 organisations, our co-operative societies, our unions and our churches have vanished.
Likewise, our middle classes have stopped associating with one another - or the poor - and become feckless, replacing a culture of sacrifice and public service with one of self-gratification and material advancement.
The results are plain to see; society disintegrates, while we gaze at the lifestyles of the rich and famous with low envy.
In part this destruction of British society has its origins in our hugely undemocratic electoral system, where both main parties have abandoned their ideologies to chase only one demographic - the liberal middle-class voter in marginal constituencies. The influence of such people is out of all proportion to our own faint sense of unease. In the last election, just 16,434 votes in 36 seats would have been enough to reverse Labour's election victory.
Perhaps this is why British politics is so insipid, technocratic and managerial. All parties have to do is successfully target a |
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| If the Labour party continues to insist on state dependency, the Tories should offer the working class stability and security |
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floating (and, let's face it, wholly self-interested) middle-class vote of about 200,000 people in about 100 marginal seats and they will get elected. No wonder the rest of us feel alienated and excluded - we are.
So, what should we do? We should weaken the central state and restore ethos and decision making to the local level. Communities should have the right, for instance, to stop multi-nationals making all our town centres the same: at present, the huge majority of local planning objections are simply overturned on appeal to central government.
As for the market, there is too much capital and too few capitalists. There shouldn't be an exclusive wage-earning class; everybody should own something.
If Labour continues to insist on state dependency, the Conservatives should and could support the redistribution of wealth and enfranchise the working class with property, stability and security. In so doing, both the market and state might be limited and contained and we might be a society again. 
FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 15 2007
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Conservatives must reject capitalism
Blame the feral kids on the middle classes
What The Papers Say
