TONY BLAIR: When is he going to get the full picture ?

THE BIGGEST story this week is Hurricane Katrina and the wave of death, destruction and misery she has wreaked on poor Louisiana.

Which probably means that for our dear Prime Minister, this is an excellent week to start back at work after his long summer holiday in the hope that bad news can be buried under someone else's disaster.

Well, it can't. Because most of us don't live in New Orleans and we have a disaster of our own in the making here, in Britain, the country where we live.

In London, hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding Zainab Kalokoh was gunned down as she held a baby at a christening.

The people charged with the attack are in their teens. Up in not-so-bonny Scotland, the body of 11-year-old Rory Blackhall lies in the public mortuary, apparently murdered by a man who was on bail for sex attacks against children.

In Newcastle, young mum Danielle Wails has been arrested on suspicion of murder, after her four-month-old baby died in a fire at their home.

And that's only what's happened this week. Over the past month we've had a baby attacked in her pushchair, a farmer run over and killed by a car thief and a young man who remonstrated with yobs on a bus, knifed to death.

And then there's the killing of black Liverpool teenager Anthony Walker, and the London terrorist attacks. On top of the usual muggings, rapes and domestic violence.

What part of "enough is enough" doesn't Tony Blair get?

When is he finally going to be reduced to the tears of despair and the burning anger that so many feel when we consider the tsunami of violent crime and yobbish behaviour engulfing this country?

More to the point, when is he going to realise his party's utterly shameful part in all this? When are Tony and his bunch of toadies and wannabes going to get the full, hideous picture?

When are our ministers going to realise that it was their decision to incorporate the unwanted, unworkable European Human Rights convention into our laws that has allowed the preachers of hate to remain in this country to corrupt the youth that end up on Al-Jazeera, justifying suicide bombing?

When will they twig that the reason violent, drunken behaviour and all the crime and misery that accompanies it, has rocketed because of their crass decision to allow every boozer in Britain to stay open all hours?

When will they realise that decent citizens are appalled and sickened to read that hate-merchants like Abu Hamza are living off the state, while the people who fought for this country in World War II are told to sell off their homes to pay for their personal care?

Join up the dots and the picture that emerges is grotesque and is of a country that fewer and fewer of us now recognise.

I don't recognise a country where we rush to deport the blameless asylum-seeker Williard Chinhanhu to a place where he runs a grave risk of being tortured, but refuse to turf out terrorist suspects in case someone tortures them.

I don't recognise a Britain where the teenage scum who chucked Dave Berry to his death in the River Stour are only given sentences of eight and 18 months, or where people who molest kids are frequently not even sent to jail.

But, it appears, this is the Britain we now live in and it is a Britain of Blair's making.

As the nightmare of New Orleans unfolds in all its horror, let's not kid ourselves that, given similar circumstances, it couldn't happen here.

In some places, it's already started.