THE British Home Secretary, Mr Michael Howard, bared his teeth in the election campaign yesterday when he accused the opposition parties of having "sympathy" for burglars and drug dealers.
Mr Howard's comments came after Liberal Democrat and Labour members of the House of Lords on Tuesday forced him to drop proposals for mandatory minimum jail sentences for persistent burglars and drugs traffickers.
"They put their sympathy for the career burglar and the career dealer in hard drugs before the need to protect the public," the Home Secretary said on BBC.
A Labour spokesman noted that crime levels had doubled during the 18 years of Tory rule "while there has been a drop of a third in the number of criminals convicted in our courts".
Mr Howard had no choice but to concede to his opponents insistence that judges retain the right to use their discretion when passing sentence because the current parliamentary session ends tomorrow. If he had tried to push through his Crime Bill unadulterated, the Lords would have used stalling tactics that could have led to it being abandoned altogether.
The Crime Bill will now return to the House of Commons where it is expected to be adopted by the end of the week.
Meanwhile, the Defence Secretary, Mr Michael Portillo, claimed that a Labour government would cut defence spending to finance its election promises. Mr Portillo, said he had set out a level of future spending on defence, but Labour had said only one thing on the subject, that they would have a defence review.
This was a "thinly disguised way of saying they are going to have defence cuts", Mr Portillo claimed at a press conference in Plymouth, Devon.
. The Referendum Party yesterday denied that its £20 million election campaign has already run out of steam.
The party leader, Sir James Goldsmith, will not appear publicly until the end of next week, "nearly two weeks after the Prime Minister announced the election".
His campaign managers said yesterday the Referendum Party is concentrating on grassroots work, and will not launch a national drive until after Easter.
Today the party will finish recording its "unofficial anthem", sung by candidates and supporters. The final pieces will be put in place at a public jam session in Walthamstow, east London. It will be launched on April 14th.