A father lies seriously injured in hospital after chasing a gang of youths who threw a stone at his car and getting beaten up by them; his local police chief describes how the streets of suburban Manchester are in the grip of ''feral'' youths with ''no parental control or respect for anybody.'' A funeral car full of mourners has missiles hurled at it in what Cheshire police call ''the ultimate disrespect for human dignity.'' The semi-final of a boys' football tournament has to be abandoned when parents brawl on the touchline, severely cutting and bruising the club manager. All of these incidents happened last week, giving us a picture of an embattled society under siege from yob behaviour, in which lack of mutual respect plays a key role.

 

Respect has become the key-note of New Labour's third term, with half the Bills in last weeks Queen's Speech attempting to address the problem of how to ''foster a culture of respect.'' Punitive measures such as forcing offenders to wear bright orange US style uniforms have been suggested by Hazel Blears, the Home Office police minister, and Education Minister Ruth Kelly wants persistently disruptive pupils to be sent away to state boarding schools.

 

Yet Professor Richard Sennett of the London School of Economics, a leading Left-wing thinker and sociologist whose new book, Respect - the Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality has become the must-read publication for Ministers and politicians this week, believes that this is a problem which cannot be legislated against by Government.

 

''Blair has latched onto this problem because he's lost the respect of the British public,'' he says. ''You don't have to be a psychiatrist to see that his response, to claim that society has a problem with authority, is quite an over-determined thing. Society has always had a problem with yobs, as anyone who looks at a painting by Hogarth can see. What we should be looking at is not the easy emotional appeal that we're going to hell in a hand-basket, but understanding that our social glue of manners is coming undone, and looking at ways in schools and the work-place to give people back a sense of self-respect. The Government has got itself into a box by making it all one-sided, by being long on incentivising and measuring and punishing and short on rewarding loyalty and service. You can't glue things back together through punitive measures.''

 

Sennett's believes that Blair's love of the ''new meritocracy'' in which emphasis is put on discovering exceptional talent in schools and ordinary kids are branded as ''losers'' certainly strikes a chord with those preoccupied with the breakdown of social intercourse. As he points out, ''being respected by others is the most fundamental social need, it is one of the things that make people feel recognised; what Blair should be looking at is the way morale improves when you treat people positively rather than punitively.''

 

Sennett's concerns echo those of Amitai Etzioni, the German-born thinker whose ''communitarian'' philosophy was so influentiual in America under Bill Clintopn's reign. Etzioni proposed a system of matching rights to responisibilities. Too many people shirked community responsibilities, he said. He also believed it was vital to reassert the importance of the family,without reverting to a 1950s mentality.

But how do we do that? The concern over yob culture is such that it has seeped into the media in every possible way. Television series ranging from Little Angels and Bad Behaviour, and a new series starting on ITV next month, Ladette to Lady, all focus on the personal misery and lack of progress experienced by who have grown up without an inkling of how to inspire mutual respect.

 

 It is an issue that goes far deeper than mere etiquette or hearking back to an age of deference. Two forthcoming books on manners by the best-selling author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves Lynne Truss, and the writer Simon Fanshawe, attempt to describe the causes of our coming unstuck through the rise of yob culture, and suggest a way back towards a more harmonious society. Truss, raging at the way rudeness is ''dressed up at consumer freedom,'' has called her book Talk to the Hand. She writes, ''I do remember that there used to be a human emotion called shame, which kicked in when people were justifiably told off. This contrasted with the righteous indignation experienced when the telling off was not justified and it entailed quite a sophisticated mental act of self-division motivated by basic honesty. Manners are ultimately about imagining being the other person.''  

 

Simon Fanshawe, whose book The Done Thing, is published next month, defines manners as ''at their most basic, reducing potential violence between strangers.'' His observations chime with the ITV series, Ladette to Lady. This takes ten good-hearted young women who are foul-mouthed, drunken, sluttish, promiscuous and so domestically incompetent none of them can boil an egg - and puts them through finishing school. These real-life Eliza Dolittles have to not only compete to learn to ''talk proper'', but to walk, dress, cook, sew and, most importantly, discover a way of relating to people that does not involve downing seven Bacardi breezers and flashing their breasts. They are asked to examine their actions, and punished severely when they break rules by becoming drunk and disorderly.

 

It makes fascinating viewing, not only for the jaw-dropping honesty - one admits she'll sleep with anyone once she's got a few drinks inside her - but how totally unaware the girls are of the way their behaviour is perceived by others.

 

''What's interesting about the ladette phenomenon is that it cuts across society,'' says the director, Rod Williams. ''It's become a ubiquitous attitude, glorying in drinking like louts, having casual, callow sex and having an aggressive approach to sexual equality.

 

''My crew were shocked by their forensic attitude to getting drunk - which they quantified as spending £40 each night. But at the same time, they recognised that their attitudes hadn't got them anywhere. They didn't have boyfriends, and knew they'd frightened off men. What surprised us was how the girls responded to the harshness and strictness of the finishing school regime. When they discovered they would be punished by expulsion from an institution the rest of us might find monstrous, they became extremely conformist and eager to learn, cooking meals that would have tested a professional chef. They wanted to prove the staff which were judging them wrong, and found they were taking enormous pride in their achievements. What it showed is that if you really crack the whip through education and peer pressure you can achieve incredible results.''

 

These girls have ''changed 100%'' in the words of Jessica, a debt collector. One of the most foul-mouthed ladettes, she says ''I've completely sorted myself out over the last 8 months, I don't throw myself around, I pay my bills and I have focuses in my life. If I get angry now, I wouldn't shout my mouth off. I'd never swear at my parents or grandparents, but we gained more knowledge of how to act and how to manage my anger in my job, even if I didn't like being told what to do.''

 

Tom Bentley, Director of Demos, sees the difficulty as precisely this. ''It's a question of how you preserve a community in which respect and trust are highly valued and get people to accept responsibility without dictating their every move. I think it's not possible to enforce rules without the threat of sanctions for people who break them, Ideas such as making offenders visible through uniforms might be part of an answer if they were part of a shared social system through which norms of behaviour could be internalised, but if not, it won't have much lasting effect.''

 

By becoming more individualistic, we are less likely to follow the rules laid down by the Church, Bentley says, and even the workplace and the family have become more democratised.

 

''The answer has to include the familial and everyday way we can reinforce a shared sense of respect and responsibility, rather than a political culture. It's a difficult message for politicians because there's no lever you can pull. For individuals, it is the manifestation of the free rider problem. If you try to maintain good behaviour on your own, you may end up worse off. In a situation when you have something bad happening to yourself or to someone else, you can only take an individual decision as to how best to act.''

 

Fear of standing up to transgressors because they may have a knife or turn violent is at the heart of fears about maintaining our ''social glue'' through individual coercion. This is a relatively recent fear to those who grew up in the 1940s and 50s. Nostalgia for the past, Simon Fanshawe thinks, isn't the answer, however. ''The generation who lived through World War 2 had the unique experience of unity of purpose, of an incredible example of sacrifice paying dividends for the greater good. We can't go back to that, even if we wanted to. In the past, kids obeyed the rules because they were frightened of the rod, but we don't want to do that any more. What we're dying for is a new framework based on consideration for other people, and on creating a sense of shame. I did an experiment recently on a train, when a girl put her dirty feet up on the seat beside me. I asked her why she thought it was OK to put dirt on the skirt of the next woman who sat down there. I didn't criticise, but she got very aggressive and said, ''F- off, don't tell me what to do,'' and appealed to the rest of the carriage for votes to support her. When they didn't, she was so ashamed that she got up and left. The remaining passengers then said, Why don't we do that more often?''

 

A sense of shame may not seem like a good enough defence when confronted with a gang, and it is the obverse to the humane, positive creation of mutual respect Professor Sennett wants to see more of in schools and the work-place. It is the old argument about whether the carrot or the stick are more effective. What is certain that one-sided attempts on either side are likely to be insufficient to prevent a repetition of the kind of behaviour which has become all too familiar.