IF fear were a climate, it would be cold and hostile. The eight law and order bills contained in this week's Queen's Speech certainly won't bring about a feeling of warmth and community. The new bills, which include plans for ID cards and on-the-spot fines for minor offences, bring the total of anti-crime bills introduced by the government since the 2001 general election to 34. Given that only two of the bills are likely to be passed before the next election, the government has been accused of using fear of crime for political efficacy, particularly as the announcements come at a time when crime levels, in general, are falling.

Fear of crime and actual crime have always been awkward bedfellows, however, and their relationship is often misunderstood. Jason Ditton, director of the Scottish Centre for Criminology in Glasgow, believes that the government hasn't grasped the issues, in spite of its bold pronouncements. ''It's a big but somewhat mistaken issue in the Home Office at the moment,'' he says. ''There's something called the National Police Reassurance Project, the basis of which is that recorded crime has been going down for a while - not across the board but generally - yet fear of crime as measured in the British crime survey has not declined nearly as much.

''The fatal flaw is that I can see no reason why, if recorded crime falls, fear of crime should fall - yet this is the premise upon which the current understanding is based. It's a fatal misconception: fear of crime is a complicated issue.''

It is commonly believed that statistics on fear of crime should reflect actual crime figures, which would mean that members of the public would base their fear on their so-called objective risk of a crime being committed against them. However, it is not that simple. ''I did a survey, asking people how likely they thought it was they would be a victim of crime next year, and nearly half thought it was either likely or very likely they would be murdered next year,'' says Ditton. ''It's bizarre. What some politicians and senior police officers think is that people rate their risk much more highly than what they call objective risk, but that's a false piece of logic because until people are actually, say, burgled, we don't know who is worrying needlessly, so why is it needless to worry? It's only when you know the outcome that worrying becomes silly.''

Such worry does not necessarily stem from our own experience of crime, newspaper stories, or crime statistics. Indeed, Ditton thinks over the past few decades there has been a more fundamental shift in how crime is perceived. ''We never had fear of crime in this country until February 1982 and the publication of the first British crime survey,'' he says. ''I don't think it's a thing that exists, I think it comes from asking questions about it. If you ask people if they fear crime they say they do, and that has been translated over the decades from a general concern about crime across the country - which is code for 'why aren't politicians doing something about this?' - into personal worry about becoming a victim. A general concern about the failure of public policy has become a private concern about being a victim.''

Whether this concern can

be translated into political gain is another question. Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, and professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, is in no doubt that it can and is. ''Politicians profit greatly by selling themselves to voters and selling their policies to voters who are much more likely to support them if they are fearful for their own safety should they not support them,'' he says. ''When crime rates are especially high or rising or if there's a new kind of crime, it's a more direct matter: they just talk about what's going on. But when crime rates are decreasing it's a more complex matter for them.

''The crime rate has been going down pretty consistently for a decade now so supporting the reduction in civil liberties or increasing funding for policing requires a new focus and that focus since 9/11 has been on terrorism. Yet the only real protection from major terrorist attacks comes from good intelligence, not from frightening the population into changing their behaviour or removing civil liberties. But it plays into other agendas and projects that some politicians have, to focus attention away from the responsibility of intelligence agencies and government to individual citizens.''

Glasner believes people are beginning to realise that

fear-mongering and high levels of fear and anxiety are problems in their own right. ''Just as crime on the street is a danger, so are high levels of fear and anxiety,'' he says. ''The consequences of this are great in themselves.''