What do we do with people who make their fellow citizens' lives a misery while being subsidised by the taxpayer? If they are MPs, we let them vote themselves a juicy pension increase at our expense.
Others get less generous treatment. On Friday the Commons returned to Frank Field's Housing Benefit (Withholding of Payment) Bill.
To some Field is an almost saintly figure. Certainly, there is a monkish quality about him that suggests he was up at 4.30 to sing Lauds or scourge himself. Thanks to this reputation, his bill won support from both sides of the House. But regular readers will know this is a sure sign of a bad piece of legislation.
The problem of neighbours from hell has moved quickly from tabloid television to the floor of the Commons. Field himself said that 20 years ago people came to him about social security, housing allocations and industrial disputes. Now they complain about their neighbours.
Has there really been such a collapse in civility? Is there a whole realm of offensive behaviour the law cannot touch? Field gave the example of a woman who had been smashed in the face, had her house wrecked and been threatened with death if she went to court. But this is not anti-social behaviour: it is serious criminality and has always been punishable by imprisonment.
Fortunately, Ed Davey, Steve Webb and Matthew Green were all on hand to nail the weaknesses in the Bill. Powers are already available but hardly used. The bill would doubly punish offenders: they would lose benefit as well as suffer the penalty imposed by the courts. People who become homeless are more likely to reoffend.
Yet it was Geraint Davies from Croydon Central, normally an ultra-loyal Blairite, who voiced the killer objection. Housing benefit exists to help people on low incomes pay for their housing. A penalty which applies only to the poor is deeply unfair.
The bill ran out of time with no sign of an answer to any of these points.
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The Commons rose for the summer on Wednesday, so House Points is taking a break. Unless the revolution comes, we shall return in October. Meanwhile, a growing archive of these columns can be found at www.bonkers.hall.btinternet.co.uk.
Gordon Brown's spending review could be the last chance. Not for his prime ministerial ambitions. Not for Labour to make its policies work. The last chance for us: the British people.
Frankly, we have been a disappointment. Targets have been set and not reached. Cynicism is everywhere. On Tuesday Tony Blair had to tell select committee chairmen that accusations he had introduced a presidential style of government were "unfair and wrong".
We must pull our socks up. (That's 20 per cent higher by 2005.)
The extra spending Brown announced on Monday was startling, even though we have heard his promises before and found the reality less impressive. Aesop should have included a fable about the boy who cried "Spin!"
Even more startling was his assumption that there are no limits to the reach of government. He is providing more money – never mind that it comes from us in the first place – and in return he claims the right to manage the smallest details of national life. So new inspection bodies are being created for health and social care, criminal justice and housing.
Schools deemed to be performing badly will have new heads imposed, be taken over or closed. Similar sanctions will apply to colleges and even to whole local education authorities.
On Tuesday Estelle Morris added targets covering everything from attainment among 11-year-olds to the number of adults with vocational qualifications.
Individually, each of her ambitions is desirable. Lump them together and they produce an education system so centralised that it cannot possibly work. Already schools are more interested in achieving targets than fostering learning. Which is why we live in a country where examination results get better every year but teenagers can embark on a history degree not knowing what Protestantism is.
Where are parents in all this? Brown talked of the need for "better child care and a sure start for the very young". What he had in mind was the funding of more childcare places. To many in the Labour Party, giving children the best means reducing the role of their families.
In a famous satire Bertolt Brecht suggested that the East German government should dissolve the people and elect another. That must be the next step for Labour.
Remember Beverley Hughes? She's the minister who thought Chris Morris's Brass Eye satire on the media's obsession with paedophilia was "unspeakably sick". Questioned on the Today programme, she had to admit she had not watched it.
But give Hughes her due. When she takes the trouble to brief herself, she is mightily impressive. Here she is on Today more recently, explaining government thinking on identity cards:
"I think an entitlement card could offer some important contributions both to the challenges we face and also to some important new concepts that we're trying to introduce to this issue around entitlement and also around citizenship, but the most important thing is that we actually stimulate, er, debate, a widespread debate, among ordinary people, and I think, I hope that because we have actually genuinely tried to bring a really fresh look and some creative thinking to the debate, that I hope people will be, I hope, pleasantly surprised by the document; it's very comprehensive, it looks at all the issues for and against, and the most important thing as I say [is] that we want to hear the views of ordinary people."
Ludwig Wittgenstein writes: It's hard to make anything of this thicket of verbiage, but I think the government wants a debate.
A debate? We started to have one in the Commons last week. Oliver Letwin asked why the Home Office is involved with an entitlement card at all. He asked how, if the police will not be able to demand production of a card, it will have any effect on crime. Then Simon Hughes suggested that people who use public services will have to show their cards constantly, but those who use private health and education will be able to do without them.
All valid arguments, you might think. Not David Blunkett. "I am disappointed, because this is degenerating into a contest with intellectual pygmies," he announced. This at once showed he does not want a debate at all and gave an insight his extraordinarily high opinion of himself.
What Blunkett means when he calls for debate is that he would like to bring in identity cards – sorry, "entitlement cards" – but will back down if he runs into too much opposition.
So we know what to do.
We've got to get this "darling" thing sorted out. Darling starred Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey. Delicious.
Then there was Blackadder. How we laughed when Stephen Fry called Hugh Laurie "Darling"! It was his name, you see: Captain Darling. But that was not a new joke. Christopher Isherwood published Lions and Shadows, a lightly fictionalised account of his early life, in 1938. Here he is as a prefect at public school:
"I had a study of my own and two fags to keep it clean. The fags were both new boys, their names were Berry and Darling. I caused my friends much amusement whenever I shouted down the passage: 'Berry, darling!' or 'Darling Berry!' "
On Tuesday it was Alastair Darling. The new transport secretary was answering questions. Would it be "Darling you were wonderful" or "Move over Darling"? (That's another film: Doris Day and James Garner.) He was helped by having Stephen Byers ("Darling, don't be horrid!") as his predecessor and even more by having the Conservatives as his opponents.
Before he spoke we had to endure several lengthy answers on the buses, with his number two John Spellar in the role of Blakey. When Darling finally rose it was to reply to Theresa May – "Darling Buds of" May as she is probably known by her colleagues. (For all I know, they call Angela Browning "Gravy" Browning too.) This is not the most taxing task a minister has to face.
Let's ignore Theresa May shortcomings as a debater. (It's like ignoring an angry mammoth, but do try.) The problem she faces is that in reply to any question she asks, Darling need say only one word. Railtrack.
Or as he put it more fully on Tuesday: "It is high time that they cared more about future investment in the railways, rather than trying to go over old ground. Frankly, in doing so they expose the bankruptcy of their thinking, and remind the country yet again that it was the Tories who introduced Railtrack and this botched privatisation, which has left so much mess and damage."
Besides that he mostly offered standard New Labour platitudes about strategic partnerships and integrated frameworks. Darling you were mediocre, but on the day it was plenty good enough.