It is hard to say which was more depressing: that a Labour Prime Minister believed his skin might be saved by announcing teenage mothers “from now on” would be compelled to raise their babies in state-run hostels, or the applause it got from his party.

The PM’s language bespoke vulnerable, forgotten victims at last being given due succour and love. He did not characterise teen mums, as Peter Lilley famously did in 1992, as scheming missies sprogging just to land a council flat: rather they were “children having children”. But it was not compassion and certainly not innovation — since these baby-mamma motels already exist and 8,000 girls live in them — that won that applause. It was the punitive whiff of the workhouse, the populist dog-whistle authoritarianism in Gordon Brown’s conclusion that getting tough with teen mums was not just “better for them, better for their babies . . .” but “better for us all”.

Yet here was just another example of new Labour behaving like the worst kind of parent: the hipster mum or dad who is ludicrously libertarian, disdains to impose rules and curfews, is, like, totally cool about the spliff under the bed, the all-night party before maths GCSE, the boyfriend sleeping over. And then, when some cataclysm occurs — the car is written off, the police show up, exams are flunked — acts with outraged and baffled despotism.

Take Harriet Harman this week railing against PunterNet, a website that serves as a Zagat’s sex guide to brothels and their whores. It was “the ultimate commodification of women” she told the Labour conference. Indeed she had phoned the Governor of California — where the site is based — to ask Arnie to terminate it. Then later, in her final, flailing, unfunny closing speech, she mocked the Tories’ record on equality by saying: “George Osborne, instead of a Sure Start centre in every community, would promise a lap-dancing club.”

Really, Harriet, why fixate on PunterNet, the one “sinister and degrading” institution that is beyond your purview? Why did your Government never, say, regulate the gazillion “adult” channels that pop up unrequested on the nation’s Freeview box, featuring soft-porn models who beseech lone men to text them instructions to flash their breasts or fondle each other. “Don’t w*** alone,” they cry. “Pick up the phone.”

And how can you, in all feminist righteousness, cast the Shadow Chancellor as Peter Stringfellow? It was under your Government that the number of lap-dancing clubs in Britain doubled, since the 2003 Licencing Act made it almost impossible for local residents to oppose them.

But that was then and this is now. After absurd, reckless licentiousness comes the crackdown. All-day drinking legislation was swept in by ministers, impervious to residents’ objections or police misgivings, who were seeking only to please the all-powerful booze lobby. But it all ended in puke and 2am punch-ups so — as Gordon Brown’s speech announced — councils will be given power to scrap late licences right across town. Britain: you had your chance, but you spoilt it, so now, young lady, you’re grounded.

Morality has been a dirty word these past 12 years. It stank too much of John Major’s “back to basics”, old-school Tory viciousness, discomfort with modern life, severe Whitehousian grannies railing at the telly. And from that loosening up, that new Labour refusal to judge or stigmatise, came a gladdening wave of tolerance, bringing gay relationships from the margins into register office celebrations.

But it also left Labour politicians paralysed about calling right from wrong, vice from virtue. Last week, while interviewing the Chancellor, I asked why, back in the boom, when it was clear that we were running up insurmountable levels of personal debt, the Government did not utter words of caution, suggest maybe that we might do better saving up for that designer bling or mini-break and living within our means?

“People have to make their own decisions,” Alistair Darling said. “The Government shouldn’t lecture people on their personal lives.” And yet later he let slip that “trying to persuade my daughter there is a relationship between what you spend and what you earn is difficult”. So at home the Chancellor was arguing hard — and not very successfully — the case for personal fiscal responsiblity, yet the rest of us could work it out for ourselves or go drown in debt.

Perhaps it is only right that politicians don’t lecture us as if we’re their teenage children. It is just hard not to yearn for a politician willing to flip open his moral compass.

Barack Obama based his election campaign on calling out to his own community, telling baggy-trousered dudes, “brothers should pull up their pants — some people might not want to see your underwear”. Or plain talking to parents: “Turn off the TV set, put the video game away. Watch your kids do their homework. Stop giving them eight sodas a day; they’re overweight, they’re getting ill.”

Instead our Government pumps untold resources into anti-obesity campaigns or “enrichment” activities to improve health or lift children out of poverty. But it leaves the tough love, the ugly truth — “don’t feed your kids junk” or “teach them some manners or else they will never get a job” or “stop blaming everyone for your own laziness” — unsaid or outsourced to the TV moralists Lord Sugar and Jamie Oliver and “Dr” Gillian McKeith.

Where is the minister touring schools lecturing teenage girls that getting up the duff at 16 doesn’t make you an adult, but a loser for life. That — whatever, however unpalatable — the best outcome for any child is living with two parents. That men who don’t provide for their children are not men at all.

It is a moral vacuum that has served David Cameron well. Sexy clobber on little girls is disgusting, he says, public drunkeness is a disgrace. Without commiting to actual policies he has chimed with a nation hungry for plain speaking and an ethical core.

And yet the Labour movement was founded on a deep-rooted morality, virtues that still endure — thrift, temperance, propriety, hard work. Their purpose was wholly practical: to bestow upon those with least social power some dominion over their own lives. The next Labour leader might do well to revisit them. We are tired, so tired, of this juddering swing between anything goes and everything’s banned.

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