Just a week ago, this newspaper condemned the negativity of the current campaign, which has seen nasty e-mails, unfair attacks in fundraising letters, push polling and now negative advertising.

That's too bad, because the Island faces problems which desperately need to be solved, but the intelligent debate between adults that should be taking place is mostly being drowned out by the kind of shrill polemic that belongs on a school playground.

Both political parties can take some blame for this, but the view from here ¿ which again will be taken as a sign of this newspaper's alleged bias, is that the Progressive Labour Party is doing its best to hit the depths last plumbed by the infamous Delaey Robinson advertisement in 1998.

The best example of this is the recent argument (debate is too fine a word) over crime. It started when a UBP candidate claimed that 2006 had been a record year for crime in a TV ad. The PLP, rightly, jumped on that, noting that 1996 was a worse year, and that was when the UBP was in power. But the PLP then tried to, in effect, take a graph from 1996 to show how much better things are now.

An objective look at the statistics for the last 11 years shows that crime has gone up and down under both parties. If you take violent crime as a guide, the period 1996 to 2000 saw violent crimes range between 295 (in 2000) and 350 (in 1996). In 2001 and 2002, there was a steep decline to 236 violent crimes in 2002, but since then it has been steadily increasing, peaking at 309 in 2005 and slipping slightly to 305 in 2006.

So the UBP, apart from claiming that 2006 was a record year, is right to say that serious crime has been worsening in recent years. After all, it wasn't that long ago that then-Premier Alex Scott was speaking to the Country in special broadcasts about the crime crisis the Island was facing.

Still, the main point here is that you can do pretty much what you want with statistics, and especially crime statistics. What can't be denied, as we report on Page 8, is that crime is one of the top three issues the public are most concerned about.

People do not feel safe and they want to hear what the Island's parties will do about it, not a lot of "nyah nyah, nyah nyah nyah" about when it was worse or better.

On that note, the UBP rolled out tough measures on crime earlier this week. It can be argued that the UBP is putting too much emphasis on deterrence and punishment and not enough on rehabilitation, or at least rehabilitation outside of prison.

That's a worthwhile debate. But the PLP is not having that debate. It instead has taken the route of smearing and misrepresentation, arguing that UBP leader Michael Dunkley's vote against the repeal of capital punishment (which included a section allowing corporal punishment) that had not been exercised in decades meant the UBP was going to bring both (and corporal punishment is "flogging" in PLP terms because that is much more provocative and evocative language) back.

This of course is nonsense, as were the claims that mandatory additional sentences for persistent offenders of serious crimes would end up in prison for "life" as PLP supporter Charles Richardson claimed ¿ despite the fact the UBP's platform says no such thing.

From there, of course, it is just a short leap to PLP Southampton West Central candidate Marc Bean's claim on Wednesday night that: "If they have the opportunity they (the UBP) will lock all of us up. It's true," he said. It's not true. It's complete nonsense, and if Mr. Bean does not know that, then his more experienced colleagues certainly do. But instead, they have parroted the same line, claiming the PLP is the party of rehabilitation.

But the fact is that it was the PLP that passed the law requiring mandatory prison sentences for people carrying bladed weapons and it is a fact that rehabilitation under the PLP has not worked especially well, as Public Safety Minister David Burch admitted to this newspaper yesterday. Certainly the crime rate has not decreased in the last five years.

It may be that the Mirrors programme, which looks promising, will work, but it is far too early to say. Both parties know that programmes devoted exclusively to either "lock 'em up and throw away the key" or rehabilitation without going to prison are doomed to fail and that only programmes that combine the two ¿ and give the public a sense of security ¿ will work.

But instead of a debate on that, the public is subjected to a series of misrepresentations, hysterical allegations and general nastiness that does the PLP no credit and which may well backfire on it.