And the evidence is that the parents are indeed likely to have played a significant part in the anti-social behaviour of their offspring.

So should the state intervene in the upbringing of the nation's children, offering intensive support and advice to all parents? Should it play the role of surrogate nanny?

At the moment, parents who cannot control their kids may end up being ordered to take classes in good parenting by the courts. But the links with the criminal justice system mean that parenting classes have a stigma attached to them.

Parent classes 'not nanny state'

Attendance is often poor, and those that do go represent a fraction of families who could benefit from help and advice. The support is only available after the damage has been done.

About 10 years ago, I reported on a class arranged for the parents of truants. Even though many of those due to attend had been ordered to go by a court, almost no-one turned up. I remember a huge plate of doughnuts sitting uneaten on a table.

However, one mum was there - furious that the others hadn't bothered. She explained to me that she had resented the mandatory classes at first, but how ultimately the classes had changed her life. Her children, aged about 11 and nine, told me they had been given a new mum.

So the government wants to make attending parenting classes a normal part of being a good parent - something that every new mum or dad does. All parents could benefit from some good advice, it is argued, and only by making support a mainstream part of starting a family can those who need help most be encouraged to participate.

To create that cultural change, they want to build the capacity for a thriving commercial market in parenting advice. If pilot schemes prove successful, free vouchers worth £100 will be given to all parents of children under five in England and Wales - available from Boots on the High Street. The idea is that, once evaluated providers are up and running, the state can pull back from universal vouchers and target state help on those with specific problems.

There is another side to this initiative too. From an expectant mother's first scan in an NHS hospital at about 12 weeks, future parents will get texts and emails linking to information films and advice directly relating to the development of their child at that point.

From conception to the first three months of life, I am told, there will more than 100 separate video or advice notifications for parents. This is an intensive programme based on strong evidence that helping parents form strong attachments to their children in the very early days and supporting them through the stresses and strains of family life can significantly improve the life chances of children.

Experts at the National Antisocial Behaviour Clinic based at London's Maudsley Hospital draw a direct line between poor parenting and a range of social problems including educational under-achievement, criminality and drug misuse.

But they also suggest that support works. A 10-year clinical trial into the Incredible Years parenting scheme has begun to show significantly improved outcomes for those youngsters whose parents had taken part.

Ministers are very anxious to avoid the accusation that the good parenting advice amounts to the nanny state. The prime minister has described it instead as "the sensible state".

"It's ludicrous that we should expect people to train for hours to drive a car or use a computer, but when it comes to looking after a baby we tell people to just get on with it. And to those who say that government should forget about parenting and families and focus on the big, gritty issues, I'd say these are the big, gritty issues."

Changing social norms is never quick and is never easy - ministers talk about trying to initiate a generational shift in attitudes. There are clear benefits in improving the nation's parenting skills. The question is whether the state has a role as super-nanny.

Yes, of course I know that the last thing ministers say they want is disruption and strikes that cause widespread inconvenience and make the job of deficit reduction even harder.

But if there is a surprise at the action today, it is that we haven't seen more of it. And as I shall explain, I think for some in Downing Street, that is a bit of a worry.

When the budget cuts were announced back in 2010 there was an acceptance that austerity, once it started to bite, would be greeted by widespread public anger. Government unpopularity at this point in the cycle was a given and the big question was how the British population would make their fury felt.

For a moment last summer, people wondered whether the English riots were the start of it. But it quickly became clear the looting and disorder had very little to do with cuts or welfare reform.

Then the focus shifted to the Occupy movement - was that going to be the rallying point for broad-based public anger? It would appear not.

The small-scale rallies and demos which pop up on the front page of local papers don't seem to be part of an identifiable protest movement. Today's national strikes over pensions and the police march over conditions of service seem to reflect the narrow self-interest of public workers rather than the vanguard of a more general outcry.

Q&A: Public sector strikes

At first sight this might suggest to some that the government has "got away with it". Britain feels more resigned than furious at the impact of austerity. Although the coalition took a kicking in last week's local elections, if the nation really wanted to scream their opposition to cuts and reforms, why did two-thirds of the electorate in England not even bother to vote?

And this must worry David Cameron and some of his closest advisors. Why? Because we have a prime minister whose central mission is the idea of building an active citizenry.

He wants to see armies of armchair auditors checking on public spending and creating a fuss if they don't like what they see; he wants grassroots activism to shape planning and development; he wants real power to flow from the Whitehall elites to the ordinary Joes and Josephines in parishes and wards; he wants a Big Society where citizens get involved in their local communities.

Instead, some of his advisors privately despair at a population that appears to count the cost of democracy rather than understanding its value.

My guess is that they imagined the pain of the cuts would wake people up to their democratic rights. While disagreeing with those who oppose their policies, of course, I suspect they thought this period in our politics might also represent an opportunity to rouse a populace that has come to regard itself as consumer rather than citizen.

David Cameron may pat himself on the back for so successfully making the case that deep public sector cuts are a necessity. But there may also be part of him that is disappointed the argument was so easily won.

Well, I can't speak for Afghanistan or Zimbabwe (or any of the other countries in between), but I can tell you that the topic of conversation at my bus stop this morning was not the mutualisation of Britain's civil service pension scheme.

So when Cabinet Minister Francis Maude says that government is "transforming a neglected back-office operation into a new competitive and responsible business - the rest of the world is watching", what is he on about?

Ministers always get a trifle obsessive about the mechanisms of government because one of the first things civil servants tell them is that, whatever fancy ideas they might have for reforming the country, most of the levers you pull in Whitehall are not connected to anything.

Tony Blair famously revealed how, after two years in government, he bore "the scars on my back" from trying to introduce public sector reform. Finding novel and effective ways to improve the delivery of public services lies at the heart of ministerial thinking in the current coalition government, just as it was with New Labour.

The argument is usually cast like this: centralised state monopolies are bureaucratic and inefficient (think grim Soviet-style central planning); privatised public services put profit before people (think corporate fat-cats feeding off the poor old taxpayer).

What is needed, the theory goes, is a new model that retains the ethos of public good but with the quality and efficiency associated with successful competitive markets. Enter John Spedan Lewis.

JS Lewis's book Partnership for All: A Thirty-four Year Old Experiment in Industrial Democracy may currently reside at 3,513,740 in the Amazon bestseller list, but the ideas within it are white-hot in Whitehall.

He founded the John Lewis Partnership, arguably Britain's favourite department store, a business owned by its employees. Profits are spread among the workforce as an annual dividend, agreed by a board of trustees.

The model, known as a mutual, is credited with high levels of staff loyalty, enthusiasm and innovation. Employees are said to put the partnership before profit: in 1999 it was suggested the business might be demutualised and floated on the stock market, with a guaranteed a windfall of up to £100,000 for each staff member. The proposal was swiftly and resoundingly dismissed.

It is easy to see why ministers might be drawn to the John Lewis model: the motivation of the business is not short-term profit but the long-term benefit of those who work for it. If only it could be adapted for the public sector, mixing business efficiency and growth with a philosophy of public good.

Today, ministers unveiled what they say is the answer to that - MyCSP Ltd. The civil service pension scheme has a new funky name and a new structure.

"We no longer face a binary choice between public services delivered by state monopoly and straight privatisation," Francis Maude said today.

But is this new model really as radical as ministers like to claim? Or is it more of a committee camel - a hybrid of ideas stuffed into a creature christened "compromise".

Unlike John Lewis, MyCSP Ltd is only 25% owned by its employees. Full 40% is controlled by a private business services company and the remaining 35% stake is retained by the government.

This is where you end up when you try to use the profit motive to do the quality and efficiency thing without the self-interest or greed thing.

The taxpayer keeps a stake just in case the business really starts to make money and voters start to resent someone else profiting from their asset. The private sector needs a sizeable chunk to encourage share-holders and investors. The employees get a portion - but appear to be the junior partners in this partnership.

Will it be enough to generate the kind of loyalty and service one sees at John Lewis? It is an interesting question but one, I suspect, that is not yet on the lips of people in Kabul, Harare or at my bus stop.

Ministers are realising that there is simply nothing simple about simplification.

The welfare state is a beast of bureaucracy - but its complexity is a product of attempting to achieve something massively complex. No two claimants are exactly alike and, over time, creative policy-makers have come up with all manner of ways of using the system to target cash to need.

One way to offer extra help to people on low incomes, for example, has been to attach additional support to recipients of benefits like income support, Jobseekers Allowance and tax credits.

All kinds of measures have been passported to those who really need them on the basis of income-based benefits:

But when the individual benefits which trigger those payments start to disappear next year, absorbed into the new Universal Credit, there remains a large and emphatic question mark. How can you target support to the needy?

The coalition government's answer back in summer 2010 was what it described as "a simpler and fairer system that bases entitlement on an income or earnings threshold". But it quickly transpired that manufacturing simplicity and fairness was easier said than done.

The following year ministers asked the collective brains of the Social Security Advisory Committee to look at the problem. They thought about the conundrum long and hard and sent their report to ministers last month.

The committee put forward what it called "a number of broad suggestions", but it was clear there was no cheap and simple solution that could be in place in time for the introduction of Universal Credit.

The government was forced to accept that "given the legislative and administrative change that would be required, radical reform of passported benefits may not be achievable for the initial stages of Universal Credit and that the first challenge will be for departments and organisations to review their entitlement criteria for 2013".

It is small wonder that lobby groups are trying to get a debate going. The Children's Society's warning that 350,000 of England's poorest children might lose their entitlement to free school meals are regarded as scaremongering by ministers, but the charity wants to use the moment to press for more families to get help.

The Department for Education is about to announce the terms of a consultation on what to do. But some campaigners fear their favoured option, giving free school meals to all families on Universal Credit, will not be even up for discussion.

Sarah Teather, the Children and Families Minister, has told me as much. "We are not going to be able to afford to do everything the Children's Society wants us to do because it is very expensive. But what I am very determined about is that those who are most in need will continue to receive free school meals."

The basic problem that ministers need to solve is the so-called cliff-edge: at the point a benefit is withdrawn, work doesn't make financial sense unless earnings are greater than the value of the lost welfare.

Under the current system, a system of tapered tax credits can lessen the impact. But a simple "earnings threshold" means that a family with three children on free school meals would need to earn at least £30 a week more simply to stay where they are.

Indeed, the new taper built into Universal Credit designed to ensure work always pays more than welfare actually makes the impact of losing free school meals even greater. Because welfare is reduced as incomes rise, parents will need to earn even more to cover the cost of losing a passported benefit.

The Children's Society calculates that a single mum with three children earning £7,500 a year would need to double their salary to break even.

No-one seriously argues the welfare system doesn't need urgent modernisation and simplification. But achieving such reform is not simple at all.

Quite why crime rose inexorably from World War II until 1995 and then started falling is a question that still puzzles criminologists.

Because crime didn't just fall in the UK. It fell in almost every developed Western nation from pretty much the same time.

It fell in Canada and in the United States - even though those two countries operate very different criminal justice policies. It fell in Scandinavia and fell along the shores of the Mediterranean. It fell in Australia and fell in Iceland.

It would be ridiculous to suggest the police have no impact, but how much does the activity of the local constabulary influence crime rates?

Evidence that police have more than a marginal impact on offending is hard to come by. It would appear that bigger forces are at play: economic, demographic, social, cultural and technological.

The reason volume car crime fell so dramatically from the mid-90s is probably much more to do with improved vehicle security than the reintroduction of bobbies on the beat.

Falling domestic burglary rates may also have been affected by the installation of locks and alarms but, equally, may have dropped along with the value of a second-hand TV or DVD player.

Home Office research in the mid-80s concluded: "A patrolling police officer could expect to pass within 100 yards of a burglary taking place roughly once every eight years. Even then they may not even realise that the crime is taking place."

The latest thinking is that so-called intelligent policing can help to bring down the numbers of certain offences. Targeting crime hot-spots or known offenders does seem to get results without necessarily moving the criminality elsewhere.

But the claim that neighbourhood policing is a significant factor in preventing crime remains unproven. The bobby (or PCSO) on the beat may provide a comforting uniformed presence that makes the law-abiding feel safer. They may bolster community confidence which may, in turn, encourage people to obey the law.

There is, however, little hard evidence that the renaissance of the neighbourhood bobby explains the dramatic falls in total crime we have seen since the mid-90s.

But those behind today's launch of Big Society Capital have ambition far beyond restoring the reputations of the rich and powerful.

It is seen as the catalyst for a dramatic expansion of a new vehicle for delivering public services.

We are used to a simple choice in the provision of services: they are either funded by taxpayers or by shareholders - public or private sector. But there is a third type of provider - the not-for-profit social enterprise.

They exist already, of course, but users may not even realise they are there.

Passengers travelling on the red London buses on route 388 won't spot any obvious difference between their double-decker and the 254 at the same stop.

As you might expect, profits from the 254 go to shareholders at the parent company, Arriva plc. But profits from the 388 all go to subsidising mini-buses for the disabled and elderly in north and east London.

Buses on route 388 are owned and run by a social enterprise called HCT Group. Their mission is not making profit but doing good.

It is a successful model that the company has already spread to 11 depots across England with a fleet of over 370 vehicles and a turnover approaching £30m.

They would like to reproduce it even more widely but a double-decker can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The problem for all social enterprises who are looking to start-up or expand is getting a loan.

Traditional banks find it hard to get their heads round businesses that are motivated by "community value" rather than company profits and, without access to capital, social entrepreneurs often find it impossible to grow their brilliant idea.

Enter the Big Society bankers.

The idea is that a social enterprise seeking new capital would apply to Big Society Capital for help in getting a loan at affordable rates. The bank would then approach investors who might be interested in getting a financial return mixed with a social return.

The fiscal rewards would be slightly less than they might get in the conventional market, but the theory is that investors would be prepared to swallow a slightly lower level of profit knowing they were making the world a better place.

The boardroom at Big Society Capital is full of hard-nosed financiers who could squeeze a return from a boulder at forty paces.

The chairman is Sir Ronnie Cohen, the man known as the father of British venture capital. The chief executive is Nick O'Donohoe, who forged a successful career as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan.

But they are both convinced there are plenty of institutions and individuals who will be prepared to invest billions in the brave new world of social enterprise - even if it means taking a small hit on their percentages.

Government ministers, of course, love the idea.

Not a penny of Big Society Capital's money has come from the Treasury - £400m from dormant bank accounts and £200m from big banks themselves.

And the thought that a fortune might be diverted into community and other projects without costing the taxpayer a bean is a funding mechanism made in political heaven.

There are concerns, of course. Some social enterprises will go bust with the loss of what may have become a vital service.

Others may operate more like profit-making companies than socially-motivated services, offering fat rewards to successful board members. Some fear that the need to maintain an income-stream to service the loan will deflect social enterprises from the most challenging projects or clients.

The potential of the social enterprise movement will depend on finding ways to monetise the good they do. A project that gets problem drug users off heroin, for instance, will need to calculate how much they save the taxpayer by keeping people clean.

If a metric can be devised, then government might well be prepared to "pay by results", providing the income stream that might then unlock further investment for the expansion of the social enterprise model.

But here is where senior civil servants in Whitehall start to get nervous.

There is little doubt that a problem drug user is a drain on the public purse. There are likely to be costs for the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Department of Health, Department for Education and local authorities, if not many other parts of the tax-funded machine.

But how much should each department or council put in to the pot for the success a social enterprise might have?

One consequence of this new approach to delivering services for the public good may be something our current government regards as a public bad: bureaucracy.

Someone is going to need to check that social enterprises are doing what they say they are doing, that the benefits are what was claimed, that the contracts are in the best interests of all, that the different parts of the Whitehall machine are paying their fair share.

The launch of Big Society Capital today may well be seen as the start of a creative new way of funding projects that genuinely deliver social good.

But many questions remain unanswered.

One thing is for sure: if Big Society Capital does fulfil its promise, it will do no harm to the reputation of politicians and of bankers.

The Riots, Communities and Victims Panel, set up last year, highlights "500,000 forgotten families".

It also cited poor parenting, an inability to prevent reoffending, too much emphasis on materialism, and a lack of confidence in the police. You can watch my report for more details.

The official Red Book detailing the government's assessment of the Budget's impact shows that the 40% of households who lose the least as a proportion of their income are in the top half of the income table. The biggest losers are the bottom 20% and the top 10%.

It is worth noting that this graph does not include the impact of the cut to the 50% rate of tax because, the Treasury says, "the behavioural response is so large that presenting a static analysis would not be representative of likely actual impacts". In other words, it is too difficult to work out how much a tax cut for people earning over £150,000 will save them.

Another way of thinking about the Budget's impact is to look at how much people have got to spend. This graph looks at how the changes are expected to change household expenditure. Again, everyone will have less to spend but again it is the very poorest and the very richest who will see the greatest squeeze on their spending power.

So, while there has been much attention paid to the squeezed middle today, perhaps it is worth noting what is likely to happen to the group described to me on Twitter today as "the squashed bottom".

To give you some idea where the income bands for each 10% of households fall, you can see figures from last year here.

In a briefing paper published on its website, the UKSA says Daily Mail coverage of crime figures on the riots "is likely to have left its readers with the impression that far fewer crimes were recorded as a result of the disorder in August than was actually the case".

The statistics watchdog has not previously commented directly on the use of official statistics by the media, limiting its scrutiny to the behaviour of the government and national politicians.

The criticism is a response to an article published in the Daily Mail in January headlined: "Rioting is 'airbrushed' from official crime statistics as most trouble-hit areas record a drop in violent crime."

The story highlighted the relatively small number of "public disorder" crimes recorded in the official statistics following the disturbances saying "reading the crime figures yesterday, it is almost as if the five days of widespread looting and violence never took place".

However, today's UKSA monitoring paper states that, while the Daily Mail quoted the correct number of specific offences of disorder, their story "did not give the numbers of the other offences" connected to the rioting.

For example, while the paper contrasts the widespread violence and arson in Croydon with just seven disorder offences, the UKSA calculates that hundreds more disorder-related offences were recorded by police in the area, including acquisitive crime, criminal damage and violence.

The authority suggests the paper's coverage may have misled its readers into thinking the authorities had not logged riot offences in the crime records. "For example, the article says that in Croydon the Metropolitan Police only recorded seven disorder offences, while in fact a total of 430 offences were recorded."

The Daily Mail article claims the disparity between a fall in recorded crime and the "avalanche of offences" during the riots was down to the way police officers classify crimes.

"Some forces classified hundreds of feral thugs rampaging through different streets in the same city as just one incident of public disorder," the paper claims. "Similarly, mass looting in which one person broke into a shop only to be followed by dozens more was recorded as a single offence."

The authority, however, does not agree with the Daily Mail analysis. It points out that a substantial amount of relevant statistical information on the disorder was made available by the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office.

But it also accepts that the crime figures "could perhaps have highlighted more clearly the distinction between specific disorder offences under the Public Order Act and the full range of disorder-related crime".

What is perhaps most interesting about the commentary, however, is that the authority sees its role as taking to task journalists who it deems to have undermined public confidence in official statistics.

When it was first created in 2008, the authority saw its principal responsibility as promoting and safeguarding the production and publication of official stats by government departments and agencies. Its Code of Practice applies only to "UK bodies that are responsible for official statistics" and, initially at least, the chair of the authority, Sir Michael Scholar, largely restricted his attention to the activities of government.

However, the legislation that created the UKSA also entitles the authority to "ensure good practice in relation to official statistics" and it is that broader safeguarding remit that appears to justify his organisation's critique of a newspaper story.

Nevertheless, the decision publicly to question the journalism of a popular and influential paper like the Daily Mail is not without its risks. Close to retirement, it appears Sir Michael is content to live dangerously.

In a speech last September Sir Michael talked of a powerful alliance between ministers pursuing power and "those in the Press and media who wish to make money and themselves exercise power".

"This alliance is, I believe, the greatest source of corruption in modern times. It dwarfs the petty corruption revealed in the Parliamentary expenses scandal. It is the genus of which the Murdoch affair is a species," he said.

With just days to go before he hands over control the UKSA to Andrew Dilnot, Sir Michael has decided it is legitimate for the authority to consider if journalists are undermining public confidence in official statistics. Whether Mr Dilnot, who takes over on 1 April, will follow suit is another question.

I have asked the Daily Mail for a comment and will add their response as soon as I get it.

It has been pointed out to me that the article in question appeared only in the MailOnline and not in the printed version of the Daily Mail. A similar story, not mentioned by the UKSA, appeared on the Daily Telegraph website at around the same time.

Associated Newspapers who publish MailOnline have told me they don't wish to comment further on the original article.

The Royal Statistical Society has been in touch following this story and Jill Leyland, the society's vice president said this:

"Misreporting of statistics by the press has often been excused on the grounds that the statistics themselves were poorly presented or opaque. And the UK Statistics Authority has, rightly, not been slow to criticise official statisticians when this was the case.

"But on this occasion it finds that the statisticians essentially did a good job, and that a substantial amount of both summary and more detailed information had been published in the months following the riots. The Daily Mail would appear to have no grounds for its accusation that rioting had been 'airbrushed' from official crime statistics. It is good that the Statistics Authority is prepared to criticise a national newspaper when it unjustifiably undermines confidence in official statistics."

The front page of today's Sun newspaper is devoted to the headline "God is in Control" below the subheading "Praying for Muamba". "In God's Hands" says the Daily Star. Chelsea defender Gary Cahill pulled off his shirt after scoring yesterday to reveal a vest encouraging supporters to "Pray 4 Muamba", his former team-mate.

Bolton Wanderers and Muamba's friends and relatives have said they have been touched by the out-pouring of goodwill towards the player. His club manager Owen Coyle said: "Everybody is praying for Fabrice, which is very important, and that has been a real source of strength to the family."

The dreadful sight of a young, apparently healthy athlete collapsing in front of tens of thousands of football fans is a sharp reminder of the unpredictability of all our lives. We can never be in total control of our destiny and so, like generations before us, at times of stress or crisis we look to the heavens in the search for meaning and hope.

A BBC survey in 2004 suggested roughly six out of 10 people in the UK believe in some sort of divine being and research concludes that there is a basic human desire for supernatural involvement in matters of health and wellbeing.

In the Christian tradition, the New Testament states that "prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well" (James 5.15). It is a claim that pits medical rationalism against religious conviction and for centuries scientists and preachers have argued over the evidence that prayer works.

In 1872, Sir Francis Galton's classic paper Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer was published in The Fortnightly Review. He reasoned that, if praying was effective, then monarchs should live longer than comparable groups. Galton set about examining the mean age attained by men who had survived beyond the age of 13 between 1758 and 1843. The data excluded deaths by accident or violence.

The group who tended to live longest were the gentry (roughly 70 years) and the lowest mean was among members of royal houses (64 years). From this, Galton concluded that "the sovereigns are literally the shortest-lived of all who have the advantage of influence. The prayer has, therefore, no efficacy."

However, trust in the power of prayer remained. That pioneer of nursing Florence Nightingale was a believer, writing that "often when people seem unconscious, a word of prayer reaches them". A number of scientific experiments have been conducted over the years to try and demonstrate what effect, if any, intercessionary prayer might have.

A book entitled The Power of Prayer on Plants published in 1959 detailed the results of research involving 150 people and 27,000 seeds and seedlings. The author Franklin Loehr concluded that plants for which people prayed showed a better rate of survival and growth than plants which did not enjoy the benefit of prayer.

In 1988, the American doctor Randolph Byrd recruited some born-again Christians to pray outside a San Francisco coronary care unit for a randomized group among 400 patients. The remainder were not subject to prayers. His paper in the Southern Medical Journal concluded that patients in the intercessory prayer group had "a significantly lower severity score" than the control group.

"These data suggest that intercessory prayer to the Judeo-Christian God has a beneficial therapeutic effect in patients admitted to a CCU," he concluded.

In 2007, researchers at Arizona State University decided to do a systematic review of all the literature on the efficacy of prayer to see what picture emerged. In setting out its findings, the paper states that "although it is theoretically possible that a transcendent being exists and responds to prayer, it is also possible that prayer taps into presently undiscovered natural mechanisms that produce change".

The study looked at 17 previously published papers and found that "patients who received intercessory prayer demonstrated significant improvement" in seven of those. However, there were questions about the validity of some of the research and the evidence was not sufficient for "prayer" to meet the criteria required for an "empirically supported treatment" in the United States.

"Intercessory prayer offered on behalf of clients in clinical settings is a controversial practice, in spite of its apparent frequent occurrence. The topic is one that engenders both support and opposition, often passionately held," the research concluded.

"Thus, at this junction in time, the results might be considered inconclusive. Indeed, perhaps the most certain result stemming from this study is the following: The findings are unlikely to satisfy either proponents or opponents of intercessory prayer."

The evidence, however, is stronger in terms of the apparent efficacy of prayer on those who are doing the praying. A much-cited American paper from 1983 entitled "Are religious people nice people?" attempted to plot links between people who prayed and pro-social behaviour. The author concluded that "those who pray frequently" tend to be more cooperative and friendly.

A study in Britain of 4,000 12-15-year-olds conducted in 1992 by the academic and Anglican priest Leslie Francis found that "as many as one young person in every three who never has contact with church nonetheless prays at least occasionally". The frequency of personal prayer, he concluded, is "an important predictor of perceived purpose in life".

Whatever you might think about its links to a supernatural being, intercessory prayer is a straightforward way for an individual to focus the mind on their capacity to think nice thoughts. Anyone can close their eyes and make a wish that bad things do not happen. Right now, Britain is praying that Fabrice Muamba makes a speedy and full recovery.

It sounds so plausible - women make up a larger proportion of the public sector where the cuts are biting. And the latest unemployment figures do show that of the 28,000 rise in jobless in the latest figures, 22,000 are women.

But that doesn't mean more women lost their jobs. In fact, more women have won jobs - the female employment rate in Britain has risen. In the year to last autumn, an additional 32,000 women were in work and experts say the trend has continued since then.

What has happened is that more women have entered the workforce and many of those fresh to the labour market have not been able to get a job. To put it another way, the number of women joining the queue of jobseekers is greater than the number of women who have found jobs.

What the stats don't show is that women are more likely to receive a redundancy notice than men. On the contrary, it is men who have experienced a fall in employment over the past year. Despite cuts to a female-dominated public sector, it is male workers who appear to be getting the chop.

This is not what people expected. John Philpot, chief economic advisor of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), identified the paradox in a paper published last December and suggested it was "probably in part due to the increased effort of policy-makers to encourage lone mothers on benefit to seek work".

That might be the explanation, but those women still needed to find jobs and we are constantly being told that family/friendly public sector jobs are the ones that are disappearing.

There is a bit of a mystery here and one which the CIPD acknowledges. "Why ongoing job losses in the public sector are not hitting women harder than men is an interesting question, and one to which the answer is not immediately apparent," they told me today, expressing frustration that official ONS public/private job stats don't have a gender breakdown.

The CIPD suggests it could be that more women have been losing jobs than men in the public sector but have been better than men at getting jobs in other sectors. "It could be that recruitment freezes or natural wastage reductions affect men and women more equally despite the relatively high share of women in the public sector workforce," they say. "Either way, however, there is no simple cause and effect between what's happening in the public sector and the rise in female unemployment."

In fact, it is arguable that women now hold a greater proportion of Britain's professional jobs than their representation in the workforce would lead one to expect.

The statistics team in the House of Commons library has just published data on women in public life, the professions and the board room. On International Women's Day it is worth celebrating the progress there has been over the past decade in trying to achieve equality for women in the workplace.

In some parts of public and corporate life there is still some way to go. Just 22% of MPs and peers are women, with a similar proportion in the Cabinet and serving as judges in the courts. As of last month, just 15% of FTSE 100 company directors were women.

But what does equality look like? As I scrutinised the tables of occupations and the ratio of male to female employees, I began to wonder if only 50:50 really represented job done.

A look at official employment stats reveals that the number of men working full-time is 13.58m compared to 7.68m women. The figures for part-time working show 2.01m men and 5.86m women. If we assume that two part-time jobs equals one full-time job, it means that 58% of the workforce are men and 42% are women.

So, it could be argued that equal gender representation within the current employment market would see roughly four out of 10 jobs in any sector held by women.

With this in mind, one sees that among the professions, some 44% of jobs are filled by women - slightly higher than their representation within the workforce might lead one to expect.

Women now make up 45% of the country's GPs, with the same figure in a category comprising solicitors, lawyers, judges and coroners. It is a similar story with scientists - 46% are women.

The employment consequences of the government's austerity package are expected to have a greater impact on women than men, particularly those working part-time in the public sector. There are still glass ceilings for women in some parts of the country's professional and public life.

But on International Women's Day, perhaps it is also worth reflecting on how much has been achieved already.

After all, many of aspects of "privatisation" they say worry them were introduced during Labour's time in office.

The shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper says she has "very serious concerns" about plans by West Midlands and Surrey forces to enter into contracts with profit-making companies to provide services many people would consider policing functions.

The former deputy prime minister John Prescott has described the process as "extremely alarming", launching a campaign to "keep the police public".

And the Police Federation, which tends to regard outsourcing as a potential threat to its members' jobs, has called the proposals "an extremely dangerous road to take".

The affair, it transpires, has its origins inside the Home Office and meetings held between the Police and Justice Minister Nick Herbert and the chief constables of West Midlands and Surrey.

It was the minister, I am told, who encouraged the two forces to push ahead with their outsourcing initiative and some central government funding was made available to help make it happen.

Mr Herbert is enthusiastic in promoting innovative thinking as to how shrinking budgets might be spent more efficiently so money can be focused on what he regards as "core policing". However, he would not and could not claim a patent on what West Midlands and Surrey are considering.

The plain fact is that a lot of the functions included in the current exercise, and that so exercise the Labour opposition, have been contracted out to private companies for years.

In a statement earlier this week, Yvette Cooper said: "The possibility of including the management of high-risk individuals, patrolling public places or pursuing criminal investigations in large private sector contracts rather than core professional policing raises very serious concerns."

Well, let's go through those categories.

Currently, the security giant G4S alone monitors some 14,000 individuals on behalf of the Home Office and Ministry of Justice. Private companies supply tagging services for electronic curfews and satellite tracking of offenders. They provide secure transportation for moving high-risk prisoners and others, as well as running prisons and operating custody suites in police stations.

Since 2003 and with the Labour government's blessing, G4S (under the control of a police sergeant) has managed 500 police cells in Lancashire, South Wales and Staffordshire with all the functions that go with that:

If the anxiety is about the monitoring of, say, serious sex offenders, as one chief constable told me on Tuesday, this often comes down to an officer checking every few months that an individual is still living where his or her licence requires. Worth remembering that not so long ago, this function would have been the responsibility of the probation service and not the police at all.

It all depends on what you call a "public place" but private security firms already patrol and guard major public sector construction projects, railway lines, MoD bases, and public buildings such as government departments, shopping malls and pedestrian precincts. G4S will provide security patrols for the London Olympics and private security firms routinely police football matches and other public events.

I remember reporting for the BBC 20 years ago on an estate which had its own private beat bobbies - a security firm had been hired by residents to patrol the neighbourhood because they wanted a greater uniformed presence than the police were providing.

The question for some is whether private security staff are going to replace badged police officers on the streets. So far, I have not seen any suggestion that they will.

In fact, the Chair of the Surrey Police Authority, Peter Williams, invited me to read his lips: "There is absolutely no question of private security staff replacing beat bobbies. You will not see G4S staff parading through Guildford on patrol."

Right now, about 500 civilians (mostly former police officers) are working with forces in the UK on criminal investigations. When a big inquiry comes along, the senior investigating officer may well look to hire trained assistance from the private sector.

For example, a few years ago when detectives in Jersey were faced with the huge criminal investigation into child abuse, they recruited extra help from a private recruitment agency.

Don't forget that private security firms already conduct criminal fraud investigations for insurance companies and other institutions, handing over evidence to the police at the conclusion of their inquiries.

Forensic investigations, initiated by the police, may well be conducted by a profit-making company in what is a highly competitive market.

To be shocked by the police use of private companies, as outlined in the contracts being considered by West Midlands and Surrey, implies ignorance of the enormous changes in the way policing has become a partnership service with other agencies, including the private sector, over the past decade or two.

When I bumped into David Hanson, the shadow policing minister for England and Wales on Tuesday, he said his greatest concern was that the contracts could last for up to 15 years, locking forces into arrangements that ministers or elected police and crime commissioners could not undo.

Another of Labour's anxieties is that decisions on which crimes or criminals to pursue, or what priorities to follow, might be made in the interests of a private company rather than the public good.

But this is an argument that critics made against many of the widespread reforms of public services that Labour introduced, in policing and elsewhere.

The accountability argument is one that must be dealt with at the contract stage. Next Tuesday, companies wanting to get a slice of the police budget in Surrey and West Midlands will attend a bidding conference, with Peter Williams telling me he would be there to ensure that nothing was agreed "unless it delivers benefits to us".

There will be concerns about how far civilianisation and outsourcing should go as police forces look to focus their limited resources on core responsibilities. The question what are the police for, that I explored in my recent BBC Radio 4 series of the same name, is one that Labour's independent commission on policing will undoubtedly be obliged to consider.

The president-elect of the Police Superintendents' Association of England and Wales, Irene Curtis, has told me that while "outsourcing of policing services has been done by the private sector for years", she's concerned as to "where the line is drawn with core police services and where those services are provided by a company that is not under the complete control of the chief constable".

Peter Williams , of the Surrey Police Authority, does not even accept the word "outsourcing" for what they are considering. He prefers to describe the potential contracts as a "partnership" - with a chief constable retaining full control.

For some, it comes down to a question of political ideology. Do we think all these functions should be done by the state, in this case by fully-trained warranted police officers? That central argument was conducted a decade ago and the Labour government's answer back then was "no".

This has always struck me as pretty insulting to our friends and relations beyond these shores. Such principles matter enormously, of course, but to claim an international patent on virtue might be seen as a little smug.

I do think Britain is a decent and tolerant place, but how confident are we that it is more so than… (flicks through atlas index) the Netherlands or New Zealand or Norway? We have our share of scoundrels and bigots and, in the absence of good evidence, I am not sure it is wise to claim a podium spot in the league of gentlemen.

If Britishness means anything at all it must go beyond ticking boxes of general niceness. While that may make us feel good about ourselves, there is something a bit disturbing about people who stand in front of the mirror marvelling at their perfect teeth. (Perfect teeth, of course, are regarded as thoroughly un-British.)

Others try to get a handle on Britishness through its association with institutional abbreviations: the NHS, the BBC, the WI or the RSPCA. This is a more profitable path because our brand of alphabet soup has a distinctly homemade recipe. The complex flavours of our health service, national broadcaster and voluntary sector come from a unique combination of local ingredients.

Is brand Britain losing its lustre?

Some argue that it is the principles behind free healthcare and licence-funded TV that shape our national character, but arcane funding mechanisms for the delivery of public services across our islands cannot, surely, be the heartbeat of Britishness.

The NHS is significant, not because of its bureaucracy, but because we have such affection for it. The character of the relationship between citizen and state must lie at the heart of any national identity and with Britishness nowhere is it more exposed than when we are naked under a gown on the doctor's examination table.

Close your eyes and recite the letters N H S. What comes to mind?

I see pale green walls and lino-covered corridors, Hattie Jacques in a starched matron's uniform, half-moon glasses on a consultant's nose, HMSO-brown files stacked behind a fierce receptionist, ancient copies of Country Life on a table and a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums. It is, I accept, a dated and cliched vision of British healthcare and yours will be different. But it is in the Rolodex of memory and perception that Britishness has its source.

Let's try the experiment again.

Close your eyes and recite the letters B B C.

You might see the iPlayer or imagine the sizeable operation that will bring the London Olympics to the world this summer.

But I am going to guess many of you conjured up an image of a chap with Brylcreemed hair in a dinner jacket and bow tie talking in rounded tones into a Bakelite microphone. Perhaps you heard the Blue Peter theme tune or Robert Robinson welcoming listeners to Brain of Britain. The cultural references will vary but they will almost certainly be nostalgic.

The BBC and NHS shape Britishness because they are powerful voices in the oral/visual history of our islands, passed down through the generations and across the classes. But they also possess a quality that is key to defining identity. Other people don't have them.

Let me give you some examples: Belisha beacons, fish 'n' chips, Chelsea pensioners, Highland games, Marmite soldiers, Blackpool rock, Jimmy wigs, Yorkshire pudding, prawn cocktail crisps, red telephone boxes, afternoon tea, the Greenwich pips, a pint of foaming bitter (or, if north of the Border, make that a pint of heavy).

These quirky items are trotted out as iconic symbols of Britain, not because we believe Gilbert Scott's cast iron scarlet kiosk is intrinsically better than other phone booths, but because it is British and, critically, not foreign.

In a world of satellite TV and global shopping, foibles and idiosyncrasies become endangered and beloved species. As the planet shrinks and cultural cross-currents threaten to wash national identity away, everyone is searching for anything they can call their own.

The question, though, is whether holding up cultural erratics, the bits and bobs of our past that have somehow survived through the ages, tells us anything about our identity. Are we vainly searching for meaning among the dusty relics forgotten in a trunk in the attic?

It is not the items themselves that are the embodiment of identity. A sporran doesn't hold within its pouch something intrinsic about a Scotsman any more than a bowler hat harbours the essence of an Englishman.

When I was a boy, I spent many family holidays on the Isle of Arran. A little cottage in Kildonan, without television or telephone, was a simple retreat for hassled parents escaping frantic lives in 1960s Glasgow. We went crabbing and mackerel-fishing and played French cricket and whist. However, there were days when three young brothers complained they were bored.

My father would scratch his head and announce a treasure hunt. The rules required his sons to run around the place while he relaxed in a chair. Find something with six legs. Bring me something purple. Something which would be useful in a storm. The more difficult the task, the longer he had to snooze. I remember one windy, grey afternoon when he simply asked us to find something interesting.

We scrambled across slippery rocks on the beach and up and down the steep stony banks that surrounded our little cottage. Eventually, we returned with our treasure and laid out our finds for inspection: a bird's egg; a crab's claw; a stone shaped like a rocket; a rusty and anonymous tin washed up with the tide. Which was the most "interesting"? Stones, eggs and claws were fine, but we all had to agree that the label-less corroded can was the winner.

It was just a bit of discarded flotsam, but it was intriguing. Where had it come from? How had it got there? What was inside? It wasn't the object but its mysterious back-story that made it the most interesting item of treasure that day.

That is what we search for in our hunt for identity too. What is interesting about us? It is not tattie scones or pillar boxes that are important in themselves, but their provenance, their survival, their mystery. Our lives are connected through shared experience of objects and events across time and space. Identity is inextricably tied up with heritage and with tradition.

So, my sense of my own identity is shaped by the wobbly cine-films of my brothers and me playing cricket on Arran year after year, the constant presence of Pladda lighthouse and Ailsa Craig in the background. It is the memories I share with my family of annual treasure hunts on the beach: heritage and tradition.

But we must beware these comforting words and where they might lead us. "Identity," it has been said, "is always a modern project: an attempt of differing political and economic interests to construct their historical pasts as the representation of the 'truths' of their present day practices."

The author of that, American sociologist Jonathan Church, spent time on the Shetland Islands investigating what he called "confabulations of community". Confabulation is a wonderful psychological term to describe the confusion of imagination with memory. But Dr Church used it to mean something altogether more sinister - the way in which invented traditions may be used to construct a false identity.

He had gone to Shetland to study the Hamefarin - the homecoming festival first held in 1960 and revived in 1985, which stresses the ancient Viking roots of the people of the islands. It seems like innocent fun, but Dr Church was anxious this new tradition was closing down a more complex historical back-story featuring Scottish kings, German merchants and American oil tycoons. "A singular gaze has become appropriated and institutionalised in the power of official memory," he concluded.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm famously claimed that British traditions "which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented". A committed Marxist, his assertion that many of the ceremonial trappings of nationhood hailed from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries was dismissed as lefty propaganda by some conservatives. This scrutiny of tradition, holding it up in the light to check its provenance and authenticity, was condemned as thoroughly unpatriotic.

A few years later, the Labour academic Anthony Giddens described tradition as "perhaps the most basic concept of conservatism", arguing that kings, emperors, priests and others invented rituals and ceremonies to legitimate their rule. The very term "tradition", he said, was only a couple of centuries old. "In medieval times there was no call for such a word, precisely because tradition and custom were everywhere."

I am not an expert on the tradition of tradition.

But Giddens' final point seems true: it is everywhere. Our identity is in tonight's fish supper and this morning's newspaper just as it is in the chimes of Big Ben and the skirl of the pipes. Britishness cannot be nailed down because, like all identities, it is evolving and re-forming with every moment. Trying to define it is like trying to paint the wind.

I was particularly struck by the correlations between ethnicity and well-being.

Black Britons, it would appear, are significantly less satisfied with their lives than the general population.

People from mixed or multiple ethnic groups are also less satisfied with their lives, while those with Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage tend to say they are more anxious. The Indian population, while pretty similar in terms of other measures to the average, also indicates a slightly higher level of anxiety.

The reasons for these results are not easy to pin down.

They may be influenced by the income, education or employment patterns within different ethnic groups. There may be an element of discrimination or prejudice at play. Migration itself, particularly if someone is leaving family and friends, can be linked to stress and depression. But equally it may that there are cultural differences in the way people respond to questions from pollsters.

Nevertheless, it would seem that pushing up Britain's overall well-being score will require us to think hard about the life experience of minority ethnic groups.

Improving Britain's general happiness may mean (among other things) focusing on policies around unemployment, the retirement age and racial equality.

The Office for National Statistics has just published results from the largest ever official well-being survey in the UK - 80,000 adults were asked about their general life satisfaction, how worthwhile they thought their life was, how happy or anxious they felt the previous day.

The large sample means it is possible to look at relatively small minority groups within the population and see how their answers compare with the average.

I was particularly struck by the correlations between ethnicity and well-being, in this table.

Black Britons, it would appear, are significantly less satisfied with their lives than the general population - a score of 6.6 out of 10 compared with a national average of 7.4. Similarly, the data reveal a significantly lower score on the measure asking respondents how happy they were yesterday - 6.9 compared with 7.3.

But the story of ethnic difference extends to other groups as well.

People from mixed or multiple ethnic groups are also less satisfied with their lives (6.9 compared with 7.4) while those with Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage tend to say they were more anxious the previous day (3.7 - 3.9 compared with 3.2). The Indian population, while pretty similar in terms of other measures to the average, also indicates a slightly higher level of anxiety (3.5/3.2).

The reasons for these results are not easy to pin down. They may be influenced by the income, education or employment patterns within different ethnic groups. There may be an element of discrimination or prejudice at play. Migration itself, particularly if someone is leaving family and friends, can be linked to stress and depression. But equally it may that there are cultural differences in the way people respond to questions from pollsters.

Nevertheless, it would seem that pushing up Britain's overall well-being score will require us to think hard about the life experience of minority ethnic groups.

The well-being data also tells us some interesting things about the importance of work…and retirement.

It comes as no surprise to see that unemployment lowers people's life satisfaction and increases anxiety, a finding particularly strong among men.

What is more, it appears that the longer someone is out of work, the more unhappy and anxious they become.

This chart shows that someone who has been without a job for a year or more has a life satisfaction score of just 6 compared with the UK average of 7.4. Work really matters to well-being.

But it would seem that retirement is also a boost to well-being. We have known that happiness is smile-shaped for decades - we tend to be relatively contented in our youth and become progressively grumpy into middle-age before recovering our sense of humour as our hair turns grey.

What is noticeable to me is the jump between 55-59-year-olds and those in retirement.

On both satisfaction and happiness measures, men see their score leap from 7.1 to 7.8 when they pass 65. For women, who usually retire a little earlier, the leap happens when they reach 60.

It would be a mistake to try and draw too much from this table. Government plans to raise the retirement age may have no affect on the well-being of the nation. They may even increase it.

But it will be interesting to see whether the satisfaction and happiness scores drop when the changes are made. And if they do, on David Cameron's watch, will he think again?

Prisoners would be paid below the minimum wage and some of their earnings would go to help victims of crime.

Ministers felt police authorities were not sufficiently responsive to the demands of an anxious citizenry. Chief constables needed someone with electoral clout to connect them to the people, to keep them honest.

But might it be true? And if it is, should we take isolation as seriously as we do obesity or smoking in our health strategies?

Theresa May noted that the proportion of officers in England and Wales working on the frontline is planned to increase from 68% in 2010 to 70% by March this year.