A father lies seriously injured in hospital after chasing a gang of youths who threw a stone at his car and getting beaten up by them; his local police chief describes how the streets of suburban Manchester are in the grip of “feral” youths with “no parental control or respect for anybody”. A funeral car full of mourners has missiles hurled at it in what Cheshire police call “the ultimate disrespect for human dignity”. The semi-final of a boys’ football tournament has to be abandoned when parents brawl on the touchline, severely cutting and bruising the club manager.

All of these incidents happened last week, along with the story of Becky Smith, a 16-year-old Manchester schoolgirl who was attacked and beaten up by a gang of teenagers as she walked home from a friend’s house at 7.15pm. The gang punched and stamped on her, leaving her unconscious: one of them videoed the attack on a mobile phone and sent the film to her brother.

It all adds up to a picture of a society under siege from yobbish behaviour. No wonder respect has become the keynote of new Labour’s third term, with many of the bills in last week’s Queen’s speech attempting to address the problem of how to “foster a culture of respect” and encourage us to treat one another with decency. Punitive measures such as forcing offenders to wear orange uniforms were suggested by Hazel Blears, the Home Office police minister, and Ruth Kelly, the education secretary, wants persistently disruptive pupils to be sent away to state boarding schools.

Yet Professor Richard Sennett of the London School of Economics, a leading left-wing thinker and sociologist whose book, Respect — the Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality, has become the must-read publication for ministers and politicians, believes this is a problem that cannot be easily legislated against by government.

“Blair has latched onto this problem because he’s lost the respect of the British public,” he says. “You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to see why his response is to claim that society has a problem with authority.

“What we should be looking at is not the easy emotional appeal that we’re going to hell in a handbasket, but understanding that our social glue of manners is coming undone, and looking at ways in schools and the workplace to give people back a sense of self-respect. The government has got itself into a box by making it all one-sided, by being long on incentivising, measuring and punishing and short on rewarding loyalty and service. You can’t glue things back together through punitive measures.”

Sennett believes Blair’s love of the “new meritocracy”, in which emphasis is put on discovering exceptional talent in schools and ordinary kids are branded as “losers”, certainly strikes a chord with those preoccupied with the breakdown of social intercourse. As he points out, “being respected by others is the most fundamental social need; it is one of the things that make people feel recognised. What Blair should be looking at is the way morale improves when you treat people positively rather than punitively”.

Sennett’s concerns echo those of Amitai Etzioni, the German-born thinker whose “communitarian” philosophy was so influential in America under Bill Clinton’s reign. Etzioni proposed a system of matching rights to responsibilities. Too many people shirked community responsibilities, he said. He also believed it was vital to reassert the importance of the family, without reverting to a 1950s mentality.

But how do we do that? The concern over yob culture is such that it has seeped into the media in every possible way. Television series, ranging from Little Angels and Bad Behaviour to a new series starting on ITV next month, Ladette to Lady, all focus on young people brought up without an inkling of how to inspire mutual respect — or self-respect.

It is an issue that goes far beyond mere manners, but the authors of two forthcoming books on the subject take it far beyond social etiquette. Lynne Truss, bestselling author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and the writer Simon Fanshawe attempt to fathom why we have come unstuck and how we formulate the rule to govern a modern, civil society.

Truss, raging at the way rudeness is “dressed up as consumer freedom”, has called her book Talk to the Hand. She says: “I do remember that there used to be a human emotion called shame, which kicked in when people were justifiably told off. This contrasted with the righteous indignation experienced when the telling off was not justified and it entailed quite a sophisticated mental act of self-division motivated by basic honesty.”

Fanshawe, in The Done Thing, describes manners as “at their most basic, reducing potential violence between strangers”.

It’s not just a chav problem. Prepare to be appalled by Ladette to Lady, a TV series that takes 10 young women who are foul-mouthed, drunken, sluttish, promiscuous and so domestically incompetent that none of them can boil an egg — and puts them through finishing school. The Eliza Doolittles learn to walk, dress, cook, sew and, most importantly, discover a way of relating to people that does not involve downing seven Bacardi Breezers and flashing their breasts.