CALM, patient and long-suffering.

That’s how the world sees us and how we see ourselves. The queues may not be so orderly, the seats on the bus not surrendered so quickly to older passengers, but we’re a tolerant easy-going lot who still value manners and self-restraint.

For every blistering letter of complaint, there are 100 scrunched up in the waste paper bin. Every Sunday night, hundreds of us promise that tomorrow we’ll tell the boss what we think of them. But come Monday morning, the showdown never seems such a good idea.

Which is funny, because if you look at the media you would assume half the country is in a state of perpetual rage and confrontation.

This is a serious newspaper that doesn’t blow things out of proportion. But just a few column inches away from this oasis of calm, there’ll be someone who’s furious, up in arms or outraged, over really very little. I appreciate that the headline “Pensioner mildly annoyed by late bus” isn’t an inducement to read on, but it shows how easy it is to talk tough.

The language of aggression permeates politics.

Politicians square up to each other, exchange (verbal) blows and rip opponents to shreds. One paper last week said Labour’s new education man, Tristram Hunt, would struggle to best Michael Gove as he was one of “Parliament’s finest swordsmen”. They’ll be talking about David’s Cameron’s sweet right hook next.

The politicians play up to it. This summer we’ve had a bidding war on who can be the toughest on welfare. Immigration and national security are other shirts-off, muscleflexing areas where rhetoric rules.

I find it mildly amusing, as most politicians have led relatively sheltered lives. Few, if any, have had to take what I often think is the toughest decision of all – whether to put your head down and walk on, or cross the darkened street and tell that group of angry men that it’s time they got themselves home; and no, it wouldn’t be a good idea to beat you up.

I have had to make that decision and no doubt somewhere in our region tonight, young men and women in police uniform will be doing the same. They’re not out to prove they’re tough, they just want to do their job.

Politics has always been an adversarial game in this country – right from the days of the Whigs and Tories when politicians sometimes settled their scores with real swords.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

AS I am sure you read, this week in Middlesbrough we contemplated budgets cuts of an order that five or ten years ago would have seemed unthinkable. Most councils are in the same boat and the NHS won’t be far behind. We are heading for uncharted waters where the solutions applied in the past just won’t work.

But the problems of protecting the built and natural environment, educating young people for the workplace and above all caring for the growing numbers of old people - which already takes up a quarter of the council budget - will need to be tackled.

Do we bang heads together or sit down and talk and talk it through, beginning with the question we never seem to ask: What constitutes an acceptable level of public service and what are we prepared to pay for it?

A cross-party consensus on this key issue seems further away than ever. But if we don’t provide an answer, there are soon going to be a lot of genuinely angry people.