AT first glance, it sounds like a good idea. Cut the benefits of parents who allow their children to truant. No more free money for feckless people whose children grow up to be lawless juveniles. It's Tony Blair's instant solution to youth crime.

But will this father-of-four really find it so easy to judge and condemn others? Hasn't he whisked his own children out of school in term time to take them on exotic holidays? Sounds like a conveniently middle class version of truanting to me.

Blair's own son was found face down in Leicester Square after an evening of under-age drinking. And Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's son was exposed selling drugs in a pub.

If people like the Blairs and the Straws, who have lots of money, along with the back-up of nannies and family support, have problems with their children, just how easy do they think it is for an abandoned single mother struggling on her own with three children in a high rise block?

Blair is acting like the angry father of an errant child, threatening to dock her pocket money if she doesn't fall into line. But what does this already impoverished woman do for money then - steal? And is it fair to make her other children suffer through no fault of their own?

Feckless, irresponsible parents do have a lot to answer for. But it is a much more complex issue than Blair makes out, and there are no quick fixes. Child crime is a major problem. Increasingly, people are becoming more dismayed at how the Government - along with our policing and criminal justice system - is failing to get to grips with it. Just ask Damilola Taylor's parents.

If things don't start to improve, perhaps we should start docking a few fat ministerial salaries.

THE story of the golfer jailed for making a living retrieving lost balls from lakes, with the permission of golf clubs, to sell on cheaply reminds me of the semi-retired Mercedes driver I met in North Yorkshire recently who told me how he made his substantial fortune.

Apparently, when we bring our cars in for service and garages charge us for oil, they don't just top it up, but empty out the old oil and fill up with new. The Mercedes driver, who developed a method of treating the old oil so it can be re-used, buys it off the garage cheaply and sells it on for a profit. It doesn't appear to matter that we, the car drivers, paid for the oil in the first place. In both cases, these men showed initiative by making money out of waste. But one ended up in prison. The other runs a successful business. Where's the justice in that?

IS the new McDonald's advert, where a child from a broken home plays one parent off against another in order to get two nutritiously dodgy burger meals in one day really supposed to encourage us all to rush to our nearest outlet and order Happy Meals? Portraying its customers as greedy children and manipulative parents with nothing better to do during their time together isn't the best way to sell burgers. It's just McSad.

IN the North-East now, more illegitimate children are born than those within a marriage. One 25-year-old mother of two boys, by two different fathers, interviewed in Hartlepool, commented: "My children are more than enough to cope with. I don't need a man in my life to complicate things even more." She might not need a man in her life, but if she bothered to ask her children what they want, she might be surprised to learn that they do.