BACK in the 1930s a lot of people got all dewy-eyed about Soviet Russia, idolising Stalin and portraying a regime based on mass murder as a workers' paradise.

These people became known as "useful idiots". That phrase has become a label for well-meaning but naive people who get manipulated by vicious and unscrupulous forces.

I think it's the ideal description for the politicians and civil servants who have directed policy on crime and disorder for the past four decades.

They have become apologists and ultimately allies of the hoodlum element who want to exercise their own kind of tyranny over our lives.

I started this column just after the news of another fatal stabbing in London at the weekend.

Events have overtaken me. Another teenager has died since, this time from gunshot wounds. He is the 15th young person to be killed in the capital this year.

These appalling events are not random occurrences.

They are the direct consequence of a process that the useful idiots have developed and perfected - the disempowerment of the police.

When a police officer goes out to do his or her job today they'll have a shackle on each hand. One is the shackle of bureaucracy that deters the vigorous, interventionist policing that alone will reclaim our estates and city centres from the antisocial element who see them as their territory.

Every police officer I know wants to do their job like this, every member of the public I speak to feels the same. But it is not happening.

That is because form-filling and target setting stifles real policing. Then there's the second shackle.

It is the vice-like grip of political correctness, placed there by civil libertarians who have spent decades making every excuse in the book for the wreckers and created a culture in which respect - for the law, good manners and your environment - has evaporated.

These are the people who have put every imaginable obstacle in the way of criminals being caught, convicted or, perish the thought, sent to jail. They have ensured that when they do see the inside of a cell, it is one which will have a TV or games console.

The bureaucrats and the politically correct brigade have held sway because politicians of all parties have not challenged them. They have, with few exceptions, refused to champion the public and the police. Another phrase gained currency around the same time as "useful idiots", this time to describe the appeasers. It was "the guilty men".

Again, I'm afraid it applies to many politicians and policy formers of our own times.

Because, make no mistake, what we have seen in recent decades is appeasement of criminals.

There will be few people reading this who have not been offended or frightened out of their wits by some form of anti-social behaviour in the past week or month, who won't be thinking twice when they leave the house today or looking over their shoulder as they make their way home from work tonight. We have to take the fear out of these people's lives and put the fear back in the criminal.

I don't know if the current Government is up for the fight. On evidence to date, I doubt it. But here's a plea to all politicians, the beleaguered Mr Brown and the cheerful Mr Cameron alike.

Take the handcuffs off the police, give them back the initiative to police our communities in the vigorous, no-nonsense manner that our citizens want. For once, put the rights of those citizens to enjoy their homes and communities in peace and security above the rights of the wreckers. Do this and you'll make up for the mistakes of the guilty and the guileless and restore public faith in our political institutions.

Oh, and by the way, you'll also be sure to win the next General Election.