This summer's panic about teenagers with knives, after a series of brutal attacks across Britain, had barely subsided when David Cameron gave a speech to the Centre for Social Justice saying "hoodies" needed more love, not punishment. If it was a striking echo of Tony Blair's 1997 soundbite, "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", the Conservative leader's appeal was also a striking departure from conventional Tory thinking on law and order.
Cameron's raid on New Labour territory followed a paper published by another think-tank, the Crime and Society Foundation, which argued that repeated crackdowns don't reduce crime because so few offenders ever get caught. It concluded that looking at the underlying causes would be more far more effective.
