IN Opposition, keen to capitalise on alarm about crime - hence "tough on crime'' etc - Tony Blair now seeks to play down its impact.

He thus assures us that the disturbing spate of shootings among young people is not "emblematic'' of the communities where the shootings have taken place, most of whose citizens lead law-abiding lives.

Of course they do. Even in Britain's most crime-ridden areas, the troublemakers are a minority. If we reach the stage when the majority steal, rob, stab and shoot, God help us indeed.

Mr Blair is at least concerned enough to recognise that penalties for illegally carrying guns should be the same for older teenagers as for adults.

So he has flagged up his wish that the mandatory five-year sentence for illegal possession should apply from the age of 17.

Just one snag. Since virtually all sentences are now halved, if Mr Blair intends offenders to serve five years, the mandatory term needs to be reset at ten.

THE ink had scarcely dried on my piece expressing disgust at the abhorrent conditions in the Bernard Matthews turkey factories when I read of the plight of farmed "organic" cod in the Shetlands. They live under permanent low-level artificial light, which stops them spawning and (a consequence of their caged life) becoming aggressive.

It's astonishing that new forms of industrialised animal farming are appearing even while we ooh and aah in our millions over wildlife programmes a la David Attenborough. Before too long, escapees from the cod farms will be imperilling native cod, just as farmed salmon are infecting natural stocks.

If some superior life form one day exploits and abuses us as we do so many of the creatures with which we share our planet, we will have no cause for complaint.

FAR from the scene when his BMW was filmed allegedly speeding in Gateshead, Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate was unable to discover who was at the wheel, and all other efforts to establish the driver's identity have failed. So the decision not to prosecute the eminent life peer, a former senior officer with Durham Police and a Government advisor on policing matters, is absolutely proper and correct.

But next time we hear Lord Mackenzie, frequently consulted by the media, offering the benefit of his experience, we will find it hard not to remember that the doubtless well-honed policing skills that took him high in his profession proved inadequate to solve a seemingly simple crime close to home.

Accepting that no relative or friend had borrowed the BMW - a completely unworthy thought - Lord Mackenzie must be thankful that whoever drove his luxury car made no attempt to deprive him of it permanently, still less torch it or cannibalise it. Surely Britain's most considerate car thief?

ACENTURY ago today the poet WH Auden was born in York. While the merits of last year's dead centenarian, John Betjeman, might be keenly debated, Auden towers majestically over the 20th Century poetic landscape. Written in the 1950s, these lines about a feral youngster mirror our present times: That girls are raped and two boys knife a third, We're axioms to him, who'd never heard Of any world where promises are kept, Or one could weep because another wept.