Editor-At-Large: Have you any idea what life is like for Damien, Daniel and Darren?

Daily I am convinced that politicians don't inhabit the same world as you or I, but exist in a parallel rose-tinted universe with an entirely different take on reality.

Poll after poll reveals that we the voters place poor transport at the top of our concerns. The other day, after sitting in his ministerial car in a traffic jam surrounded

by cones, the Transport minister Alistair Darling suddenly cracked and announced he was thinking of appointing some kind of "pothole tsar" for large cities – as if that will make any difference.

Last week it emerged that 200,000 seven-year-olds can't read, and reading standards have declined for the second year running. When David Blunkett and Estelle Morris held the post of Education Secretary they both pledged to resign if literacy targets weren't reached. Well?

Meanwhile, Gordon Brown announced in his pre-Budget statement that he is considering setting up child trust funds which young people could draw on when they are 18. This is the man who pledged to halve child poverty by 2010. But how can we measure the progress of this important goal? And is poverty something determined simply in monetary terms? Surely poverty is opportunity denied, not lack of money in the bank. I wonder if the Chancellor plans to resign if his target is not achieved, or will it be conveniently forgotten if he's sitting in a different office?

Is building help for disadvantaged young people around the idea of a family unit, with tax credits and benefit reform really the way forward?

How can kids who are illiterate, jobless and homeless, sleeping rough and stealing for food, stick money in a trust fund? A well-intentioned middle-class approach just doesn't deal with the reality of today – thousands of children abandoned and discarded by one or both parents.

Does the Government acknowledge that there is a crisis in parenting, and that we have a generation of breeders many of whom don't know how – or want – to be decent parents? People who work shifts and never see their kids. People who never eat a meal with them. People who never speak to their children, except to tell them to shut up. People who liked their children as babies, but once they're walking, talking and misbehaving, don't know how to cope. The Government's response is classes in citizenship, when they should be setting up mandatory classes in parenting.

I wonder if Gordon Brown last week read about the three brothers from Dartford, Kent, aged 14, 15 and 17, who achieved a dubious first when they were awarded anti-social behaviour orders covering the rest of their lives. If they reoffend, they will be imprisoned for up to five years. We already lock up more children than any other country in Europe. We have the largest prison population of any European country, with the possible exception of Turkey. The Government's response is the Criminal Justice Bill, abandoning the right to trial by jury, discarding the principle of double jeopardy so that you can be tried for the same crime twice, and allowing juries to hear a defendant's previous convictions. If all that doesn't zap up the prison population to the 100,000 jackpot within a couple of years, I'll be very surprised.

I do not want to run a fan club for Darren, Daniel and Damien Brown, who have clearly made life hell for everyone who lives anywhere near them in Stone, outside Dartford. Between them they have notched up 41 arrests and the two youngest have been permanently excluded from school, a shocking record. In a similar case last week, three brothers in Southport, aged 11, 12, and 15, were given three year anti-social behaviour orders and banned from every amusement arcade in their town. But are these not the kind of socially deprived children that Mr Brown and Mr Blair should be focusing their attention on?

I define poverty as being outside the social system, and these two sets of brothers both clearly are. Denied education and now the target of New Labour's anti-yob laws, we are giving them nothing except even more local notoriety. The Browns live with their mother, who works at nights, and is said by the police to have "washed her hands of them". Over the years I have made many television programmes about people such as Damien, Darren and Daniel. Their craving for attention is not a sign of mental illness, inherent evil or that they are a budding career criminal. But, as night follows day, they will become the latter if they enter our prison system. Is that really any kind of governmental success?

Young people such as these need special places they can go to scream, shout and make music, gradually learn to read and write and use a computer. Kids Company in Camberwell in south-east London (near where Damilola Taylor was murdered) is a place that acknowledges that often children may have to look after their own parents. Other children will have to leave their parents in order to have any chance of survival. More and more children are growing up in a moral vacuum, and slapping anti-social behaviour orders on them, excluding them from school or tagging them, achieves nothing except a greater sense of detachment.

Children who continually break the law need people who can relate to them and start building the bridges to get them back into the real world. They need drop-in centres, therapy, meals and education. Who could not be moved by the story of 17-year-old Lauren Brown, whose mother introduced her to smoking crack and who knew that her daughter sold herself for sex at 13. Helped by Kids Company, Lauren now has her own little flat, existing on £35 a week from social services, as well as £60 twice a month for clothes and personal needs. At least Lauren is studying and will soon have a job.

But what about the Brown brothers? Perhaps the other Mr Brown should leave the rose-tinted world of politicians, shelve his plans for teenage trust funds and consider funding drop-in centres run by people such as Kids Company (currently run on voluntary donations) on a national basis. It's a lot cheaper than jail.

* * *

Tonight's television drama Jeffrey Archer: The Truth by Guy Jenkin is a hilarious satire, with Greta Scacchi playing Maggie Thatcher engaging in all sorts of hanky panky with the leading man. As Archer, Damian Lewis is a brilliant blend of smarmy Gerald Harper and bumptious Gerald Campion (TV's Billy Bunter for those of short memory). It's a good job that this is being broadcast on BBC1 and not ITV, because the BACC, which rules on television advertising, has decided to ban an ad for a video of the award-winning 2DTV animation series simply because George Bush is depicted as an idiot, and David Beckham is shown making a list of Christmas gifts asking Victoria how to spell DVD. Apparently Mr Bush and Mr Beckham might turn on their televisions, stumble across one of these ads and be "offended". It's not as if there aren't plenty of ads on television already that are totally offensive – but I suppose it's OK to portray other men as mindless chaps in pubs and women as people whose lives revolve around food, washing, and worrying about sanitary protection.