When a crime is committed, whose needs should "the system" look after over all others? The answer is pretty obvious; the victims of crime must always be the priority for all those involved in the justice service; from the police to the courts. Of course there is little anyone can do to take away the pain and anguish of being a victim of crime, particularly in the most dreadful cases. But proper support and care can help. We try to provide that, though sometimes we need to try harder.

But if victims come first, who's next?

The other day in the House of Commons I was told by the Liberal Democrats that prison doesn't work, and that we lock up too many people (prison numbers have increased by 25,000 since 1997 and 70 percent more dangerous criminals are locked up). The argument is that prison isn't the most effective way of reforming a criminal.

I certainly agree that sometimes prison isn't the best place to get an offender to see the error of his, or her, ways and stop committing crime. What are known in the jargon as "alternatives to custody" can sometimes be very effective in particular cases. That's why we have made community sentences tougher.

But what is forgotten when people say prison doesn't work is that for many local communities, the opposite is true. People living on an estate blighted by gangs are less worried about the rehabilitation of an offender and more bothered about getting that offender off their streets to give them some peace and freedom to live without fear. In other words we must not forget whose interests really matter in terms of crime and justice: the law-abiding majority.

And while crime has fallen over the last decade, there is still a lack of confidence in the criminal justice system.

Yesterday I launched a new consultation on how we can do more to ensure that the justice system works on behalf of the people it serves - and that means you and your community. There is going to be a new website where people will be able to log in to see what happened to a particular offender when he, or she, appeared in court.

I launched a prototype of the website yesterday and want the finished version to be launched later this year. I also want the public to have more say in the system.

That means being able to direct how offenders on unpaid work "Community Payback" repay for their crimes, so we are extending the use of "citizen's panels" so that you can feed in your views.

I'm delighted that Blackburn has been announced as one of the areas where we are going to pilot some innovative new ways of giving the public a greater say in their justice system. I would like to hear views about how people think justice could be done better, and how their voice could be heard. Send your ideas to EngagingCommunities@cjs.gsi.gov.uk or leave a comment here. I look forward to hearing your views!

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The closure of the EDC compact disc plant in Blackburn is a real blow to the local economy and illustrates the reach of the global economic crisis. You can read my official statement on the issue in the news section of the website.

Our thoughts are with those families who are affected by these job losses. But there's no need to face the stress and worry of redundancy alone. The government is providing assistance to people affected and you find out about this in our Real Help Now section.

Anyone from Blackburn affected by the financial crisis and is needing assistance should contact my office. We will do our utmost to provide any help and advice that we can.

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I've just had a copy of the Shuttle and read with interest the headline story about proposals to build an £8 million 'youth facility' on the site of Jubilee House, near to the corner of Blackburn Boulevard.

On the face of it this seems to me like a really good project. We're always complaining that there isn't enough for young people to do and that as a result we have kids hanging around on street corners and causing nuisance. So any investment in providing constructive social activities is surely good.

The worry I have about these proposals though is will local young people be willing to make the treck into town, and moreover back home late in the evening? And will parents be willing to allow their children to do this? The fact is Blackburn Boulevard is not exactly the most delightful part of the town centre and if this project is to stand any chance of success there is going to need to be major reassurance that local children will be supervised outside of the youth club - and how can you practically do that when kids will be coming from every quarter of the town?

Add to this the possible cost of travelling to and from the youth club. At a recent public meeting held in Shadsworth a number of residents complained that a town centre youth club was too far away for their children to travel to, saying that they would rather have better youth facilities in the community and couldn't afford to pay for transport into town. Mention has been made of 'busing kids' to and from the centre for free using the Community Transport Service - but this throws up even more problems as the Council intends to charge the elderly and disabled for the use of this service - surely not fair.

Potentially this could be a great project but if the numbers attending don't materialise it could just be a great white elephant. I hope its not the latter!

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It was meet-the-boss time last Saturday. Whenever this engagement is due I get up with some trepidation.

How will I be received? What’s going to come up, especially on those questions where I could and should have done better? But I told myself that I hadn’t had to take the job in the first place. I was a volunteer. Take a deep breath, Straw, and get on with it.

So down I went to Blackburn town centre, got on my soapbox, and began this month’s regular open-air Question Time. I’m there to give an account of how and what I’ve been doing on behalf of the citizens of Blackburn, who are the ones who decided to employ me. The weather was reasonable, so I had one of the biggest meetings I’ve had for some months.

The questions came in thick and fast. The financial crisis; the government’s response and how far was it to blame; the reported plans of some universities to raise tuition fees to £5,000 per annum, maybe more; de-regulation of the banking system; identity cards, – and an allegation of kidnap in Uzbekistan.

When I got talking about the way the slump in the 1930s had so badly hit Blackburn and East Lancashire for the best part of a decade I was upbraided for not talking about today’s crisis. I did better on ID cards. Contrary to what everyone seemed to believe, they would be voluntary when the scheme began, and could not become compulsory without a separate vote in both Houses of Parliament.

I’ve often said that the issues which are raised in these open air meetings really have informed and moulded my own politics, and policy at a national level. My cabinet colleagues have long tired of hearing me begin “We’ve got to do this, because it’s a pre-occupation of the people of Blackburn”. But if that’s the case, why did I spend a good part of Monday launching a government Green Paper “Rights and Responsibilities, developing our constitutional framework”? Whatever was discussed in Blackburn, it wasn’t this.

Not directly, is my answer. But indirectly, the balance between rights and responsibilities, between liberty and order, lies at the heart of almost all the specific concerns of people in Blackburn and across the country.

What is the right of a student to have the taxpayer pay most or all of their higher education? What’s the responsibility of the individual student to pay for themselves? Who benefits the most from a degree – society, or the individual? Would ID cards enhance our own individual freedom, by making it much more difficult for bad people to steal our identities and abuse this nation’s generosity or not?

These are hard questions. A Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, which my Green Paper suggests could and should better inform public understanding that we can’t have something for nothing, that, as George Bernard Shaw famously said “Liberty means responsibility” (to which he added “That is why most men dread it”).

Next time I go for my job appraisal in the town centre I might open up with a mini-lecture on a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. If the crowd disappears in a trice I’ll know my time is up, but my guess is that, being Blackburn, it’s more likely to open up a big debate.

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Mum’s not been well all my life. That’s what Mary McDonough, 17, from the east side of Blackburn told me earlier this week.

She went on: “I’ve been caring for her ever since I can remember. "She’s got mental health issues, and heart difficulties. The latter have got worse in recent years, so now she can’t walk unaided, and is confined to a wheelchair”.

I mentioned Mary in my last post, and the way in which our often unfairly maligned young people had taken part in greater numbers than their parents did in democratic elections for the borough.

Mary was one of the candidates to become Youth MP. That’s impressive enough – and all the candidates I met were a real credit to their generation and to our society. But Mary is also a “young carer”. She has shown astonishing determination to cope with the stresses of looking after an infirm parent, pursuing her own education, along with the additional burdens and joys of being a teenager.

I think her story is worth hearing. It tells us more about the character of the majority of our young people than the stories we read of that small minority who don’t know the meaning of the word “responsibility”, and who make life difficult for others.

Mary was at Our Lady and St John’s School. She left last July with five A-C Grade GCSEs. Being a young carer and a studious pupil is not always successful, however. Mary told me that there were many times when she had not been able to hand her homework in on time, and her school attendance had been “really poor” too, since she quite frequently felt obliged to stay home to look after her mother.

It’s a Young Carers Project based at the Carers Centre in Oakenhurst Road Blackburn which has helped turn things round for Mary, and get her some life chances she might otherwise have been denied.

“When I joined Young Carers they supported me through thick and thin and not just me, they did all they could to support my whole family and they made my home a better place to live”.

Mary was going to go to college when she left school last summer but she decided that there was a better route for her – as a “Young Carers Apprentice” based on the Carers’ Service.

“It’s learning and working at the same time” she told me. I go to college one day a week, I’ll get an NVQ Level 2 qualification. I then want to go to university to study social work”.

The Young Carers’ Project – which is funded by Blackburn with Darwen Council – is working on a regular basis with about 60 young carers like Mary. But Karen Walker, the project’s manager, reckons that across East Lancashire there must be well over two thousand “hidden young carers”.

I knew very little about the Young Carers’ Project until two weeks ago. I guess that I am far from alone.

There will be many young carers, and their families, who could really benefit from its services, and above all from the way in which it is helping a talented young person like Mary fulfill all the potential in her where previously it might have been crushed.

See here for more information about Blackburn's Young Carers project or for general information see the Princess Royal Trust for Carers.

Picture credit: Barnardos

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UPDATE: The page this post refers to has now been changed

The Blackburn Conservative Party's new website has a blog which anyone can post entire entries to (not just comments) and invites residents to "let us know what you think". They could probably do with a hand as their last post was 13 months ago at the beginning of 2008.

Permit us to suggest a few topics:

• Telling local people that the credit crunch is "not a local issue". How out of touch can you get?
• Cutting key bus services, including a "lifeline" route taking people from Darwen to Royal Blackburn Hospital.
• Slashing the wages of ordinary council staff while giving directors a 12% increase.
• The state of the town's roads. John Lennon wasn't joking when he said there were "4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire".

Anyway, get over there and let them know your thoughts! The "Add" button is at the left of the grey bar.

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Many older residents will remember the famous Beatles song of the 1960s, claiming that there were 4,000 pot holes in Blackburn's roads. Well, not much has changed, has it? You can scarcely travel along any road in Blackburn or Darwen without feeling discomfort or risking vehicle damage.

Now we know that the Coalition running the Council will try to claim that the roads are in a bad condition because of the winter weather. But we also know that these roads were full of pot-holes long before the winter took hold.

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So we’re all “Nimbys”.

That’s the charge of Ken Hudson, Preston council leader, against all of us in East Lancashire who have dared publicly to suggest that the proposal to increase the size of Preston’s non-food retail sector shops by an extraordinary 75 per cent may not be a good idea.

We should instead “focus on our industrial heritage and not try to compete with Preston’s shopping might”. In other words, that we should know our place.

For those who don’t know, the proposal is to create a shopping centre in the area of Tithebarn, Preston. “Us” in this context includes all parties on the Blackburn with Darwen Council, the town’s traders, the MPs, and I believe many many others across East Lancashire. And Councillor Hudson had a particular complaint about my impertinence in supporting the Blackburn with Darwen Council.

It was, he said, “totally wrong” for a “Government Minister and a Blackburn MP to get involved with a planning permission affecting Preston Council”.

Leave off the Government Minister bit. As Justice Secretary I have zero to do with this kind of planning application. I do not see the papers. I take absolutely no part in any decisions. And if I did have some theoretical role I would in any event have already excluded myself, under long established procedures, from any ministerial involvement.

I’m sorry to disappoint Councillor Hudson. It’s my job to represent the area for which I was elected; just as it is Blackburn councillors’ too. We are doing our job in objecting to this proposal, just as he is doing his job in promoting it.

I can’t recall another occasion in the last 30 years when I’ve been vocal about a planning issue in Preston, nor one where the council has weighed in.

All of us in industrial Lancashire (which includes Preston) have a profound interest in supporting the economic and social life of every other part of the area. We are in this together. Generally, development in one area can help another.

There are sub-contractors and individuals from East Lancashire who depend for their livelihood on firms in the Preston area, and vice versa. It’s not a zero sum game. But whilst retail is not quite a zero sum game, it’s getting on that way. As we are all painfully discovering in this recession, people have only a certain amount of money to spend.

Yes, it depends in part on the availability of credit, and so on; but that said there is a finite limit to the number of shops and stores which any area can sustain.

And since people are much more mobile than they used to be, changes in one locality can have a big impact on other areas. Here’s the problem with Preston’s Tithebarn development proposal. That 75 per cent increase in Preston’s retail floor space would take its town centre to the size of Blackpool and Blackburn centres combined.

Yet Preston is put for planning purposes in the same category (“Tier 1”) as these two towns, and Lancaster; and it lost its argument last year that it should be upgraded to the level of Manchester and Liverpool. It’s a no-brainer that a shopping centre of the size proposed would be bound to adversely affect the other major shopping centres in Lancashire.

As for the charge that we’re “Nimbys”. Wrong. The reverse of the truth.

Nimbys don’t want things in their own back yards. We do.

This argument is about ensuring that not just East Lancashire’s back yards, but good shopping facilities are able to survive and prosper. And none of us would be doing our jobs if we were not speaking up about the Preston proposal.

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I don't know about others but I've been puzzled by this debate about the 'Tithebarn' proposals in Preston.  Our MP, Jack Straw has been criticised by Prestonians for being 'crackers'.  I disagree!  How exactly is sticking up for traders and residents in Blackburn 'crackers'.  He'd be crackers not to!

When Preston City Council proposed it's massive redevelopment of the Tithebarn Street area of the city did it genuinely think that there wouldn't be controversy?

Yes, we're all in favour of regeneration, but I want to see a fair market for traders across Lancashire.  I don't see how having a few 'superstores' in Preston, where you can buy just about everything you need is going to help the economy in general - in fact contrary to their aims it might have a negative effect on Preston's other shops as visitors just pull up their cars on the new car park, go into the new shops and don't even bother wandering round the rest of what is already very pleasant city centre.

I visit Preston regularly and I'd hope there are Prestonians who visit Blackburn, and yes Preston is the economic centre.  But this development is just greedy and would happen at the expense of lots of other good Lancashire town centres.

Here's the full text of my letter to the Lancashire Evening Post, which was mostly responsing to this comment article calling Tithebarn opponents Nimbys:

Dear Editor,

I've followed reports on Preston's proposed Tithebarn redevelopment with interest. As Chair of Blackburn Labour Party, I have to agree with concerns raised by others across Lancashire about the impact this development will have on the wider regional economy if it proceeds in its current form.

Regeneration of town centres is vital in creating vibrant and sustainable local economies. But as with ‘out of town' retail developments, these should be implemented in a sustainable way which is not detrimental to the existing economy and employment during a global economic crisis.

The evidence shows that the Tithebarn proposals will have a significant impact on towns outside Preston with obvious implications for the Regional Spatial Strategy. These massive £700m proposals are more than ten times the size of its nearest equivalent: the Lord Square development Blackburn. The Tithebarn Partnership must have known from the outset that there might be an enquiry. To start blaming this on politicians from outside Preston is quite simply political opportunism.

Preston councillors and your recent editorial have described comments made by Jack Straw and others as ‘Nimby-ism'. We all want sustainable economic regeneration across the region. But in the middle of a recession no town centre can afford to lose 14 percent of its trade. Jack Straw is doing what he's always done for the last thirty years: standing up for Blackburn. If Preston was the town threatened in this way Mark Hendrick would be doing exactly the same thing.

Preston is at the heart of Lancashire and undoubtedly it is the economic centre, but as the base of the County Council it has a responsibility to look at the welfare of residents and economies across the area - not just the large towns. Think of smaller places like Garstang, Kirkham and Poulton-le-Fylde that all serve their local communities and help to create the rich character that makes Lancashire the great place it is. How can we expect the small traders in these places and across the county to compete with the mass produced standardised retailing being proposed in the Tithebarn Street area?

By all means I would encourage redevelopment of what is a neglected part of the city centre; but please - not to the detriment of the other local economies of Lancashire.

Cllr Damian Talbot
Chair - Blackburn Labour Party

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When Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling suggested in a newspaper interview early last month that the world economic situation was arguably the most difficult for sixty years he was charged by some of undue pessimism, of talking the country down. There were even absurd accusations that these remarks had been the direct cause of the London Stock Exchange having a bad time after the interview was published.

Now, just a few weeks later, his comments look remarkably restrained, not to say highly prescient. For the scale of the crisis which has engulfed a number of American financial institutions and so lowered confidence in them is almost certainly without parallel since the great Wall Street crash of 1929. The speed with which the consequences of the American crisis have spread throughout the world, but not least to western Europe, probably has no parallel in our history; for internet based trading systems and satellite communications have made the world a single trading floor in a way that just a few decades ago was the stuff of science fiction.

That Wall Street crash of 1929 still had a terrible effect on East Lancashire even though it took some months before its full impact was felt. Then - wham. Unemployment shot up. In Blackburn alone it had been 14.5% of the "insured" population (those who paid a National Insurance stamp, mainly men) were out of work in 1929. By June 1930 more than half the town (51.8%) (and probably half the whole area) were unemployed . The rate stayed around that level (at 47.0%) throughout 1931, and never dropped much below a third until the second World War began in late 1939. There was the reason why that great son of Blackburn, William Woodruff , whose death we mourned last week, decided in 1933 aged16 to leave the town for good; and did so, as he wrote in the closing chapter ("Good-bye Lancashire") of The Road to Nab End , with "no underwear....five pounds, a watch, a comb, a handkerchief and a knife." Woodruff had calculated that he was better taking a chance in London than facing the certainty of the dole in Blackburn.

The impact of the 1929 crash here in the UK was much much worse than it need have been for two linked reasons. First, in 1925 Winston Churchill as Chancellor had decided to peg the pound to gold. This had a catastrophic effect on our exports. Lancashire cotton which had previously dominated world markets lost out to cheaper producers, especially Japan. Second, policy makers were the prisoners of a blind orthodoxy which said that at times of trouble Governments should borrow very little, that the free market contained within it self-correcting mechanisms which would in time cure all ills. This was fine for the high priests of this nonsense - bankers in the City of London - but truly terrible for those, like millions in the industrial north, who were nearly killed by the medicine.

We've learnt since then. Overall the post-war period has been one of rising prosperity without equal. But crises of the kind which we are now witnessing by definition take us into uncharted waters, which is why Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling are devoting every moment to working with world leaders to establish a new and better international framework Far from the effects being confined to the main financial centres of the US and the UK, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Japan all are facing similar problems to those which impacted on Northern Rock and Bradford and Bingley. The British Government has been adamant that it will do what it takes to ensure that the money of all depositors with UK banks is safe.

In addition, like other countries, we are borrowing more to help keep the economy on track. Contrary to the charges of some "we did repair the roof whilst the sun was shining". Capital investment over the last ten years in schools, hospitals, transport, science and much else has trebled. And we have been able to cut the national debt as a proportion of our national income (GDP). It was over 43% in 1997, and down to below 37% when the credit crunch began last year. But we are not going to make the mistakes which laid waste to East Lancashire for a decade before the war, where so many lives were sacrificed on the altar of worthless orthodoxy. So borrowing is higher, to offset the inevitable drop in tax receipts at a time like this, and to meet the other costs which come with an economic downturn of this scale.

Alistair Darling was, at it turns out, dead right in saying we'd seen nothing like this in our lifetimes. But he and Gordon Brown I am certain are also right to say that we will get through all this. We will.

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