AS A vicar and writer in the Church of England, I am inundated with letters from people who despair at the state this country is in.

My postbag reveals that there is an unofficial debate going on in every city, town and village, with people asking 'what has gone wrong with Britain?' I wish to use the letters page to further discussion and debate in the Lancaster and Morecambe area.

Society has now got so bad it appears that the very essence of what being British stood for - justice, decency and common sense - is in meltdown. People are saying the country has gone mad with crime soaring, family values collapsing, road rage, courts failing to adequately punish offenders and so on.

Politicians often cite poverty, unemployment and bad housing as the reasons for the decline in standards - but Britain has always had these problems to a greater or lesser degree.

It may come as a surprise but a study of statistics covering the past 150 years reveals two related U-curves.

The first, an inverted U, shows church and Sunday School attendance rising in the last half of the 19th Century and peaking in 1905 before going into decline, while the second U - this time the right way up - shows crime, drunkenness and illegitimacy falling to a low at the turn of the century and then steadily rising.

The fall in crime as church attendance rose was noted by commentators of the day. It seems it wasn't people's fear of arrest that kept them from breaking the law but their inner morality. Church attendance promoted conscience, self-control and the belief that they were accountable to God for their actions.

The lesson from history is surely that these values and beliefs have a timeless quality about them and they can only be ignored at terrible cost. Today's Britain is paying that price.

Rev J Williams, Leigh, Surrey.