Tony Blair has backed a ban on wearing hooded sweatshirt tops and baseball caps in public.

Britain's largest shopping centre, Bluewater, has banned shoppers from wearing the look, in an attempt to reduce rowdy behaviour by youths hiding their identity. Gangs of more than five people who do not intend to shop have also been barred.

Police have attended Bluewater 23 times in the last eight months to deal with nuisance behaviour.

John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, described this morning how he was confronted at a motorway service station last year by a gang of about a dozen hooded youths with a video camera, apparently intent on filming an attack on him.

He also said that he was in favour of Bluewater's ban. "What struck me about it is not only did they come with this kind of uniform, as it is, but they came with a kind of movie camera to take a film of any such incident. I found that very alarming.

"I think the fact you go around these hats and these covers... I mean, it is a uniform in a sense. It is intimidating, and I rather welcome what they have done there at Bluewater."

Questioned at his first Downing Street press conference since the election, Mr Blair said that he thought that the ban was "fine" and that he agreed with it.

"I have total sympathy with that and I totally agree with that, he said.

People had to know that they could not get away with rudeness and rowdiness in public, and the Government would bring in new laws to enforce proper behaviour, he said.

"There are deep-seated causes of this that are to do, I think, with family life in the way that parents regard their responsibilities to their children," the Prime Minister said.

"In the way that some kids grow up generation to generation without proper parenting, without a proper sense of discipline within the family.

"I can't solve all these problems. I can start a debate on this and I can legislate, but what I can't do is raise someone's children for them."

Mr Prescott, famed for punching a protester who hit him with an egg during the 2001 election, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he agreed with the Bluewater ban because he had personal experience of a "hoody" gang, who apparently wanted to carry out a "happy slapping" attack on him - filming themselves assaulting him.

He said that a youth had make a cheeky comment to him at the service station. When he challenged the boy to repeat it, he returned with ten friends dressed in "hoody" tops and carrying a video camera. His Special Branch minders scared the group off before anything could happen, he said.

Mr Blair told reporters that there needed to be more respect in society. "During the election campaign I heard too often people talk about a loss of respect in the classroom, on the street corner, in the way our hard-working public servants are treated as they perform their tasks," he said.

"People like a society that is less deferential. They want a society free from old prejudices. But a loss of deference is very different from a loss of respect for other people. Society without prejudice should not be one without rules.

"People are rightly fed-up with street corner and shopping centre thugs, yobbish behaviour sometimes from children as young as 10 or 11 whose parents should be looking after them, Friday and Saturday night binge-drinking which makes our town centres no-go areas for respectable citizens, of the low-level graffiti, vandalism and disorder that is the work of a very small minority that makes the law-abiding majority afraid and angry."

The Prime Minister also promised to overturn moves in the European Parliament to restrict British workers to a 48 hours working week. He said he believed that the Government would be able arrange a blocking vote in the Council of Ministers, to preserve Britain’s opt-out from the working time directive.

"I think the vote is wrong. It is completely misguided," he said. "I have no intention whatever of abolishing our opt-out."

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