IT IS, of course, an anathema that a free country should consider locking up people who have done nothing wrong. But, surely, such values and high-minded ethics have to take second place to the indisputable, commonsense logic that says it is wrong to allow liberty to people, who are a known and manifest danger to others, until they harm or kill someone.

It may be that the plans unveiled today by Home Secretary Jack Straw and Health Secretary Frank Dobson to deprive so-called "walking time-bombs" in the community of their liberty fit uncomfortably with the notion of the right of the freedom of the individual, but they have to be measured against society's right to safety - something which is unarguably superior.

At present, there is a disturbing failure in the law to uphold that virtue.

Horrific consequences that might have been avoided have resulted because of the legal loophole which allows dangerous people who pose a known risk to the public to remain at large.

For, under the Mental Health Act, people can only be detained in secure conditions if their condition is classed as treatable whereas the state of people with severe personality disorders is regarded by most doctors as untreatable. The frightening upshot of this difference is that such sufferers can only be locked up if they commit an offence.

Even then, they are sent to prison rather than special hospitals and have eventually to be freed despite being just as dangerous as ever.

It is a chilling revelation that tells us today that there are believed to be as many as 200 such people in the community and it is even more frightening that the only protection that we have is for these people to first attack or kill someone in order that they might be locked up and then quite likely only temporarily.

The alarming inadequacy of the law was revealed must horribly in the case of the psychopath Michael Stone who bludgeoned Megan and Lin Russell to death on a country lane in Kent after begging doctors to lock him up.

The government has a duty to close this loophole and Mr Straw's and Mr Dobson's proposals, for all their unsettling divergence from purist concepts of liberty, will find support from most people.

Even so, civil rights campaigners are right to protest and their concerns must be heeded in any revision of current legislation.

It is imperative that strict conditions, checks and balances and effective independent monitoring are all part of any changes.

For these measures must be employed solely against the dangerous and not extended to become a device to sweep from the streets the eccentric, outlandish or difficult.

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