Stories of the latest war on gun crime appeared last week flanked by advertisements for a film called Mr & Mrs Smith. A glamorous couple were depicted with handguns as sexually explicit fashion items. Gun laws are like gun movies. They are erotic politics. Home Office ministers go wobbly at the knees just thinking of them.

Another crime bill is heading towards the statute book to keep the public in mind of Tony Blair’s tough-on-crime pledge. Believe it or not, between 1925 and 1980 there were four criminal justice statutes, fewer than one per decade. Blair has passed 27 crime statutes in just seven years. This is obsessional. According to the civil rights group Liberty he has created 750 new criminal offences.

The bill is intended to rectify last year’s failure to get tough enough on imitation gun crime, knife crime and drink crime. It will declare alcohol disorder zones where binge drinkers will be banned and publicans fined, apparently at will, to pay for “drink-related problems”. There will be an extension of antisocial behaviour orders, Asbos.

On Thursday Louise Casey of the Home Office’s “Asbo unit” warned anyone objecting to this extension of police power not to complain. Civil libertarians, she implied, must not put judicial process — such tedious matters as trials, courts and evidence — against the majestic will of her boss, Charles Clarke. Asbos were “a byword for action”. I could hear Robert Mugabe cheering.

Blair’s “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” has entered the lexicon as a classic of political vacuity. Don’t scratch, it says, or you will find goose feathers inside the brain. But that was in opposition. In government Blair has to choose but his choices are always “just-in-time”. Like a medieval monarch, he finds his default mode is war, whether on Iraq, poverty, Aids, drugs or guns. To the complexities of diplomacy or crime he offers a simple three-letter word. Blair has duly imprisoned more Britons (not least women) than anyone, Labour or Tory, including Michael Howard.

Hardly a week goes by without Britain’s civil rights record being under attack at home or abroad.

Not since Philip of Spain told Mary to go easy on Protestant martyrs has Britain taken lessons from a Spaniard on liberty. Yet last week Alvaro Gil-Robles, Europe’s human rights commissioner, commented scathingly on Blair’s anti-terrorism control orders and Asbos and his use of torture evidence in trials.

The British government, he said, seemed to treat human rights as no more than a “formal commitment and, at worst, as a cumbersome obstruction”.

This authoritarian tendency has come from a Labour party which once called itself liberal. It is the party which, in the lifetimes of the present cabinet, abolished hanging, legalised homosexuality, ended theatre censorship, allowed abortion and liberalised divorce. Ministers such as Jack Straw and Patricia Hewitt wrote pamphlets in favour of civil liberty. It is inconceivable that the present cabinet, terrorised by the tabloids, would abolish capital punishment today.

Surely it is time for Blair to honour the second part of his pledge and get tough on the causes of crime. He knows perfectly well what they are: alcohol abuse and drug abuse. Nothing else, not terrorism, rape, fraud, paedophilia or domestic violence, is in the same league. Both arise from what experts call consensual crime. They are undertaken not to cause harm but from a desire for personal enjoyment. They so dominate the criminal justice system that hardly a month passes without a minister taking more power to control them.

The majority of violent crimes and 80% of nocturnal hospital admissions are drink-related. We tolerate this as laddish (or lass-ish) because most of us feel we know what it is. The government indulges it by reducing the cost of drink, largely as brewers and distillers pay a fortune in revenue. Ministers are even making drink more accessible by relaxing licensing laws.

Drugs are a different matter. They rule the underground economy more than gambling and prostitution did before they were legalised.

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