issues for the next 10 years. It fits well with the new Conservative party and its rediscovering a lot of Conservative tradition' said Damian Green, the party’s immigration spokesman and one of the group's supporters. 'It's a genuine divide between the parties: New Labour has now taken the view that if something serves the interests of the police and the security services, we should do it'

Labour strategists, however, believe the Tories' reinvention has set Cameron adrift from public opinion: they were thrilled last week by newspapers unfavourably contrasting his eco-friendly trip to the Arctic with the Prime Minister meeting pensioners for tea. 'Tony Blair believes the political and media establishment are completely out of touch with where the public are on these issues and it's during election campaigns that that is brought home to politicians on the doorsteps,' said a Downing Street source.

'He wants to reopen the debate. David Cameron and Menzies Campbell are on different ground to him on this – and it's an area where the Tories, through having to take up positions to appeal to new people, seem to be losing the plot.'

Today, also writing in The Observer, leading Tory the Earl of Onslow writes an open letter to Cameron demanding his leader take a much more active role in defending what the peer describes as threatened British liberties.

In the exchange with Porter, Blair admits measures such as the antisocial behaviour laws have 'disturbed the normal legal process' but argues that previously police were not prosecuting over such crimes: 'Where these powers are being used, the law-abiding no longer live in fear of the lawless.'

He defended controversial action on asylum and immigration as necessary to prevent racists exploiting the issues.

And he said Stein's criticism, in a lecture earlier this year, showed 'how out of touch much of the political and legal establishment is today', adding that he remains determined to go further down the same road: 'I would widen the police powers to seize the cash of suspected drug dealers, the cars they drive round in... I would impose restrictions on those suspected of being involved in organized crime. In fact I would generally harry, hassle and hound them until they give up or leave the country.'

Plans are being drawn up for a super-strength variant of the anti-social behavior order, for those suspected of involvement in organized crime such as drug smuggling or sex trafficking.

Suspects would be forbidden from associating with accomplices or visiting certain places on pain of jail, restricting their liberty in an unprecedented way. Such civil orders can be obtained with less proof than a court conviction.

Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, will use a lecture to the London School of Economics tomorrow to counter what he will describe as 'the myth' that Lab our has assumed police state powers.

Critics cite examples such as a new law forbidding demonstrations outside Parliament without prior police permission. Clarke is expected to argue that freedom is alive and kicking, with 157 demonstrations held there since last August.

HOW SHOULD CRIME be punished? For many crimes, my wife’s answer is torture. In her view it has all the virtues to be sought in a punishment: it would be an effective deterrent, proportionate (because similar) to the crime, and cheap. This is an unpopular view, at least in our social circles.

Punishing crime is a tricky business because all punishments are, by necessity, nasty. Torture is very nasty, of course, but imprisonment is quite nasty too. So it was not surprising to learn that Tory thinking is turning against prisons. Mary Ann Sieghart wrote on the comment pages last week that Edward Garnier, the Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, thinks imprisoning criminals ''is hugely expensive and not working''.

This anti-prison position is certainly fashionable. But is it also true? Mr Garnier claims that prisons are failing because recidivism rates are high. Seventy per cent of prisoners are convicted of another crime within two years of being released from prison.

But doesn’t the high recidivism rate show that prison is not an effective deterrent after all? It does not. Testing the deterrence value of prison by observing the portion of ex-prisoners who commit crimes is ludicrous. It is a bad case of the statistical error of ''sample bias''. Prisoners are, by hypothesis, people for whom the threat of prison is an insufficient deterrent to crime. That prison does not deter those who end up as prisoners tells us nothing about how much it deters the rest of the population, nor therefore by how much it reduces crime.

Recidivism is a red herring. Nevertheless, Mr. Garnier may be right that prison is too expensive a way of reducing crime. Alas, Mr. Garnier offers no argument beyond pointing to the cost to taxpayers: £37,000 per prisoner per year. He seems to think that upon hearing this figure we will all leap to the conclusion that prison is too expensive. But it would be a leap of faith, because you cannot tell from its price alone whether or not something is good value. Is £15,000 good value for a car? It depends, of course, on what the car is worth. The same goes for prison. If keeping someone in prison for a year is worth more than £37,000 then it is money well spent.

When imprisoning criminals is such good value, we should be doing much more of it. Especially when, contrary to popular belief, Britain has such a low rate of imprisonment. Admittedly Britain imprisons a higher percentage of its population than any other Western European country. But this is a misleading measure, since it takes no account of the portion of the population who commit crimes. Allow for the extraordinary criminality of the British, and Britain has a low imprisonment rate. Whereas Britain imprisons 12 people per 1,000 crimes, Spain imprisons 48 and Ireland 33.

Measured properly, high imprisonment rates correlate with low crime rates: Spain and Ireland, for example, have lower crime rates than Britain. And when Britain began increasing its prison population 13 years ago, the number of crimes began falling. In 1993 the prison population was 49,000 and the number of recorded offences was 19 million. By 2005 the prison population was 75,000 and the number of crimes 11 million. The same story can be told for the US, where the crime rate has fallen steadily as the prison population has climbed.

Someone who knows these facts, as Mr. Garnier must, may still favour reducing the percentage of criminals sent to prison. But it cannot really be because he thinks prison doesn’t work. It can only be because he is very, very nice.

* deterrent – средство устрашения; сдерживающее средство.

One of my fondest memories of Channel 4 dates from the year of its launch – a time when some Golden Agers would have you believe that the channel was a broadcasting hybrid of All Souls' high-table, a top-ranking comedy club, and the Royal Shakespeare Company in a good season. But the programme I'm thinking about would be unlikely to make it on to anyone's list of TV treasures.

It consisted, so far as I can remember it, of an airmail letter from a feminist collective in New Zealand, read aloud on air as the camera panned down the writing paper. And as I watched this utterly baffling transmission – and tried to work out what kind of communal cerebral hemorrhage had ushered it through the commissioning process – it dawned on me that it was a good candidate for Worst Programme I've Ever Seen, one of those elusive absolutes that language suggests should logically exist, but which usually prove very hard to pin down.

As soon as I realised that it was a candidate, it became fascinating, of course. Would the production team ruin the Platonic perfection of their atrocity by including any moving images? Or would they disqualify it from eligibility by ending after just a few minutes – revealing it to be just an early example of the scheduling Polyfilla with which Channel 4 still occasionally stops up listings chinks.

Again, if my memory is reliable, neither thing happened. It rolled on uninterrupted for something like 20 minutes – and ever since has provided me with a kind of laboratory benchmark for just how bad television can get. The only qualification to this thought being that it is quite possible that there are viewers out there who recalls it as a zenith of their viewing experience.

I was reminded of that programme while flicking through the Radio Times, which this week contains an article by John Naught on in which he offers his own Bottom 50 of British Television – a list that kicks off with Naked Jungle – the Five programme that offered the nation the chance to see Keith Chegwin in the raw – and concludes, somewhat arbitrarily, with Crossroads.

You will probably have spotted the conceptual problem already. Any list of terrible television that includes Crossroads has clearly fudged some issues. This isn't a matter of saying that any programme that runs for 24 unbroken years can't be all that bad. Television has some curious ecological zones that can sustain the unsustainable for astonishing lengths of time. Nor is it a case of saying that Crossroads falls into the extensive category of "so bad that it's good". It's more that truly terrible television wouldn't stir any recall at all.

By definition, it's a bit difficult to think of these programmes – and not easy artificially to provoke a memory, either - since they never make it into media surveys or archive highlights. You can find them by going through library copies of the Radio Times –but even then, you're very unlikely to clap a hand to your head and say, "How could I forget that!" Along with the vast bulk of television, they're like Mission: Impossible messages – once they've been transmitted, they self-destruct, leaving no trace behind them. If television came in a packet, they would feature on the ingredients list as bulk filler – no discernable flavour, no detectable nutritional value, but quite useful for making the box feel full.

And I would argue that, in this context, mediocre is far worse than bad. Because it's one of television's duties to be terrible. It is an inspection hatch through which we can look at the inner workings of our society – at its cardiac pulses and digestive churn. It isn't always a pretty spectacle, of course, and in some cases it can be downright nauseating, but even the most deplorable programmes (or, more accurately, above all, the most deplorable programmes) will teach you something. There's no rule that says symptoms have to be pleasant. And if you need an intellectual alibi to watch terrible TV, try this: imagine yourself watching the same programme in 100 years' time – when its crassness will have petrified into hard historical evidence and the tedium will have burned away I wonder myself what future historians will treasure – the programmes whose excellence we now take for granted? Or those that provoke a sense of shame as we watch them?

Which isn't to say that there's no point in distinguishing between good and bad TV – I don't want to put myself out of a job – only that bad programmes are an inevitable part of the ecosystem, and one with a contribution to make to the medium. It's best to avoid them if you can-but worth recognising their accidental qualities when you can't.

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