Sisyphus (and this is true) was sentenced by the gods to roll a huge rock up a steep hill for eternity. Each time he would bring the boulder just about to the summit, and then something would cause the blasted stone to roll right down to the bottom again. The ancient Sisyphus was punished for his cleverness, but we modern Sisypheans are condemned by our stupidity to have the same debate about how to alter the behaviour of our fellows, over and over and over again.

The issue might be a health scare, an environmental scare, a crime scare or a combination of all of these. Whatever - the inevitable rubric is as follows.

One: dreadful case or cases, headlines, news stories, moral panic, bishops (optional), MPs, voluntary organisations, something must be done.

Two: government consultation, strong words, determination, much already done - much remaining to be done.

Three: proposals involving tougher sentencing, banning of something in public, strengthening police powers.

Four: proposals involving education, a publicity campaign, special lessons in schools.

Five: vested interests (brewers, head teachers, lawyers) on why measures are impractical or reek of the nanny state; Opposition on why measures are impractical and don't go far enough.

Six: Institute of Ideas or similar contrarians on why murder or smoking or devil dogs were never a problem in the first place.

Seven: fail to evaluate last set of measures, begin again with something else.

Yesterday it was, once more, drink. Or, rather, kids and drink, which is a quadrupled panic. This concern arises partly out of the endless recent publicity about binge drinking and antisocial behaviour, and partly because of worries about the health of individuals. Kids being involved meant that the main minister in the frame was Ed Balls, the Children's Secretary. So we got ideas for extending ASBOs to persistent public drinkers, greater police powers to disperse youthful drinkers, a two-strikes policy for retailers flogging booze to the unbearded and - on the soft side - an education campaign for parents on what drink advice to give to their progeny (other than “drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence”). And we had the Shadow Secretary, Michael Gove, on how this was no good, though no one quite got round to asking him why. Expect the Institute of Ideas (actually alcohol liberates young minds) later in the week.

But in the midst of his hyperactivity Mr Balls said this: “We need a culture change about drinking, with everyone from parents, the alcohol industry and young people all taking more responsibility.” In other words the measures were of little use without the culture change. People who currently think that getting blasted, wasted, rat-arsed, hammered, legless, mellow, jolly or wrecked is a good thing need to begin to believe that it is a very bad thing. Radio presenters need to stop joking with victorious sportsmen that there'll be “sore heads” in the morning. Sometimes, in social situations, I am astonished at just how much glug otherwise sensible folk can get down their necks in an evening. So cultural change is right. Without it, everything else is just more laws.

But can governments effect cultural change? This last weekend I read a piece in a left-leaning newspaper complaining about advertising for a strip club, and suggesting that both the poster - depicting partly undressed young women apparently writhing - and pole and lap dancing were somehow attributable to new Labour. And I thought to myself that Cleggian Lib Dem and Cameronian Tory lap-dancing posters would probably be much the same, except with younger models. In other words, society marched on regardless doing what it wanted to do regardless of what party was in power.

The ranks of those who moan loudest about their loss of freedoms are swelled by nostalgics for the days of Merrie England - before CCTV, when post offices could be found in every hamlet and foreigners wore pointy beards and limited themselves to the royal court. But even popular monarchs could be very proscriptive. Consider the announcement in 1574 by Elizabeth I of her Statutes of Apparel, telling free-born Englishpersons what they could not wear. The statutes laid down limitations on the fineries to be donned by subjects, and were - or so Her Majesty claimed - motivated by a concern that now sounds wholly modern. Viz, “the wasting and undoing of a great number of young gentlemen and others seeking by show of apparel to be esteemed as gentlemen, who, allured by the vain show of those things... run into such debts and shifts as they cannot live out of danger of laws without attempting unlawful acts”.

Elizabeth had the advantage that she could imprison anyone so much as questioning these laws, let alone breaking them. But not long afterwards we discover various proto-Mailites suggesting that antisocial dressiness had broken out again. Stephen Gosson lamented that hardly had Good Queen Bess “set downe the limits of apparel to euery degree: and how soone againe hath the pride of our harts over-flowen the chanel?” Huge ruffs bothered Philip Stubbes, who, in his The Anatomie of Abuses considered that: “If Aeolus with his blasts, or Neptune with his stormes chaunce to hit uppon the crafie bark of their brused ruffes, then they goe flip flap in the winde, like rags flying abroad, and lye upon their shoulders like the dishcloute of a slut.”

Fashion, popular culture, whatever you call it, found a way round authority, because it didn't depend upon authority, or even upon establishment approval. For a century women insisted on wearing the hoop petticoat, despite being mocked in poem, novel and periodical. Fielding considered that the huge garment “serves as a sort of a Fortification, a woman being it as it were intrenched and an Assailer kept at a distance...” Isn't that true of the infamous Chelsea tractor?

At the end of the 8th century Bishop Alcuin of York complained to the young Anglo-Saxon beaux aping Viking fashion. “Look at your hairstyle, how you have wished to resemble the pagans in your beards and your hair. Are you not terrified of those whose hairstyle you wished to have?” he demanded. Anyone for gangsta? Authority sends its message, and gets one straight back.

Underachievement is a huge problem, but what can governments do about the anti-learning culture in our schools and on our screens, where “swots” are to be pitied and the playing of football is the sole reliable virtue? It's in the culture. Like racism or smoking, it takes decades to shift. It isn't Balls; it's us.

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