DOWN near the foot of Britain's first "yob league table", which ranks towns according to the community's anxiety about anti-social behaviour, is Middlesbrough.

Drawn up by the National Audit Office, which monitors Government performance, the table pinpoints Corby, where 48.8 per cent of people expect to encounter yobs, as the very worst place for fear of anti-social behaviour. With 39.3 per cent, Middlesbrough stands at ninth worst, just a fraction ahead of Easington, tenth with 38.9.

Fifty years ago I was a reporter in Middlesbrough. What percentage of people then feared yobs? I confidently state - none.

In the Cannon Street area, the town's roughest district, policemen often patrolled in pairs. One constable might not have been enough to sort out a violent fight between two burly steelworkers. Or deal with a larger disturbance, usually inside or just outside a pub, which, when the offenders reached court, Chief Supt Bert Watson, the police prosecutor, invariably termed a "fracas".

Here's the point. Generally inflamed by drink, virtually all the trouble was within the community - family feuds or rows over girlfriends. Strangers were not in danger in Cannon Street - or any other part of the town. No one got mugged. Cars could be parked safely. No one's home was attacked.

The other day, a Stockton man, a well known and much-respected figure in the town, told me that Teesside's evening paper, which I used to work for but now rarely see, is nicknamed the Daily Stab. Well, in the ten years or so during which I covered Teesside courts, stabbings were extremely rare.

Sometimes there was "glassing', one man jabbing another with a broken beer glass. Usually this was in a pub, again following a row. That a knife should be drawn on a perfect stranger was unheard of. Nor, for that matter, was any crime fuelled by drugs, the taking of which was negligible and confined to Middlesbrough's tiny West Indian community.

The decline on all these fronts signals the nightmare vortex we are in. Not from Middlesbrough but South Shields comes the incident of a lout pushing an elderly man into a lake, for the purpose of posting a video of the assault on the Internet. Complete with the over-the-shoulder grin of the assailant as he moves in, the attack echoes one in Wrexham that I commented on here last month.

Obviously, the perpetrators have no respect for the law or other people. What length of sentence might achieve at least the former? Five years? Maybe not. Right - ten, all served. That should just about do it. Certainly it will be more likely than the current leniency, mirrored in figures which show that 80 per cent of muggers are arrested at least ten times, and 30 per cent 50 times, before they are put away.

Some of you will say "bring back the birch". I've never favoured that. But for thugs like our South Shields friend I might be coming round to amputating a foot - or two. For the really shocking statistic in that yob league table is that in only seven towns is the percentage of people who feel threatened by anti-social behaviour less than ten. So throughout urban Britain at least one in ten people goes in fear of yobs. Our society is falling apart.