When driving around West Drayton, be careful when passing under bridges. So I found out yesterday when, ensconced in our people mover like American soldiers scurrying intrepidly through Iraq, we heard an odd 'clunk'. On closer inspection, a gang of kids had thrown a brick from a bridge and had hit the roof of the car.

Obviously this could have been far more serious and I probably should consider myself fairly lucky to be here writing this. If it had gone through the windscreen, the consequences could very easily have been fatal, and what possesses anyone of any age to pass their time idly tossing bricks onto cars - probably aiming for the windscreens, let's face it - is beyond me.

The initial reaction was, of course, to call the police, but the point was made that they probably only had a finite supply of bricks, and by the time the police got round to doing anything about it, one of two things would have happened: either a) they would have got bored and stopped, or b) someone would stop their car, get out, and chase the little sweethearts for around six miles before being arrested by the police for child abuse.

There are a number of key elements of British society at fault here. Firstly, these children are not getting the education, certainly not morally, that they require. This is not primarily the fault of the education system, because despite successive attempts to broaden the sphere of learning with schemes such as sex education at five, drugs education and 'personal and social education', the main job of a school is still to teach your kids to read and write. And they have enough trouble doing that. The fault lies more with parents who maintain little or no control over their children, fail to instil in them the basic rights and wrongs in life, and neglect them to such an extent that they are reduced to the pleasures of dicing with the lives of others on a busy A road.

The government does go some way towards recognising and addressing this problem by providing courses for parents and the support of social services, but you cannot expect the state to mop up the damage wraught by hopeless parenting. Then again it is quite hard to blame the parents themselves in many instances, as more often than not they experienced abuse, poverty and deprivation as children, and never had the chance to understand how to bring up kids of their own. It is an ongoing cycle from which I suspect it is extremely difficult to break out. Ryan Bell, plucked from inner city London by Channel 4 to go and study at the exclusive Downside school, survived quite a while and became a good student but still did not stay the course. It would be interesting to see what sort of parent he made, given that he must have seen all ends of the spectrum.

It is harder still to envisage any method of effectively dealing with this moral decay, which seems to me so deeply engrained in our society that we can only be fighting a losing battle. It may seem like an odd contrast with Ryan Bell, but the decision of the All England Club not to insist that players bow to the Royal Box before matches at Wimbledon was symptomatic of this - society no longer demands sufficient respect from its members. Bowing to the Royal Box was hardly the most degrading, time-consuming or archaic of gestures, and to many was part of the tradition of the competition, but someone, somewhere, decreed that it was a show of unnecessary respect. One hundred years ago, monarchs really were treated as monarchs. Now we grudgingly concede that they were lucky enough to be born into the Windsor family, and then we whip out our zoom lenses and try to get photos of their offspring taking drugs.

That argument opens up whole new possibilities for who to blame for the lack of respect going on in our society. Political correctness has a lot to answer for - people are now too afraid of the consequences to stand up to just about anything. Last week, a childminder with an immaculate 13-year record was graded as merely 'satisfactory' by a government inspector because they failed to provide dolls from ethnic minorities or with disabilities, and failed to cook special meals to celebrate events like the Chinese New Year. One wonders if Chinese childminders do cod, chips and mushy peas for the English New Year. Daniel Pipes, in America, suggested that Islamic mosques needed closer scrutiny than that afforded to churches and synagogues in order to effectively monitor terrorist activity - there was a politically correct outcry against his 'bigoted' comments, but the man was only telling the truth. The Finsbury Park mosque in London has become notorious as a front for the recruitment of potential terrorists, and Islamic militants do pose far more threat than anyone else. Pipes was just acknowledging a reality, something the politically correct ignore in favour of trying to handle the entire population with kid-gloves.

Secondly, the media must be held to account for their despicable portrayal of news in the 21st century. Hypocrisy, deceit, betrayal and blackmail are just a few of the techniques widely used on Fleet Street. Take, for example, the case of disgraced TV presenter John Leslie, who was recently cleared of any wrongdoing. The newspapers had spent the previous half a year or so calling him all manner of names from 'love rat' to much, much worse, and had pronounced him guilty the moment Steve Wright inadvertently spilled the worst-kept secret of all time one morning on Channel Five. As soon as Leslie was found innocent, the entire British press cosied up to him and paraded him as the 'heroic' presenter whose career had been destroyed by lies - lies which they neglected to mention they themselves had spun. The British media show no respect for anyone, and it seems it is from them that society takes its lead. Hey, Murdoch, leave those kids alone.