Paul Vallely: What Caroline Aherne teaches us about fecklessness

'My great-grandmother would, in her unguarded Yorkshire way, speak of "low-life" '

Personally I blame Caroline Aherne. I'd always enjoyed her celebration of low-life slobbery, The Royle Family, up until the point where a baby was introduced to the storyline. Suddenly the telly- transfixed Royles had something important to compete for their attention, and Baby David came off a very poor second. You found you were laughing at the wilful neglect of a child by a group of self-absorbed idle layabouts, and then it struck you that it wasn't funny at all. That was when I stopped watching.

That has always been the downside of satire. There is inevitably a stratum of society too stupid to appreciate it – and who embrace such characters, not as accurately observed objects of contempt, but as celebrations of the attitudes the comedians set out to deride. Thus the racists applauded Alf Garnett, the vulgar slapped one another's backs at the abusive braggadocio of Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney and the uncouth now rejoice in the abusive ignorance of Ali G.

What is being offered, as they see it, is not a critique. Rather, it is an endorsement of behaviour that is portrayed elsewhere as entirely unacceptable. There were places in Wythenshawe, the massive Manchester council estate on which The Royle Family was purportedly set, where families did not need to be told it was okay for parents to put boozing, farting or just watching the television above looking after a child.

Wythenshawe is probably the kind of place the Education Secretary, Estelle Morris, had in mind – she is after all a failed product of the Manchester school system herself – when she wrote the much-trailed speech she is to deliver to a teachers' conference in Cardiff today. In it she blames "feckless parents" for much of the bad behaviour that plagues our schools and shopping arcades. It is an unfashionable word, "feckless". The dictionary says it means "ineffective, feeble, futile, valueless". Of persons, it implies that they are weak, helpless or "destitute of vigour, energy, or capacity".

There is, of course, more to it than that. In common parlance – at least as I recall its use by previous generations – it conveyed a moral judgement on a class of people my great-grandmother would, in her unguarded Yorkshire way, call "low-life". Everyone was poor in those days. But there were those who worked to combat their poverty and those who wallowed in it. It is a word from the vocabulary of the days when people spoke of the "deserving and undeserving poor".

None of which is to say we do not have a real problem. Most of us – when we read newspaper reports of a headmistress held hostage by angry parents after she sent their daughter home from a school for wearing a nose ring, or the teacher who had a miscarriage after she was attacked by a pupil – know that these incidents are just the tip of an iceberg of delinquency.

Nothing so extreme may have happened to us. Yet we have all felt that visceral sense of outrage or intimidation when we find that yobs have set fire to the under-fives' playground, or sprayed graffiti on our garden wall, or jeered at a pensioner outside the local post office. And we know that a lot of the anti-social behaviour is down to children under the age of 14 – some of them not even 11 – many of whom are from broken or unstable homes. Everyone has someone to blame for this. Parents say teachers. The Government says parents. The Tory press says a government which has consistently undermined the family.

The lesson of Caroline Aherne, I suspect, is that blame has to go far wider. There has been a breakdown – or a remaking – not just of the family unit but a whole nexus of support and security. The past decades have seen a questioning of authority, a growth of individualism and an emphasis upon choice and consumerism which has been a very mixed heritage for this new generation. Personal fulfilment has led to a discarding of the old hindrances, restrictions and compromises of a life rooted not just in family but in a wider social sense of belonging too.

There is no point in harking back to a golden age . No one would want to go back to the blind obedience to authority of the Fifties, which hid within its coat-tails institutional snobbery, class prejudice and child abuse. But what it does make clear is the need we have to rediscover a sense of meaning and belonging that extends beyond the shallow accumulation of designer goods and the latest mobile phone – and which apparently offers young people the sense that they can get the things they want by taking from others.

We are all part of that. Tony Blair criticised parents on Friday for "colluding" in their children's truancy, apparently forgetting how he recently took his own kids on holiday during the school term. Robert Kilroy-Silk lamented yob culture this week, cheerfully oblivious of the bad example of his own yob television. And the rest of us, too, need to consider the ways in which we are complicit in creating the culture of which the yobs are only the most extreme expression.

p.vallely@independent.co.uk