DAILY POST YOUR VOICE IN WALES: Street life tells us all we need to know.

SO there we have it, a snapshot of Britain 2008 seen through the dim neon glow of New Year's Eve street life: people collapsing, falling over, fighting and assaulting each other, injuring themselves all ways, plus a smattering of stabbings and shootings.

Not very different from most nights, in fact, just more so.

And almost all fuelled by drink - exacerbated by illegal drugs.

The only people who were probably behaving themselves en masse were smokers: it's hard to have a punch-up with a fag on the go; besides the much-derided, government-detested nicotine addicts tend to be a more contemplative bunch. Hitler and Stalin detested smoking too, unlike Churchill. Perhaps if they'd stopped to inhale deeply occasionally and think about what they were doing instead of feeling they always had to be doing something...

Britain's streets are a good barometer of its society. They tell us what the pressure is like, indicate quite accurately what's likely to happen next. Drinking in public may be banned in more enlightened areas but we still get the drunks and they get younger and younger despite the law.

Someone is enabling them to get their hands on drink - why are the penalties for this not harsher, and not more rigorously enforced? If they were peaceable smokers minding their own business they'd have had the book thrown at them.

And why aren't the penalties for carrying knives as stiff as those for packing firearms?

Knives are even more likely to be used than guns - and at close range may even be more deadly. No-one needs to carry a knife in public, yet thousands do. If they were smokers caught discarding a cigarette stub they'd have been hung out to dry, fined and possibly in danger of losing their driving licences and jobs.

Which is more than can be said for the uninsured teenage joy-riders who use our roads as private racetracks and are seldom caught unless they are observed exceeding the speed limit.

As a snapshot of Britain our streets tell us much - besides the evidence of unhealthy diets witnessed by the pooled remains on the pavements the next day. They tell us what our rulers' priorities are as they are chauffeured around in their sparkling limousines. Drinking culture and knife culture are not amongst them. Would ID cards make the situation any better? What if, instead of spending pounds 16bn on those, we invested in a few thousand more community police officers?