Like millions of others in modern Britain, David Langton is a law-abiding citizen who keeps getting into trouble. His crimes? To drive, to park, to be an ordinary person who makes occasional mistakes.

In the past year he has had his car towed away from outside his home when the parking bay was suspended; he has been caught by two “safety” cameras when driving a few miles an hour over the speed limit; and he has twice been fined for forgetting about the London congestion charge.

“Most recently I’ve been fined £100 for stopping on a red route at 3am for a few minutes while a friend bought a takeaway meal,” said Langton, a 28-year-old freelance writer from north London. “I am utterly fed up of the sledgehammer approach of police and councils when it comes to dealing with minor motoring misdemeanours.

“I have never had an accident, and in every case I was not blocking traffic, causing a nuisance or endangering life; but none of that is taken into account. My biggest crime is absent-mindedness.”

Yet he has had to pay almost £1,000 in fines and risks losing his licence if he falls foul of the dreaded speed cameras just twice more.

“I consider myself a fundamentally honest person,” he said. “It makes my blood boil when I read about burglars being given community service when people like me are taken to the cleaners over parking offences. The legal system is skewed in favour of real criminals.”

It is not just motoring law that is driving ordinary people round the bend. About 1m people are also fined for filing their tax returns late; worse, more than 40,000 people were fined in the past two years even though they had filed their returns on time.

If you fail to recycle your rubbish properly, you can now be stung for up to £2,500. In recent weeks police issued a teenager in Kent with an £80 penalty notice for saying “f***” (though the case was later dropped).

In another case a 10-year-old boy was prosecuted after calling a mixed-race pupil “Bin Laden” in a playground argument. Judge Jonathon Finestein called the decision to take him to court “political correctness gone mad”.

Was this what voters expected when Tony Blair said he would be “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime”? Hardly, says David Fraser, author of a new book called A Land Fit For Criminals. Fraser, who spent 26 years working in the probation and prison services, argues that the public have been consistently hoodwinked over the true nature of government policy on crime and punishment.

In a detailed analysis, he claims successive governments have talked tough on crime but acted soft.

THE reality, says Fraser, is that criminals convicted of many nasty offences often face nothing tougher than probation, fines or community service.

Take the case of Andrew Campbell, a paratrooper from Ayrshire. He battered Gemma Gregerson, 19, so badly when she refused to have sex with him that she spent four days in hospital. Last week he was fined £1,200 and walked free from court.

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