TODAY Blackburn MP Jack Straw addressed his first Labour Conference as Home Secretary, revealing more details of his crackdown on crime. Political correspondent BILL JACOBS looks at how Mr Straw has played a leading role in seizing the Law and Order issue and making it a vote-winner for Labour.

JACK Straw was running a personal law and order campaign long before Tony Blair made "Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime" fashionable in the Labour Party.

He was taking on crooks and yobs in the street himself.

It's not every Home Secretary who has tackled street thugs and thieves, but Mr Straw wears it lightly.

He believes that if ordinary citizens cannot walk by and ignore crime, neither can would-be Cabinet Ministers.

He puts it bluntly: "You can't just keep walking past on the other side. It's no good simply lecturing other people about their responsibilities."

A survivor, he has bounced back from his disastrous failure to nail then Home Secretary Michael Howard over prison boss Derek Lewis's sacking in 1995, displaying the "guile and cunning" for which Barbara Castle first selected him as her assistant.

The 51-year-old former student leader's determination to deal with low level crime such as nuisance neighbours, his calls for a curfew for the under-10s and his demands that parents should be responsible for their children have all excited derision from Labour's left-wing civil liberties supporters. When Mr Blair, as Shadow Home Secretary, began Labour's tough law and order line, it was because of his own personal experience in his Sedgefield constituency.

The North East of England in the mid-1980's had been deluged with youth crime and Mr Blair suddenly realised that crime was a Labour not a Tory issue. It was Labour voters, not Tory grandees, who got burgled, robbed and beaten up.

But Mr Straw had got there first.

While Tony Blair's privileged background involved Durham Choir School and Fettes College, Edinburgh (known as Scotland's Eton), Jack was brought up by a single mum on a tough council estate in Essex.

Although he went to Brentwood Public School he was bullied and berated by his more prosperous peers.

After his parents split when he was ten, the family had trouble with some neighbours and having to give evidence in a bitterly fought court case against one made a deep impression.

Yesterday Prime Minister Mr Blair backed "zero tolerance on crime" and all Mr Straw's controversial initiatives. The two men - who became close after Mr Straw was one of the first to urge him to stand for the Labour leadership after John Smith's tragic death - share a view on the issue.

Loyal Jack can't say it, but both men know the Blackburn MP got their long before his boss.

It may seem strange that the former Leeds University undergraduate who cut his political teeth as the left-wing firebrand president of the National Union of Students should be as right-wing as the Tories on law and order.

His mentor Baroness Castle, who handed him the safe Blackburn constituency on a plate, may rail against him for deserting socialist principles and being too New Labour, but there is one fact that nobody can deny; when it comes to believing in being "Tough on Crime and Tough on the Causes of Crime", Mr Straw is more passionate that his boss - and got there first.

From his own youth, through his two-year stint as a barrister, his time on the Inner London Education Authority, his years as Baroness Castle's adviser at the Department of Social Security, and his 18 years as MP for Blackburn, he has always believed in tackling crime at its roots.

That means the juvenile delinquents and the minor crime the Tory Home Secretaries and police chiefs would prefer to ignore.

So when he stood up and risked the derision of the civil liberties lobby, the Labour Conference could be sure Mr Straw meant every word he said.

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