Monday, health; Tuesday, crime; last week, education. It has taken Gordon Brown two years to recognise that prime ministers have to show that they are interested in the issues that affect people's daily lives. That Mr Brown has had to grapple with an unprecedented economic crisis has never excused his failure to get to grips with policy on schools, hospitals and crime as well.

Throughout most of the Blair years, when politics could be viewed almost entirely through a prism of “Brownite” versus “Blairite”, the Brownites used to complain that the Blairites ought to shut up about crime; that constantly talking about respect and knives and gangs merely stirred up fear in the bosom of the electorate.

Two years after taking office the Prime Minister appears to have accepted Tony Blair's view that, actually, people are genuinely afraid anyway, and that they need their politicians to enunciate that concern and to show that they have thought about how to deal with it.

So as Parliament turns in upon itself, Labour turns on its leader and David Cameron turns on his own MPs, Mr Brown turns up at Chelsea Football Club to make his first speech on law and order since becoming Prime Minister.

The trouble with Mr Brown's speeches on domestic policy (other than that nobody is listening to them) is this - they read as though he has only just started studying the subject. So what we had yesterday was a competent enough trot through a general list of initiatives, all of them with some proven success in combating crime and its causes: stop-and-search to fight knife crime, a partnership with mobile phone companies to make handsets useless to thieves, youth clubs, better education, parenting orders, role models, safer school partnerships and suchlike.

It read like the initial notes that a student might make when planning a dissertation: this is where we are at - now what should my argument be about it?

But in the Brown speeches, there is no argument, no punch, no idea. They are just a list of what we knew already. In one section, Mr Brown flipped straight from the need to improve life chances to the reclassification of cannabis as a Class B drug and then on to “safer school partnerships”, with no clear link between them. Last week's education speech had a similarly disconnected feel to it.

Look at the section of the crime speech that dealt with property crime. There will be, Mr Brown promised, a renewed focus on burglary and robbery: “This summer we will launch a new programme to bring together all the different agencies involved in fighting burglary and robbery to make sure we know where crime is happening, who is committing it, how and when. We will provide additional funding and support, together with police action, tougher sentencing - and probation and neighbourhood police teams working together to keep track of those released from prison, to steer them away from crime, and to ensure that those who fail to reform will be more swiftly caught and punished.”

None of that is new - the neighbourhood policing, working together, “tough” sentencing, sharing information and the rest. It's all just words.

Successive home secretaries have tried to jolt the Home Office out of a lackadaisical view that there is little that can be done about rising crime and that it is best simply to manage it. The theory presented to ministers by Home Office officials goes like this: violent crime increases when the economy performs well (which happened throughout the Blair years) and property crime rises when the economy performs badly (which is happening now).

Overall increases are also greater when the number of young males rises. These are the factors that led to yesterday's prediction by the Police Federation that property crime could rise by 25 per cent over the next two years as the recession bites. And remember, unemployment is particularly bad among young people during this recession.

Mr Blair used to try to take on such assumptions by changing the debate on crime from a narrow analysis of prosperity and demographics to a discussion of the underlying social problems as well: tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

But because of his notorious inability to sustain interest in anything for long, and his obsession with good headlines, the efforts tended to collapse into meaningless initiatives about marching yobs to cash machines. Typically of Mr Brown, his speech yesterday reflected both the old and the new, but without any clear purpose.

He conceded that property crime was likely to rise in a recession, but also vaguely addressed the social causes behind crime and added in a load of initiatives from tracking cases online to community involvement in deciding local priorities; even “virtual pins” - “a safer streets interactive website where the public share information with each other and use virtual pins to show the authorities where they want action”.

The police already know exactly where the public do not feel safe. In my town it is the bus stop on the high street and the toilets in the public car park. Even the Home Secretary knows; she told The Sunday Times last year that she would not feel safe walking around Hackney, East London, at midnight. I'm not sure a virtual pin would help with that.

That we will keep investing in all these services, unlike the other lot who want to cut them, is not an argument, just a bit of political positioning. Mr Brown had nothing to say about family breakdown or recidivism, about policing structure or the reasons why more children carry knives - all areas where real arguments about law and order policy occur. There were a lot of words, but no ideas at all. Just a list.

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