Government and Opposition have traded verbal blows - not only on how to handle crime but even how to debate it.

Shadow spokesman Patricia Gordon-Pamplin was angry the marathon Home Affairs debate last week only gave eight minutes to crime, despite being more ten hours long.

She accused Minister Terry Lister of cherry-picking subjects while Mr. Lister said the Opposition was raising the bogeyman of rising crime which wasn't borne out of reality.

He said violent crime was down 35 percent since 1996.

Mr. Lister said coverage of violent crime by The Royal Gazette was "quite in order" but the exposure led people to believe that such crime was rampant.

He said: "If one senior is beaten up every month, that's 12 seniors, it isn't 1,200. It's alarming, its outrageous and one is too many but the truth is statistics show a 35 percent decline."

Mrs. Gordon-Pamplin said the Minister had ignored the order of the subjects in the budget book which meant the Opposition ran out of time and never got to speak on important areas such as Police and Prisons.

However Mr. Lister said he had spoken as quickly as he could while Opposition members other than Mrs. Gordon-Pamplin spoke at length during the Home Affairs debate which had taken 25 percent of the total time allocated for the whole of the budget last week.

He said: "Mr. (Maxwell) Burgess was one in particular. Both sides of the debate suffered."

He also criticised one of his own backbenchers.

"When Mr. (Arthur) Hodgson stood up spoke for over an hour in rather a rambling fashion, that ate up a lot of time."

The Minister defended his right to choose the order in which subjects were debated. "I picked a particular sequence which made sense to me."

Mrs. Gordon-Pamplin said Government MPs had filibustered, which is speaking at length in order to use up the time. "It's disgraceful," she said.

The debate about crime then raged into the night during the motion to adjourn.

Mr. Lister said the UBP had decided to try to use the Budget debate to launch their election campaign by making a stream of allegations.

He said half the Opposition's ideas were already in place while the other half were unworkable.

He said the Opposition had called for mandatory treatment in Westgate.

He said: "We passed a bill in June that does that, they may have missed it. They said put ion scanners in all three (prison) facilities, we have that now."

He said the Opposition had talked about getting the balance right between rehabilitation and incarceration.

"The balance they had was incarceration, period."

During Wednesday night's debate Government backbencher Wayne Perinchief said Bermuda was bearing the brunt of former Premier Sir John Swan's decision to axe old guard Policeman such as himself in 1994 and move into a hands-off form of policing. He said a generation of youngsters had grown up doing as they liked and were now causing most of the problems.

"The people running around the country now committing crime are about 18-20, they would have been about 8 or 9 in 1994."

Ashfield DeVent (PLP) said drugs had taken a huge toll on the country but finally some hope was on the horizon with the first graduates of drug court.

Cole Simons (UBP) called on the Minister and the Police to go the length and breadth of the country and get people on board the anti-crime bandwagon.