Is there not a link between the abuse Fiona Pilkington and her family suffered for more than a decade and Carol Hill, the dinner lady who spoke out to the parents of a girl being bullied at school? 

I have found it impossible to read fully the reports of the decade long thuggery against Fiona Pilkington and her family.  We have had examples like this in Birkenhead, although similar cases in which I was involved took place a few years ago now.  I am not saying that there are no such examples in Birkenhead, but the pattern of gang warfare that Fiona suffered for a decade has subtly changed in Birkenhead.

I now get many, many more complaints about the behaviour of adults rather than young people.  And I cannot help wondering whether it is some of those young thugs of yester year who have now graduated into being parents themselves. 

If this is true then it is doubly dispiriting - dispiriting because of how these individuals wreck other people's lives. But dispiriting also because it denotes a change in what is up until now been a traditional pattern of ‘criminal' behaviour.

That pattern was for some working class lads to get themselves on the wrong side of the law. But this pattern of criminal behaviour for most would cease once they were into their twenties.  Setting up home and beginning a family seemed to transform the lives of most of these lads. 

That prospect now seems closed to many of them.  Too many of them leave school without being able to read or write, are paid benefits indefinitely and never have a job.  

Any partnerships they form are usually short-lived and the chaotic life style of the gang is reproduced in the home they form with their partners.  Many of these partnerships appear transient.  

Dealing with the yobbish behaviour of these families clearly calls for different skills than those needed to deal with the yobs that drove Fiona to commit suicide.  Part of any strategy, but only part, is to break in to the supply chain of yobbish behaviour. 

That is what Carol Hill tried to do in informing the parents of a little girl who she discovered tied up and being whipped by a group of boys at the school where she is a dinner lady.  Mrs Hill has been sacked for unprofessional conduct.  

The Sunday papers hint there may be more of this story to come out.  But it is difficult to see what could come out that could overthrow the urgent need now to consider a network of laws and rules which make the exercise of a generous public spirit a sackable offence.  

The big failure with Labour's anti social behaviour strategy has been that it is exclusively mechanical, and worse still, the machinery is largely run by middle class professionals who do not live in the areas most blighted by anti social behaviour. 

The details being given at the inquest into the death of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Francesca should silence any politician who claims that this strategy against anti social behaviour is working.  But no serious rethink can begin without looking at the sacking of Carol Hill.

The aim must be to move back to a self-policing society where neighbours, friends, dinner ladies, voluntary workers, are all singing from the same hymn sheet. Part of this singing is to speak  out, and, where possible, act against this tide of yobbism which has already begun to destroy what was once a relatively peaceful self-governing society.

One almost sympathises with the Prime Minister. No sooner had he started to promise cuts and cuts and cuts again than the difficulties the Government is going to experience - unless they face the issue head on - became glaringly obvious.

The Government is naturally enough committed to cutting waste and the Prime Minster promised to cut unnecessary programmes.

I can't believe I'm different from the average voter. If there are unnecessary programmes what the hell are we doing providing them?

The same is true when his faithful colleague Ed Balls wades into the debate. If there is £2 billion to be saved from cutting waste, again, why hasn't that already been implemented? It shows a pretty scant disregard for tax payers' money, many of whom in my constituency earn less than one ninth of his salary and still manage to raise two children.

If the Government is not going to drown in the stream of new rhetoric flowing over our political debate it better cut to the chase quickly.

The Government badly needs to say what our essential goals as a party are and be prepared to disengage from other objectives. Otherwise we will get pulled down into a debate that demands cuts across the board.

In this way, the cuts agenda allows a radical Government to set new objectives, while disengaging from some of its current activities.

The debate urgently needs to focus on the outcomes of taking money from taxpayers to achieve public good. Broughton Hall in Merseyside is a model of how the new politics must operate.

The school has benefited from Building Schools for the Future, but it has also revolutionised its results. If we take out the handful of young women who ceased to attend the school, every pupil barring one achieved 5 GCSEs - with over 60% of them including English and maths. Now look at the schools in your area, what were their results like?

Broughton Hall is the objective for reforming the public sector. Budgets should be frozen now and those public sector workers with the ability should be encouraged to gain greater and greater outputs with what will in fact be falling real budgets.

Broughton Hall has shown the way. The Government desperately needs to get on to this attack rather than literally offering to take an axe to waste. That is the plea I made in the House of Commons.

The next few weeks are crucial in deciding how Labour holds on to its rump vote. It will not do so by obfuscating. It needs to show just how radical a cuts programme can be.

It is a distraction whether or not the prime minister utters the c-word today - or any other day come to that. The plain fact is there will be mega cuts. Two crucial questions are how big they will have to be to restore some sanity to the national accounts and when should they start?

A weekend poll shows the strong preference of voters for public expenditure cuts rather than tax increases. What I don't know, but will be crucial politically, is whether these are views based on today's phoney war over cuts or whether they are based on a more accurate appreciation of just how serious the position is.

This economic phoney war atmosphere has been made up from two contradictory forces. Voters have been bombarded with tales of extreme economic woe ever since Northern Rock bit the dust.

One of the prophecies was a recession as bad as that following the 1931 crash. In terms of national income falls that prophecy has already been borne out.

But we are now much richer so that cuts in national income fall on a much fatter body. Likewise, the government has been reflating, borrowing on a scale unknown before and printing shedloads of money. So many of us are still being protected.

At some time these policies will have to go into reverse and then there will be major economic hardship that could change the public's view on cuts. The question is, when will the cuts strategy be implemented? This debate has so far been won by those who argue that it is wrong to cut in times of recession. To do so would risk any recovery, they say. This is important, but only one dimension of what should be a two-dimensional debate. Not cutting now might also harm the recovery.

Each week the government unloads another shedload of debt on to the gilts market. There will be at least 38 more auctions between now and the expected date of the next election. Up until now the main buyer of this debt has been the Bank of England, which has been printing money to make these purchases. It has an Alice in Wonderland quality about it, doesn't it?

But the Bank has now declared a cessation to printing yet more money. Very shortly, therefore, the market will be tested on who is out there that wants to buy British government debt. All of the countries in the G8 group are also in the market selling debt and we will be trying to borrow a higher proportion of our GDP than any other G8 country.

Selling this debt will be far from easy. Long-term interest rates will inevitably rise, which will make borrowing capital more expensive and so harm any potential recovery.

One way of moderating the rise in long-term interest rates would be to convince the market that the government is serious about balancing the national accounts sooner rather than later and has published a plan to achieve that goal. Moreover, lower interest rates will mean that a smaller proportion of future national income will be impounded to both debt charges and repayment costs.

Britain is therefore in a lose-lose situation. To cut too early might harm a sustained recovery should that be forthcoming. Not to begin cutting soon will push up interest rates, which will not only harm any recovery but see a larger proportion of the country's future living standards confiscated to pay the money lenders.

For reasons that are obvious to readers of this blog, I favour an early cut strategy. For the gilt market to strike and not to buy future debt will have catastrophic economic and political consequences here. This is the real danger that has still to be registered in a tired and still very timid debate over public expenditure cuts.

It is predictable but deeply depressing. Up goes the cry that any review of NHS expenditure MUST result in cuts to consumers.

The debate on public expenditure cuts need to be focussed on output and not input. Over the first ten years of this Government's life productivity FELL in the public sector while increasing by 26 per cent in privately run organisations.

It is on this mega discrepancy that the debate should be exclusively concentrated. Going for a debate on cutting or non-cutting is simply a cop-out. It continues the error of public sector reform debate for as long as I can remember.

The NHS budget stands at £94.5bn - a tripling since 1997. If the NHS had delivered the same productivity as was registered for the private sector over the same period, they very same NHS output could have been gained on a total bill REDUCED by £26bn. The political kaleidoscope needs a radical shake up.

A first move would be to insist that the poorest performing hospitals equal the productivity of simply the current average. That move alone would save £2.4bn with no increase in resources.

A second move would be to insist that all hospitals perform as do the best units.

A third move would be to move the whole of the NHS in productivity terms to equal simply the average of the private sector.

A final move would be to ensure that the NHS leads the productivity league table of both public and private sector.

How do we make the most important changes in our health services since the NHS was established in 1948? It is by concentrating exclusively on NHS output rather than inputs.

Those who love the NHS have a duty to insist that this is the only debate in town. It will be a far from easy one to win but success will transform British politics.

The UK's population has now hit 61m and is growing twice as fast as in the 1990s and three times as fast as in the 1980s. On present forecasts the UK will hit 77m in 50 years' time and will outnumber France and even Germany.

Will it ever happen? Long term population forecasts are notoriously unreliable but, at the 20-year range, the Office for National Statistics has been accurate to within 2.5% in the past half-century. Its present forecast is 70m in 2028 and must, therefore, be taken seriously.

It is important to disentangle the two major influences: birth rates and immigration.

The birth rate in England and Wales is now 1.96 children per woman, close to the replacement rate of 2.1. This is partly due to immigration since women born outside the UK have 2.51 children on average compared to 1.84 for UK-born women.

Last year, for the first time in many years, natural change (births minus deaths) exceeded net immigration. But the full effect of immigration over, say, a 20-year period must take account of the children of those immigrants. A more sophisticated calculation of this kind shows that immigration accounts for nearly 70% of population growth.

It follows that immigration policy is critical to the future size of our population and is, of course, the only aspect of population growth that the government can directly influence.

Everyone agrees that we need some international migration to provide skills unavailable in Britain, at least until British workers have been trained. But what really matters for the population is how many people stay on and settle. The government's recent proposal to split economic migration from settlement is a major step forward.

But much more needs to be done. Net immigration must be brought below 50,000 a year if the population of the UK is to be held at less than 70m. If we want to stabilise our population at 65m we must get immigration into balance with emigration. That is the target of our Cross Party Group on Balanced Migration.

There is still a long way to go. Yesterday's figure of 118,000 net inflow was the raw data from the International Passenger Survey. The ONS will make adjustments to this for asylum seekers and those who change their intentions. These normally add 35,000 to the total so even in a deep recession we have net immigration of about 150,000.

There is no silver bullet to achieve the reduction we need. The first step is for both main political parties to commit themselves to restraining our population by limiting immigration and then building the necessary measures around it. This was the recommendation of the Select Committee on Economic Affairs of the House of Lords who reported in April 2008. We think that is the right approach and strongly commend it.

This blog first appeared on the Guardian's Comment is Free site.