THE call by Home Secretary Jack Straw for the police to lay off motorists and put more effort into hounding serious criminals is a long overdue change of emphasis.

How long it will take for it to work into the system and to overcome the itch of the career-driven bobbies who see soft-target drivers as an easy way of increasing their number of nabs, I do not know.

But I do hope that, in Lancashire, it is in place before the force unleashes its annual Christmas and New Year anti-drink driving purge that results in thousands of motorists being pulled up for no good reason and illicit random breath testing being officially condoned -- when the benefits are evidently so minimal that the police won't publish the results.

For if we are going to have another expensive and wasteful seasonal splurge of breathalysing sober drivers, it will only make for another happy Christmas for the burglars and auto-crime offenders who are the ones who benefit from the cock-eyed policing priorities that Mr Straw quite rightly clobbers.

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