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Security and opportunity with a strong dose of fear are apparently Labour's themes for the next general election. Tony Blair has announced that the government will consider changing the law to protect householders from prosecution if they tackle burglars.

Figures suggest that less than 1 per cent of burglars carry a weapon (although that's not to stop them picking one up in the house they have broken into). Even when a householder has taken action, in the majority of cases, lawyers say, he or she has not faced prosecution.

So this election ploy appears nothing more than propaganda, shoring up the notion that "respectable" householders, like a wagon train under siege, are experiencing perpetual attack from "them" out there.

It's not difficult to see how what begins as the exercising of a "right" for a small minority rapidly transforms into an obligation on every "responsible" householder to attack when faced with an intruder - no matter how unpredictable the outcome. Such is the way society's values are transformed and the vigilante is nourished.

This government refers constantly to rights and responsibilities, as if these are absolute principles beyond misinterpretation. Yet, the continuing saga of David Blunkett's possible paternity of William, the child of his former lover, Kimberly Quinn, illustrates how one person's exercising of a "right" may be viewed by another as an act of destruction. If the home secretary is proven by a DNA test to be William's father, one application of his rights and responsibilities would be to insist on his rights as a father - regardless of the impact on William's now fragile family. After all, Labour is constantly criticising "dead beat dads" who fail to do their paternal duty.

A different course of action for Blunkett also exists in keeping with the code of rights and responsibilities, arguably placing the child's interests first. He might, for instance, immediately establish his own right to see William but exercise that judiciously, maintaining a looser connection until the boy is older and can better understand the mess grown-ups sometimes make of their lives.

The language of rights and responsibilities as spoken by Labour is fatally flawed because it is so damagingly rigid and inflexible. In reality, the process of love and care, sacrifices, rewards, errors and risk-taking is a complex and muddled series of trade-offs and transactions - in which, contrary to Blunkett's belief, most of us genuinely do try to do what we think is best.