ASBOs are crucial in the fight against yobism. But each order that is given is a sign of failure. Not, of course, in the immediate sense, for some are thankfully successful in arresting unacceptable behaviour.

No matter what the immediate need is to use ASBOs each one signifies a failure of a self-governing society. And in citing that phrase I am not trying to escape to an imaginary past. While there have been no doubt many blemishes, the Britain of the 1950s, as of the 1920s, were largely self-governing communities.

You only have to look at the crime figures to see how the position has been revolutionised. Of course the government is right to emphasise the effort it has willed in countering, what seems to have been, an inexorable rise in crime levels to astronomical proportions. I am not talking about data over the past few years. Let’s take a sweep over the century.

I represent an urban seat as do many Labour MPs. Birkenhead is typical of most Labour seats. Here the latest figures on crime show how the position has been transformed out of all recognition.

Serious crimes against the person in Birkenhead now are at a level equal to the whole number of serious crimes against the person in Britain as a whole 50 years ago. That is not a misprint. And what is true of Birkenhead is true of other seats too.

Life was of course rougher in some senses 50 or 100 years ago. But society had its own ways of policing itself – sending offenders to Coventry, shaming them, and the like. This form of self-policing didn’t come about in a spontaneous way. It was very largely built up by the Labour movement, from its trade unions and from its co-operative wing.

Of course the Labour movement wasn’t the only force at work. Christianity’s force to do good was increasingly replaced by a growing adherence to what is called English Idealism – the idea that each of us would try and achieve our best selves and behave in a way so that others similarly could achieve their best selves.

It was to this development of what I would call a public ideology that Labour made a crucial contribution. Clement Attlee was the last Labour prime minister to have been taught at university the importance of this public ideology in governing our own lives and values.

One refugee coming to this country exclaimed that the most attractive aspect of life in Britain was that here individuals had to live close together with one another, but also knew how to keep themselves apart.

The collapse of an ideology of how to behave properly has collapsed in all too many areas of our life.

The biggest example is the banking system where the self-policing system was replaced by the FSA. Here miles of regulation have been published to make good the failure of people to know how to behave properly. But the gigantic collapse in the financial system a year ago simply illustrates how inadequate regulation is as a substitute for knowing what is decent behaviour.

This is not an anarchist plea to dismantle the forms of regulation and control that society has resorted to. Far from it. It is, however, a plea to realise that such regulations and legislation are poor substitutes for families nurturing proper behaviour in the first place.

David Blunkett began the first tentative steps to rebuild a common ideology in his citizenship moves but the push behind this development has faltered. Helping families make decent citizens of their children is now the exciting task that lies ahead.