Britain is becoming a safer place. So why is Mr Blair attacking our civil liberties?

The Criminal Justice Bill provides full measure of how far Tony Blair and David Blunkett have lost their way on the issue of crime.

In a rational universe, this Government ought to be proclaiming modest success in the fight against crime and bringing to Parliament a Causes of Crime (Targeting) Bill to concentrate resources where they can do most good in reducing crime further.

Crime has fallen, by about a third, since 1995. Even the fear of crime, which need not be related to the actual risks, has dropped – despite the inbuilt bias of the media in reporting the worst. And yet Mr Blair has been panicked by a mobile-phone-related blip in street crime, and a sustained campaign of misrepresentation by the Tory press, into a crass attack on civil liberties.

Yesterday's is the 14th Bill affecting the criminal justice system under Mr Blair's Government, a record of legislative hyperactivity that has contributed hardly at all to the fact that Britain is becoming a safer place. This Bill will be just as irrelevant to crime reduction while needlessly increasing the risk of miscarriages of justice.

Mr Blair seems to believe that, because the fear of crime need not be related to actual crime, it can therefore be dealt with in a parallel universe, where ever more punitive measures subdue an underclass of Bad People. This is a dangerous delusion, which threatens the liberty of anyone wrongly accused of a crime. The protections of democratic legal systems are not mere games played by clever lawyers, they are fundamental safeguards against malicious or mistaken allegations.

The basic presumption is that of innocence until proven guilty – yet two of the measures undermine that. Allowing people to be tried twice for the same offence and allowing previous convictions to be known in court both introduce a presumption of guilt. The specific argument for ending the "double jeopardy" rule that is often wheeled out is that DNA testing can provide evidence today that was not available at trials years ago. Yet the Bill does not restrict the change to such circumstances – on the contrary, it is being extended. Meanwhile, the police say they want to use it to re-try the men accused of murdering Stephen Lawrence. Badly handled though that case was, it cannot be right to change the law in order to lock up known individuals.

There are, of course, sensible measures in this Bill, and we should acknowledge one, not least to show that The Independent does not defend everything about the present legal system. It is a good idea to speed up trials by requiring defendants to disclose information beforehand on the same terms as the prosecution.

Overall, however, this Bill is a damaging distraction from what is needed in the struggle to ensure that crime continues its downward trend. Where are the measures for treating drug-addiction, one of the great drivers of crime? Where are the programmes for rehabilitating offenders, rather than simply locking up ever-larger numbers and turning them into career criminals? Where is the intelligent approach to antisocial behaviour, designed to change it before it turns into criminal behaviour? To each question, this Bill gives an answer that will result in more crime, not less. Prisons are not just universities of crime, they are supermarkets for drugs, while criminalising graffiti and public rudeness will only create more criminals.

This is a bad Bill from a Government that so lacks confidence it will end up making crime worse and miscarriages of justice more likely.