'The great abdication' of the middle classes

On a deeper level, all the dominant cultural and intellectual forces of our age are now battling against traditional respectability, so it is understandable if the middle classes are inclined to give up the fight. Throughout the public services, the BBC, the universities, schools, the London literary scene, Westminster, local government, and the arts, notions of morality and domestic responsibility are seen as either ludicrously bourgeois or dangerously extreme.

Such ideas do not fit in with the all-pervasive agenda of social inclusion and non-judgmentalism. The values of suburbia have been turned into a source of shame. In the name of the war on elitism, university admissions, for example, are now quite explicitly biased against the middle class, while in publishing, authors are far more likely to see their books published if they can weave a tale of racism, poverty, child abuse or gritty back-street drama.

In our civic life, every fashionable ideology has been dragooned into the attempt to undermine the middle class. So multi-culturalism continually stresses the importance of diversity, warning against any imposition of a universal moral code. For the pseudo-Marxists who fill the higher ranks of the state sector and academia, every sign of middle-class elitism must be eliminated in what amounts to a new kind of cultural revolution. The burgeoning therapeutic and counselling industry encourages the belief that every feeling, no matter how reprehensible or enfeebling, is valid, that self-expression is all. In the same way, an army of lawyers encourage the shrill emphasis on personal rights rather than wider social responsibilities.

All this is the utter antithesis of traditional middle-class values of self-reliance, self-improvement and respectability. And it is no wonder that Britain is in such crisis, when the middle-class are taught to be ashamed of the very qualities that once built a cohesive society.

I believe it is time to stop wallowing in guilt and self-indulgence. No one is going to challenge the current disastrous drift of public policy except the middle classes. If they could only find the courage to speak out against vulgarity and barbarity, against communal neglect and neighbourhood indifference, then the tide might begin to turn and we could start to build a better Britain on the solid foundations that the middle classes once provided.

The fact that something is wrong with Britain does not mean that it is government's job to fix it. Indeed, it is this over-reliance on government that has led to some of this trouble in the first place, as government itself is often at fault. And, as individuals have abdicated responsibility, they have asked not what they can do for society, but when government is going to get round to doing it for them.

Passing laws is not the remedy. Increasingly, ours is a society governed by the letter of the law, rather than by a sense of what is right. Instead, we should insist that people know, or should, know, right from wrong, and understand basic human virtues. Government can only follow a moral agenda once it is given both the spur and the legitimacy to do so by popular opinion.

We must generate that opinion ourselves. No-one else will do it for us.