avoidance of tax and communal responsibility. Thus the Tories' great electoral breakthrough in recent months was less the proposal to lift the threshold for inheritance tax than the promise to tax the non-domiciled financial uber-class.

Running parallel with this economic rejection of neo-liberalism, another similar cultural shift has been developing. The left-liberal cultural elite, children of the Sixties, have long preached progressive values; they adore personal autonomy, the impermanence of human relationships and the thrill of sexual exchange. They embrace one-parent families as if it were a more noble expression of feminism for a woman to raise a child without the burden of a father. In a covert alliance with right-wing economics, left-wing libertarianism has repudiated the ties of community and civic society in favour of a culture of self-interested choice, promiscuity and hedonistic experimentation.

The manifestation of these new left values in working-class, inner-city Britain has been nothing short of a social disaster. The extended and nuclear families of the poor and the immigrant

have been atomised and destroyed by liberal values - while their civil society has been reduced to street governance by the knife.

And so a peculiar reversal has been taking place. Under Mrs Thatcher and her New Labour acolytes, the British public were generally persuaded by the package of right-wing economics and left-wing cultural politics. Now, what looks like emerging as the next popular political formula is a just economic order coupled with the re-moralisation of society. In short, egalitarian economics and conservative cultural politics. Whichever party can recognise and respond to this new political landscape will dictate the future and win the next election.

In this regard Gordon Brown appears incapable of renewal; he is wedded to the old settlement of the overbearing state and the monopoly market. Cameron with his theme of the broken society is already on the right track. If the Conservatives come up with a new economic deal that will really share the benefits of growth then they will surely win the popular vote.