In The poor and the dispossessed Simon Mollan on Inner West writes about an horrific scenario in which an underclass in Britain is trapped in a downward spiral of "violence, poverty, food insecurity, substance abuse, anger..." and so on and wonders whether there are any possible solutions.

I have to say I wrote an essay not too dissimilar to that at school. My teacher gave me nineteen out of twenty but wrote in his comments that it was "worse than Hitler". It took me many years to work out what he meant. And I only became aware really a couple of years ago. He was condemning me for an assumption that these people were irredeemable, that they were born into it and had no chance of escape. Castigating me for a lack of hope.

But I do believe there is a possible solution. I can't claim credit for it - I heard it expounded on This Week a couple of years back maybe now, by Tom Conti, the actor. The symptoms were just as Simon so eloquently and I for one think accurately described. Dependency, fecklessness, down to the next generation, leaving them unteachable with no hope, little future prospects and a complete inability to take responsibility for ones-self.

What Conti suggested, if memory serves, is that there is now a generation that belongs nowhere. Home is hostile. And without that basic need addressed they cannot grow. He suggests massive extra expenditure on education (300/400% massive), such that at the very youngest, class sizes are very small indeed - half a dozen at most at age five and actually rising slowly as you go through school. The idea is that the teacher becomes the surrogate family, that school becomes a place of refuge. That the very basics of life can be taught in a family type environment at the very start of education.

He believes that over the course of a generation this could cut most other social safety net type costs in half or more as people grow up taking more responsibility for themselves, respecting themselves, simply "able to cope" often. Aside from the obvious savings in reducing costs of crime and disorder such as Simon witnessed on the train, he was talking about basics like people knowing how to tell the difference between a common cold and something more serious and stop using up valuable medical professionals' time on trivialities, and longer term know about how to look after ones-self better - all those self esteem issues that so often drive bad health and consequent spiral of employment problems and dependency.

As I write it down though, I begin to doubt it somehow. In one sense clearly, it can be seen as the uber-nanny of all states. But can it be dressed up in those liberal clothes such as leveling the playing field and preventing or removing "enslavement by poverty, ignorance or conformity"? I think it can. Can it be afforded? I don't see how it can't, the price for not doing so is horrible.