Launching the government's five-year plan to combat crime, the Prime Minister said most people wanted to live in a society where the law-abiding majority was in charge.
The government's plans include the use of satellite technology to track the country's most persistent criminals and a clampdown on anti-social behaviour.
A security camera filmed the Prime Minister and Home Secretary arriving at a London community centre this morning for what Downing Street is billing as a major initiative on crime.
David Blunkett is setting the ambitious target today of reducing offending by 15 per cent inside four years.
Frequent scenes of public disorder, and just as importantly, the fear that they spread, have helped to make crime one of the most sensitive of political issues - and a likely battleground between the parties at the next election.
As well as it's stated aim of dramatically reducing offences by 2008, the five year plan includes a major expansion of tagging, with satellite technology being used to track the country's most persistent criminals.
Criminals with drug habits will have to undergo treatment and will be punished if they fail to.
There will be a clampdown on anti-social behaviour, with nuisance neighbours and binge drinkers targeted.
And the number of civilian police wardens will be quadrupled to 20,000.
With the use of satellite technology, tagging will apparently be rolled out to deal with the 5 thousand serial offenders who are said to account for 10 per cent of all crime in England and Wales.
Those who most disrupt their communities will be a priority, and sex offenders and those who engage in domestic violence will also be monitored.
"...a society of different lifestyles spawned a group of young people who were brought up without parental discipline, without proper role models and
without any sense of responsibility to or for others. All of this was then multiplied in effect, by the economic and social changes that altered the established pattern of community life in cities, towns and villages throughout Britain and throughout the developed world. "Here, now, today, people have had enough of this part of the 1960s consensus."
Tony Blair
In case anyone hadn't noticed, the Government wants us to know that overall, the big picture is that 'this is the end of the liberal consensus of the Sixties' identified, rightly or wrongly, with reforming Home Secretaries like Labour's own Roy Jenkins.
In the Commons this afternoon, the Home Secretary gave more details of a would-be new look Labour philosophy on law and order.
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