I’M PRETTY sure that very few of those on the stage at the Labour Conference really understood just why so many people have felt so anguished about the case of Fiona Pilkington, the Leicester mum who burned herself and her mentally disabled daughter to death, after a decade of taunts from the local yobs.

Like the plods of Leicestershire Police, no doubt the Labour hierarchy found tragic Fiona an irksome reminder of real life, when they all would rather we were concentrating on Gordon Brown and the fight-back.

What matters here is that Fiona and her daughter Francecca did not matter at all.

No one on the local force thought to take a serious look into why this desperate woman made 33 calls in ten years, begging for help.

Not one copper apparently thought to sit with her for a few hours, to try and gauge how severe the problem was.

Certainly no officer thought to nick chief suspects the Simmons family.

But why would they, when Leicester’s own Head of Criminal Justice, Supt Steve Harrod, told the inquest into the deaths that: “Low-level anti-social behaviour is mainly the responsibility of the council”?

Supt Harrod and his seniors sound like the kind of police chiefs who’d be more worried if they didn’t get enough officers to attend the Gay Pride march than attend vulnerable people who need their help.

Indeed, earlier last month the same Leicester force that couldn’t be bothered to arrest the Pilkingtons’ tormentors were running around like headless chickens trying to track down those responsible for flyposting the town with ‘hate filled’ anti-gay posters.

They were concerned that they ‘could have’ incited violence against gay people.

They probably could. And people like that should be hunted down and prosecuted.

But when violence and disorder actually WAS taking place, outside of the home of those other Leicester residents the Pilkingtons, where were the local force then?

And what’s all this got to do with dead-man-walking Gordon Brown, you might ask?

Well, once again Mr B, no doubt with this case on his mind, ventured into his parallel universe where councils can ban 24-hour drinking, where yob kids are punished, their parents lose their benefits and are forced to pay fines.

What he didn’t tell us was why, after 12 years of Asbos, PCSOs, quangos, dispersal orders and the like, it STILL isn’t happening.

The fact is that even if the Prime Minister actually wanted to do something about this kind of thing, he couldn’t.

Because the people charged with the day-to-day implementation of his policies, folk you could probably describe as the Baroness Scotland class, the kind of people who employ housekeepers, don’t see yobs and chavs and anti-social behaviour as a pressing issue.

Insulated by their servants and gargantuan salaries and expenses, why should they? They don’t have to suffer with any of it.

That’s why they always describe this kind of crime as ‘low-level’. Because it only affects people lower down the food chain than them.

Of course the parents of yob kids need to know they’ll lose their benefits, the kids need to know they’ll be sent to borstal and the police should be encouraged to come down on miscreants like a ton of bricks. It goes without saying.

But thanks to the Baroness Scotland class, sensible policies like this don’t stand a chance.

If you want a vision of what actually happens, remember that even as Gordon Brown was delivering his speech, police were patrolling the Bardon Road where poor Fiona Pilkington and her little family lived.

Too little too late? Not even that.

In the new tradition of British policing, where the perps are viewed as victims, the officers were reported to be there to protect the Simmons family from any possible retribution.

Until he can crack that, until he can drill down to the malaise that infects the heart of so many institutions and eradicate it, along with all the failed policies, initiatives, projects, and grandiose spending schemes, Gordon Brown will always fail.

And the Fiona Pilkingtons of this world, the type of people Labour was created to protect, will be failed too.