It is not the affluent who have to tolerate riots on their streets; not they who are afraid to step out of their homes for fear of violence; not they who have their public amenities vandalised; not they who have to send their children to schools made almost unmanageable by "disturbed" pupils; not even they, despite their complaints, who suffer the majority of burglaries. But the victims of anti-social behaviour are not for the most part the rich who symbolise the injustice, or the liberal middle class who have invoked inequality as the excuse. Such people are often explained by the left as victims, prisoners of their circumstances. What can you expect if they are forced to live in high-rise estates? Why shouldn't they steal if they see business people and City slickers making millions? Wouldn't you feel like smashing things up if you couldn't get a job and your parents couldn't get one either? Fair enough, up to a point Tory policies are bound to create social stresses. Tawney and his contemporaries would be horrified if they had to listen to some of their heirs defending, or at least excusing, criminals, thugs, rioters, vandals, bad and feckless parents, disruptive pupils in the classroom. As R H Tawney well understood, the original impetus of the British left was the control of those who exercised their rights irresponsibly: in those days, factory- owners and landlords who asked "may I not do what I like with my own?" But the left was supposed to offer a better way, of mutual help and support, restraint, co-operation. Both main parties thus betrayed their heritage, but Labour's was the greater betrayal.

We became a society that regarded the rights of the individual as paramount: the right to consume, on one side of the political spectrum, the right to self-expression on the other. Those people are paid to supervise children and "the essence of public responsibility", wrote Jacobs, "is that you do it without being hired". At some point during the past 30 years, Britain lost touch with those ideas. They were perhaps best expressed by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: "People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other". When a child is scolded by a strange adult for running into the street or swinging on the straps of a Tube train, he learns something that can never be learned from teachers or child-minders or social workers. They are represented by such words as duty, responsibility, public virtue, citizenship, civic pride, community. But was it music or Muzak? The ideas that Mr Blair was trying to express have been so unfamiliar for so long that even he struggles to put much flesh on them.

LAST week, writing in the Times, Paul Johnson once more compared Tony Blair to Margaret Thatcher and added that the Labour leader's Spectator lecture on Wednesday "ought to be music to the ears of all sensible men and women". Anyway, it's time to look over the caravan and consider curtain possibilities.. But Holland himself - who returned to The Tube after a six-week suspension for swearing to announce that he'd spent the time "travelling into Bob Monkhouse's subconscious" - would think this was ridiculously pompous. He is an eccentric, his boyish enthusiasms never taken too seriously, stylish but beyond fashion, theme park man but with a saving seriousness about music. There is something about him reminiscent of Terry-Thomas, and it isn't just that he sometimes wears loud, chalk-stripe suits. The layout included a model Helicon Mountain, a red light district and a crack house, and during general elections they would put up Kinnock and Major posters.Jools Holland is a very British celebrity.

George and Rosie visit most weekends.Though not exactly defensive about his family (beyond saying that he does the lottery in the hope that it will alienate them), Holland isn't expansive either; and on the whole it's more rewarding to talk to him about his model railway and Minic motorway, though sadly these have been broken up since the family moved. Christabel is a sculptor, "though currently Mrs DIY, or Mrs DIY Overseer", because they, her son Fred and their daughter Mabel, recently moved into "a bigger leafy suburban semi". They have lived together ever since, a boy with such deadened south London vowels that his voice sounds almost inherently funny, and a woman whose son will inherit an earldom. But then in 1987, on location with The Tube, he fell in love with the 23-year-old mistress of Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland, Christabel, Lady Durham. It wouldn't be at all cool with captions.At the age of 24, Holland moved in with his girlfriend Mary, a hairdresser, and they had two children, George and Rosie. About Later he is even more modest - "you could do it with a few captions, but of course a lot of people can't read and write, so I suppose I help from that point of view".

But the truth is that musicians want to appear on Later not because they are vastly paid or reach huge audiences, but because it's cool. He claims his role on Toothbrush was simply that of musical director; but as he acknowledges, the music "could easily have gone down the twee route", and it didn't. On The Tube his preference for old black men and their music relieved Paula Yates's excitability about young white men and their bodies. And then the horns come out of jazz but the rhythm section's like a rhythm-and-blues rhythm section, so it has this sort of meshing thing".The viewers' sense of Holland's musical integrity is crucial to his effectiveness as a presenter.