IF THE headlines are anything to go by, Britain is in a state of moral collapse. Certainly there has been nothing like it since the gruesome murder of little Jamie Bulger. That tragedy, made all the more chilling by the age of the perpetrators, triggered a sustained and genuine period of national soul- searching.

There have been numerous other tragedies since. And out of the massacre at Dunblane, and the murder of headmaster Philip Lawrence, has come a new phenomenon, the political potency of the bereaved and suffering.

If there are doubts (and there are) about such appalling human loss as the stimulus for a legislative rush to right society's wrongs, they are still offered only hesitantly. For a mood of uncertainty and anger, indignation and insecurity seems to be sweeping the land.

The demand for action, whether to ban guns and combat knives, to enjoin parents in contracts with schools, to ban their unruly children for still longer periods, to require unruly parents to take parenting classes in return for state benefits, to teach morality and good citizenship in the classroom, and to positively promote `the family', appears to touch the mood of national angst.

And there will be plenty more. With a general election just six months away, politicians, as columnist Matthew Parris predicted in Monday's Times, can be expected to "surf it".

Solicitors acting for Pamela Cliffe, the mother of a 10-year-old boy at the centre of the latest discipline row, were last night mounting a legal challenge to the decision to close Manton School in Nottinghamshire.

Headmaster Bill Skelley closed the school after the collapse of one-to-one tuition arrangements for Matthew Wilson. This had previously averted the threat of industrial action by staff refusing to teach Matthew.

At the same time yesterday, a crisis inspection got under way at The Ridings school in Halifax, where teachers are threatening to strike unless some 60 pupils, one in 10 on the rolls, are expelled.

In the House of Commons the Prime Minister, Mr Major, called for a sense of perspective, reminding MPs that the overwhelming majority of Britain's schools are well ordered, their pupils disciplined and well behaved.

Yet in the past 10 days many feel there has been little evidence of politicians, Labour or Conservative, offering or following their own perspective.

Mr Major was speaking yesterday just hours after administering a very public slapping-down to the Education Secretary, Ms Gillian Shephard. speaking on BBC radio, Ms Shepherd appeared to suggest schools might bring back the cane.

Barely had the Tory rank-and-file time to celebrate than Mr Major hauled her from a school visit in Surrey to inform her that "settled government policy" was against such a move.

To add to Ms Shephard's discomfort, she had to make a Commons appearance as the debate on last week's Queen's Speech moved to education. The opposition was in gleeful mood, although some cynics wondered if Labour's hardline shadow home secretary, Mr Jack Straw, hadn't suggested it first.

Armed with moral outrage, Mr Straw has been exercising the Home Secretary, Mr Michael Howard, raising a public petition supporting the call by the widowed Ms Frances Lawrence for a ban on the sale of combat knives, taunting Mr Howard to follow-up last week's "U-turn" on government-sponsored legislation to deal with stalkers and establish a national register of sex offenders.

Mr Howard has accused Labour of indulging in "absurd, trivialising, gesture politics". At the same time, against mounting public pressure, he has signalled a readiness to act if he can find a satisfactory "definition" to differentiate between kitchen and other working knives and Rambostyle blades.

As on paedophiles, so on knives, Labour is offering parliamentary assistance to speed through legislation. But that won't stop the opposition proclaiming any further U-turn or pressing for a "free vote" on gun law, hoping that Tory splits could result in a damaging government defeat.

Some MPs proclaim the virtues of genuine cross-party co-operation on matters of grave concern to the public. But for the party managers, parliamentary tactics, manoeuvre and advantage remain the name of the game.

FOR many in Britain it is a worrying game. At a time of increasing convergence on Tory economic ground, the anxiety is that moral theory alone offers no escape to those, in sink schools and housing estates, already aliened from mainstream society.

The fear is that the increasingly outraged "moral majority" will eventually turn on those meant to be enabled by the new civic society. There is a sense of shutting stable doors after horses have bolted.

As if to illustrate the point, some of yesterday's newspapers carried photographs of 13-year-old Sarah Taylor nursing her baby Chloe. Sarah doesn't regret having her baby and enjoys the support of a loving family.

But not all are in the same boat. Lessons in morality and responsibility will come too late for another generation already embarked on the same vicious treadmill, lacking education, lacking jobs and lacking hope.

There are also worries about implicit attempts to rewrite the role of women, about minority rights, about the varying moral priorities in a country which has more Muslims than Methodists, about implicit judgements on those who don't choose marriage or escape failed ones, and about the practicalities of shaping a precise moral code for children, an estimated six out of 10 of whom come from "single" parent households.

And, as events in the past week have shown, playing the morality card carries dangers, too, for the politicians. There was some satisfaction last week when the Catholic bishops of England and Wales appeared to endorse "New Labour" with an enunciation of traditional Catholic social teaching supporting, among other things, the minimum wage.

One week on, and Mr Blair finds himself embroiled in a dispute with Cardinal Thomas Winning over his attitude to, and voting record on, abortion.

Former minister David Mellor this week joined calls for the government to totally ban the ownership of combat knives, lamenting the importation of an American culture of violence. The limits of the wider moral debate may finally be set by a British instinct that a US-style political agenda is another import they would wish to resist.