LAST week I spoke to the Hartlepool Advanced Motorists Association. A couple of weeks before that to the Durham Agricultural Discussion Group. In between I have been guest speaker at a couple of charity events.

I will speak to anyone, anywhere about law and order - just ask my friends who I bore with the subject every time we have a cup of coffee. So when the local Labour MP Ashok Kumar asked me to join him in three public meetings on Teesside discussing law and order, I agreed. I have been on platforms with Peter Mandelson, Jack Straw and Michael Howard, and before the last election Cleveland Police had me strolling down a street with Tony Blair.

At the first meeting with Dr Kumar there were a couple of Conservative mischief-makers in the audience. Even though I think they agreed with most of what I said and stand for, they said it was disgraceful that I should appear on a political platform.

But it wasn't a political platform. It was a law and order platform. Law and order is bigger than politics. It concerns all society. And I was non-political, just as I was to the motorists, the farmers, the charities and my friends. I said that we need a short-term strategy to make the streets safer today - I call it 'here and now'.

Hand-in-hand with that we need a long-term strategy which must be about education. Most criminals begin their careers between the ages of 11 and 14 and they retire around 24, so we have to get them early.

I usually end my talks by saying that if my arm was cut off, it would have police written through it like a stick of rock. That's how much I support them. How much do you, because if we're not all in this together we won't make any difference.

That's my message, as non-political as you like and as important as ever. But some silly people have tried to make pre-election mischief out of it.

YESTERDAY, I picked up a tabloid newspaper that considers itself to be the real opposition to the Government and read the cringe-making headline: "Blair: Give the yobs free CDs."

In the pre-election climate the paper had whipped up mischief by claiming the Prime Minister was going to reward yobs with gifts. This, it was said, would inevitably encourage others to take up yobbery. But if you look through the mischief, there's the beginnings of an idea here.

If you see a gang of anti-social youths, usually there are one or two who are the ringleaders. The rest are just tagging along. Traditional police tactics are to target the ringleaders leaving the rest alone.

Mr Blair's approach targets those who aren't the ringleaders but are on the fringes of crime. What the newspaper should have said yesterday is that he wants them to become involved in community projects, like digging gardens or removing graffiti. For their work, they will be paid in vouchers which will allow them to buy CDs and trainers. They will also be off the streets when their peers are causing trouble.

A criminal justice system revolves around four words: punishment, deterrent, rehabilitation and diversion. Our system has been so lax on punishment recently that it hasn't provided sufficient deterrent.

But Mr Blair was talking about rehabilitation and especially diversion - diverting impressionable youths away from a career of crime and showing them, through free CDs, that being a responsible member of society has its rewards.

Clearly this scheme won't solve all of our problems, but it has been misrepresented by some people as a pathetic gimmick. Personally, I always prefer to deal with people who have positive ideas about addressing problems in society rather than those who want to do no more than cause mischief.