AN 80-year-old man in Middlesbrough was badly beaten for £1.28. A man in Redcar was attacked when he tried to stop youths throwing stones at a neighbour's window. A father-of-two in Oldham was murdered trying to stop thieves making off with his father-in-law's car.

More than 700,000 mobile phones have been stolen in the last year. Footballers are running amok. Football fans are running amok.

These, and similar stories, have dominated the press in the New Year. It isn't media hysteria - with the railways on the verge of collapse, the media has enough social breakdown stories to discuss without inventing any more.

Crime is back on the agenda. Oliver Letwin, the Conservatives' Shadow Home Secretary, has even made a policy statement about it, talking about the need for a neighbourly society and about how "conveyor-belt criminals" can be stopped.

Discussing all these events, articles in both the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail have called for zero tolerance policing to be introduced. I, of course, could not possibly disagree, although, as I have always said, it has to be part of a wider strategy that involves the community and looks at the starting point of criminal behaviour.

Beyond these front page headlines, a story that caught my eye said that 25 per cent of boys under 11 drank alcohol at least once a week - two-thirds of them were on wine. A sixth of 11-year-old girls are also regularly drinking.

These figures show how, from a tender age, alcohol is endemic in our society. This is supported by yesterday's drink-drive figures, which showed, for the first time, that it is young drivers who are ignoring the limit.

It is obvious why this is happening. Reaching the pit of alcoholism is suddenly fashionable, through footballers like Tony Adams or comedians like Frank Skinner. Even Tony Blair's spin-doctor Alastair Campbell spoke openly about his nervous breakdown some years ago, which was fuelled by alcohol.

The Government's attitude towards alcohol is ambivalent. It sounded proud of itself when it announced that this New Year's Eve was the first time pubs had been allowed to open for 36 consecutive hours - can anyone wonder why seasonal drink/drive figures are up?

But I'm also very interested in what's happening in our pubs. There are many young people - footballers like Jonathan Woodgate and Lee Bowyer are the most famous examples - who have more money than ever before to spend on drink. Many come from middle-class homes and are nice people until they start sloshing their money around on drink.

And what are the pubs doing? In many towns in the North-East, competition between the pubs is so intense that they are under-cutting each other, offering happy hours to entice the youngsters in so that when the prices go up later in the evening they are trapped in their stupor.

So why, then, are we surprised when the drink/drive figures go up and when we get more and more reports of anti-social behaviour and violent crime? It's not just zero tolerance that is needed, but also some common sense.