Bang up Blunkett before he does any more harm

David Blunkett has launched a new TV reality show in which he aims to show us how to turn youngsters away from crime.

What an affront.

Here's a bloke who has spent the last decade either in the Government or supporting it. For three years he was the Home Secretary, the man with ultimate authority for dealing with crime and criminals.

In that time he and his colleagues failed utterly to turn back the tide of lawlessness in urban youth.

Indeed, as the endless succession of teenage killings so sickeningly demonstrates, criminality among the young - at least in our Cities - is, as a result of their years in power, running out of control.

So you might have thought that Mr. Blunkett might either have been hard at it within the corridors of Westminster working to find real solutions to the savagery he has help unleash, or at least hiding his head in shame.

Instead, here he is popping up on Channel 5 on a four part series called "Banged Up" which takes ten teenagers on the brink of crime and places them in a disused jail with former real-life lags as cell mates.

The idea, apparently, is to scare them onto the straight and narrow.

What a ludicrous notion.

First of all, producers of the show had to come up with a group of individuals who were not actually guilty of anything, and who were keen to volunteer for four nights on the telly.

What possible relationship can this have to real life?

Then there's the fact that what the show proposes - nanging up troublemakers in a bleak nick - is the complete opposite of what Mr. Blunkett's Government has been inflicting on our society for the whole of this century.

The New Labour response to criminality is to grasp at anything that keeps the guilty out of prison, which is why we have the nonsense of ASBOs, the proliferation of the so-called "community sentences" and relentless appeals to judges not to send anybody down.

When Ministers have failed to prevent offenders being sent away, they have simply let them out again on early release.

How dare Mr. Blunkett step out of the shadows of his own brush with impropriety (he was forced to resign over a visa application for his ex-lover's nanny) to serve up an approach to criminality that, in real life, he simply did not have the courage to contemplate?

Yet he is already suggesting that parents, schools and youth offending teams will be recording his show and learning lessons from it.

Learning what? That if you fail miserably with a problem in the real world then the answer is to make a TV show about it?

I do hope Mr. Blunkett's fee for this meaningless venture is going to charity.