ONLY the anti-social minority resists the government's tough-on-crime stance and zero tolerance measures that include targeting known offenders. But supporters of justice will be concerned that this drive is taking a sinister direction in East Lancashire today.

For we find 15 men and women banned from the town centres of Blackburn and Darwen by virtue of a secret and arbitrary process that amazingly - and fallaciously - the law condones.

The logic of this measure is simple: These people are persistent trouble-makers.

To deter them from causing more, they are told by the police to stay away from the town centres.

They are also warned that if they ignore the ban, they will be taken to court and made the subject of one of the new Anti-Social Behaviour Orders.

And if they break that, they could end up in jail or with a large fine.

This is all well and good until one considers that, in a free country, exclusion orders are being issued and people are being selected for them purely on the surmises and suspicions of faceless officials.

Think where that might lead to and how it might be abused.

This is not the way of a democratic society, but the stuff of a police state.

It could be a leaf taken straight out of the book of the despots who devised South Africa's notorious pass laws in the days of evil apartheid to restrict the movements of the supposedly undesirable.

And Home Secretary Jack Straw should be ashamed that it can be employed in this country as a so-called pre-judicial measure allowed by his Crime and Disorder Act. Its moral frailty is exposed at a stroke when we find that council bosses, who are involved in the running of the anti-crime project which has resorted to it, dare not publicly identify the 15 people on this list - though their names have been circulated to businesses and shops involved in the scheme - lest they are sued.

And well they might fear that, for the decision to put these people on the list has not been justified by them or by anyone in an open judicial system.

That is the flaw - not the intent, but the method and its ominous potential.

If Mr Straw wants the law to justify these bans, he should amend it so that they are imposed by wholly judicial process open to full public scrutiny and not by the whim of Inspector X, Councillor Y or any other faceless official.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.