Blackpool Gazette’s headlines feature all too many murders these days. In the news pages, you read of violent attacks all along the seafront, some fuelled by alcohol, some not. Government ministers talk all the time about anti-social behaviour and what they are going to do about it – but the perception it is getting worse doesn’t go away. Then there’s simple, crass rudeness. Few things annoy me more than teenagers playing ‘gangsta rap’ on their mobile phones on the buses – it’s rude, but it isn’t a crime. It’s bad manners, but what can you do about it? These days, we live in a ‘personal bubble’, preferring not to provoke others whose reactions we find hard to predict.

Government are very good at telling us crime is falling. But there are so many surveys, censuses, police statistics and so on, all of which tell the story in a slightly different way that it becomes ever harder to know what to think about crime. We know violent crime, broadly speaking is on the increase, whilst petty theft and robbery is in decline – possibly linked to the fall in the street price of certain drugs.

Increases or decreases in anti-social behaviour are much harder to quantify – mostly because it is very difficult to define the term. Does anti-social behaviour have to be a crime, or can it include those things which are not a crime? Is a crowd of youths gathering on a street corner a crime? Of course not – though it may now be enough to warrant a loudspeaker to bark at them to move on and play some sport. How do you quantify acts of incivility or rudeness? No-one rings the police to report some callow youth failing to give up their seat for an elderly woman on a bus.

The Government’s solutions all focus on dealing with the consequences of anti-social behaviour, ameliorating the effects on the lives of those who suffer. It is never about dealing with causes of that anti-social behaviour in the first place – ironic for a Government promising to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime.

But to deal with the causes of anti-social behaviour, you have first to identify them. In my view, each and every one seems to link in with the education system. I liken education to the Circle Line on the London Underground – it intersects with almost every line in the system, sometimes more than once. Education does too – it may be truancy in secondary school, perhaps caused by family breakdown, and followed by dropping out of higher education under the financial burden.

Police are now patrolling at Bispham High, Beacon Hill High, Palatine High and Collegiate High in the town in a bid to restore order in the classroom. Blackpool now has the 7th worst truancy rate amongst local authorities in the country. That tells me that neither the Government nor Blackpool are getting education right in the town at the moment. I wonder how much of the attendant social problems in the town are a consequence of that, and to what extent Labour’s low expectations for educational achievement are reinforcing that?

Pupils may be turning their back on Blackpool’s schools, but that is because Labour themselves have turned their back on Blackpool.