IT will be remembered as one of Tony Blair's great battle-cries - to be "tough on crime and the causes of crime".

It laid the foundation for Mr Blair's first election victory by helping New Labour to steal the Tories' clothes as the party of law and order.

Nine years after that election, he is still striving to convince the electorate that law and order is safe in his Government's hands.

Yesterday's latest battle-cry on crime - and there have been many during those nine years - is that the justice system is in need of a radical overhaul to ensure that the security of law-abiding people is put ahead of the rights of offenders.

Only last week, we were making exactly that point over the tragic case of a convicted sex attacker, who was freed on licence from a "life" sentence, and went on to kill mother-of-one Naomi Bryant.

Indeed, it is a point that we have made on numerous occasions over the years, repeatedly arguing that there is a damaging imbalance between the rights of offenders and the protection of the public.

We hope that this time the battle-cry will have more substance so that the imbalance so many of us have seen for a long time can be finally corrected.

The difficulty for Mr Blair, of course, is convincing us all that his Government really can deliver on this crucial issue at a time when it is still trying to recover from the Home Office blunders which allowed nearly 100 foreign prisoners to be freed onto our streets without being considered for deportation.