Blair: Coalition is soft on crime (From Hampshire Chronicle)

Blair: Coalition is soft on crime

11:22pm Sunday 5th September 2010 in

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Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has launched an attack on the liberal prison policies being pursued by the coalition Government.

Mr Blair - who famously promised to be "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime" - said he "profoundly disagrees" with the approach of Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke, who has rejected the "prison works" mantra of previous administrations.

The former PM's comments, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, amount to his first direct policy assault on the coalition since David Cameron won power from Labour in May.

Mr Clarke has challenged the trend towards larger prison populations and questioned the need for short sentences, suggesting the Government could save money by locking up fewer offenders and focusing more on rehabilitation.

But Mr Blair told the Telegraph: "You've got to put in prison those who deserve to be there."

He said "dysfunctional families who produce 14-year-old kids stabbing one another to death" are "making people's lives hell" and suggested Britain could learn from developing countries which "just don't accept" criminality.

In a speech in June, Mr Clarke said that he would have regarded it as "impossible and ridiculous" when he was Home Secretary in the 1990s if someone had told him that by 2010 the prison population would have doubled to more than 80,000. Mr Clarke said prison was too often "a costly and ineffectual approach that fails to turn criminals into law-abiding citizens".

Meanwhile Mr Blair confirmed that he had considered breaking the Treasury into two in order to reduce Gordon Brown's power base.

Under the plan, which Lord Mandelson said was code-named Operation Teddy Bear, Mr Brown would have been left in charge of a finance ministry, with power over spending handed to a new budget office. But Mr Blair said he held back because he was not sure it was the right thing to do and did not want to do it "simply because of the Gordon issue".