It is easy to react to the appalling robbery of Helmsley Post Office, as Ken Harrison does, with a call for the re-introduction of corporal and capital punishment, but, when detection rates are so low, would that make any real difference? Kenya, for example, has the death penalty for some kinds of robbery, but their crime rate is many times worse than ours, because the poverty there is appalling and the chances of getting caught are very small.

I have always thought of the law as being like the inner keep of a walled city or castle called “Civilisation”. The Roman word for civilisation is “mores”, which can be translated as “customs”. For me, a civilised society is one where everyone accepts certain common values which govern our relationships with each other and the state. These are the outer walls of our civilisation, and the law should do no more than reinforce these values. When moral values collapse, we can only fall back on the inner castle walls of the keep, namely law enforcement, but law enforcement without generally accepted values and standards of behaviour cannot save society from crime - however severe the penalties. There will simply never be enough policemen to do the job.

In the not so distant past, this country had a common set of moral values, which, generally speaking, came from two main sources: the Christian church and Classical literature. Both of these are based on centuries of experience, and teach a caring and responsible attitude and approach to society in general and other individuals in particular, and rank wealth and money as something which is less important than this.

Unfortunately, the Christian Church is in decline; children who go to church are laughed at at school, and Classical literature is so out of fashion that it is hardly taught at all these days. So, the old values have been swept aside and money and wealth are now our dominant preoccupations.

So, for example, all moral restraint is thrown away in the entertainment industry. Television and film producers compete to make the most money by selling the most sensational and spectacular productions, and outdo each other in sexual explicitness, the exhibition of violence, bad behaviour and the use of bad language. The influence of these on young people is of no importance, when considered against the money that can be made.

Similarly, in the public services, the priority is saving money and “value for money”. So we find a police force which economises by using a central call system, which rarely gets a policeman to the scene of a crime in good time. So too, Malton Hospital is once again under threat: it would seem to be more important to some of the Trust’s managers to save money by centralising maternity services at a distant hospital in Scarborough, than to save lives by providing a good service at a local hospital.

Then consider how supermarkets seek to increase their profits by exploiting their dominant position on the market to extract ridiculous prices from farmers or by buying food in bulk more cheaply from abroad: the impact on British farming and country communities is simply not their business.

In these circumstances, is it so surprising that so many people take the view that there is one law for the rich and another law for the poor, and unleash their energies in anti-social behaviour? If, for example, superstores can bring the law to its knees and force the government to make Sunday Trading legal, as happened only a few years ago, why shouldn’t everyone else break the law, if it suits their own financial interest? If the market and profits outrank every other moral consideration, and there is a market demand for narcotic drugs or guns, why shouldn’t that demand be satisfied?

These are all very sinister and frightening developments, and I wish I knew the answer. We should all be concerned and alarmed, but it is a mistake to expect the reintroduction of corporal or capital punishment to restore order to our troubled and crime-ridden country. Somehow moral responsibility has to be restored and less importance given to money and markets.