TONY BLAIR’S plans for tackling public alarm about crime and disorder were ridiculed last night as little more than a “sticking plaster solution to a broken leg”.

As the Prime Minister prepared to deliver a key speech today on law and order, his whole strategy came under attack from a leading criminologist for being more about winning elections than dealing with crime.

Ian Loader, Professor of Criminology at Oxford University, told the Prime Minister, on the No 10 website, that the Government’s “legislative hyperactivity” risked making it more difficult for the Home Office to achieve its objectives. He warned Mr Blair against sweeping changes to the criminal justice system on the basis of newspaper headlines suggesting that public confidence in the system was at crisis point.

“You seem to take the view that the role of government is to act as an uncritical cipher for public anger and demands viz crime and disorder,” said Professor Loader, who had been invited by Mr Blair to respond to a recent seminar to discuss law and order.

The Prime Minister is known to be planning a big extension of on-the-spot justice to tackle low-level crime and antisocial behaviour on the streets. “I do not think it is possible to tackle antisocial behaviour with normal methods of policing”, the Prime Minister told a recent Downing Street meeting.

Today in Bristol, in the first of a series of valedictory speeches, Mr Blair will call for a genuine debate about law and order while admitting that his Government has failed to fix a 19th-century criminal justice system dealing with 21st-century crimes. But he is not expected to announce new measures. He will call for a rebalancing of the system in favour of the victim so that the “rights of the suspect” do not outweigh those of “the law-abiding majority”.

“It’s no use saying that in theory there should be no contradiction between the rights of the suspect and the rights of that law-abiding majority. In practice there is such a conflict and every day we don’t resolve it, the consequence is not abstract, it’s out there, very real, on our streets.”

Professor Loader accused the Prime Minister of acting as “cheerleader” for longer sentences and more punishment and warned him that their demands may be unsatiable. Public anxiety would not be tackled by “yet more legislation about the criminal justice system. It is like putting a plaster on a broken leg.”

And he told him that endless proclamations of intent on law and order created unrealistic expectations about what could be achieved. He urged the Prime Minister to think hard before deciding that what Britain needed was “another grand statement of government purpose and a further round of headline-grabbing legislation”.

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: “These comments are a telling indictment of the Government’s strategy over the last nine years. They reinforce the concerns we have raised over the tidal wave of legislation, regulation and initiatives that have overwhelmed the Home Office and the systems of Criminal Justice and immigration control.”

As Mr Blair arrived at a community centre in Bristol yesterday to meet victims of crime, he avoided being hit by an egg thrown by a protester. A woman was led away by police.

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