Britain is, by and large, a secular society (in my view, pleasingly so).  Yet we have seen an increasingly powerful campaign to reassert what are presented as Christian values.  We have free schools, building on New Labour’s promotion of faith schools (and Blair’s refusal to rule out the teaching of creationism); at the heart of the coalition’s Ideology Central, the Department of Work and Pensions  we have Philippa Stroud – a woman who notoriously belongs to a church that preaches that women must obey their husbands, and that gay people can be “cured” by prayer - as Special Adviser to the Secretary of State (having failed to secure a seat in Parliament).  Before the 2010 election, the Financial Times ran an important piece on the entryism of militant fundamentalist Christianity into the Conservative Party which, among other things, correctly predicted recent attempts to tighten abortion law. More recently we have had the extraodinary spectacle of George Carey, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, arguing in the context of a debate in the House of Lords about stripping the most vulnerable in society of their benefits that Government debt was the greater evil.  Carey’s inability to understand the parable of the good Samaritan is of course all of a piece with the terrible mess the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s got themselves over Occupy LSX  and  Christ’s ejection of the moneylenders from the temple  (it became rapidly clear that the moneylenders were the overseers of this particular temple) – and it has to be said that Carey would be a strong contender for the title of stupidest Archbishop in the See of Canterbury’s thousand-year history – but it does appear that organised Christianity is no stranger to moral and intellectual confusion.

At the same time, we’re being told – especially by the media – of the evils of militant Islam, and not the smallest irony of this situation is that the drive to Christianity is apparently being led by one of the most powerful Muslim women in public life.

What is the origin of this? And what does it mean?

We are living through the collapse of one of the grand narratives of our time.  Market capitalism is in a state of disintegration that can easily appear to be terminal.  It threatens the interests of the wealthy and powerful – and, unlike the 1930′s, total war and Keynes are not on hand to bail capitalism out.  There is a desperate need for another narrative which will reinforce existing power structures, and fundamentalist Christianity offers some potent examples.

Above all it provides a diversion from the economic and social forces at work – in particular, as inequality and unemployment soar it offers a convenient diversion from economic reality into moral and personal issues.  Your job may have disappeared, your house may be on the verge of dispossession, but at least you can blame and demonise those less virtuous than yourself – women, gays, atheists, the allegedly workshy, those who have sex a lot and enjoy it.  It provides a diversion.  One of the most remarkable examples of how a political establishment has persuaded large number of people to campaign against their own economic and political interests is the Tea Party in the US, bankrolled by billionaires and fuelled by moral indignation, cheap religion, myths about hard work bringing wealth and a belief that big government was the instrument of Satan.

But I think there is another key political problem at work here – what looks like a growing flight from reason in political discourse.  Increasingly there is a tendency for political debate to become a contest in which the winner is a politician who can make the biggest lie stick – again, the debate on benefits for the disabled illustrates this, through what appeared to be the deliberate briefing by the DWP of myths about Disability Living Allowance and the entitlement to Motability vehicles in particular.  Baroness Warsi’s comments certainly seem to draw heavily on tabloid myth – only the discredited old chestnut about Winterval is missing and, as so often with statements by senior Coalition Ministers, the shade of Theresa May’s cat looms large.

There is, as I have described before, a crisis of social and political legitimacy in Britain.  But it has nothing to do with a collapse of Christian values – real or imagined.  It is about a political class that increasingly represents only one view of society, and which is an active collaborator in a form of politics that looks increasingly like organised kleptocracy.  Taking away benefits from the poorest and most vulnerable in society while shoving the subsidy down the maw of failed banks – that’s what moral breakdown looks like.

But perhaps the most important aspect of the piece is what it reveals about the values that have become politically mainstream in Britain.

The arguments against hitting children are familiar and do not need to be repeated here.  The idea that violence by the powerful against the powerless is a legitimate way of dealing with disputes seems to me to be largely nonsense – nobody appears to suggest that disputes between adults who can hit each other back should be solved by violence, and the assumption seems to be that children cannot be trusted to understand any other kind of boundary. Lammy even comes close to repeating the old hypocrisy that you have to chastise physically in order to remove children from danger – as if physical removal were the same as angry hitting.

And nowhere is the question addressed – in the days when hitting was more widespread, less condemned than now, was there less or more violence in society? Lammy appeals – like so many more reactionaries before him – to Victorian values.  Where is his evidence that Victorian England was less violent, more peaceful, more contented than modern England?  Lammy is allegedly a clever man – it should not take him very long to discover that Victorian England was a very violent and insecure place indeed.  Responsible politics – especially on the left – is about debunking myths, not buying into them.

What matters in this case is the context.  The argument seems to be: thrash children into obedience and you won’t get riots – you’ll get disciplined people who go about their business lawfully.  In one phrase, you have accepted the idea that there is no such thing as society; people go on to the streets because they are individually undisciplined and violent, the products of lax parenting,  The causes of last summer’s rioting were many and complex – but neoliberalism has a powerful vested interest in denying the political and blaming the whole affair on the personal.  Were there riots in other European countries where hitting children is completely illegal?

Lammy’s comments are useful to Labour because they provide a means of rationalising its march away from the Welfare State and its embracing of neoliberal ideology.  It’s all of a piece with Ed Balls endorsing cuts, or Liam Byrne rewriting Beveridge’s support for universal benefits.  Above all, it’s a wonderful way of deflecting opinion away from the real crisis of legitimacy, and the economic warfare on the vulnerable, that appear increasingly to be the defining features of Con Dem Britain.

It’s an easy, populist move.  Outrage can be expressed and the decent thing can be seen to be done.

But it’s irrelevant.  The point about Goodwin is not that he had his snout in the trough while his bank failed, but that he is one of hundreds who did so – and continue to do so.  There’s a particular poignancy in the generation that were told by Thatcher to take out private pensions in the 1980s as the key to a prosperous old age now finding themselves struggling while the people who gambled away their pensions continue to prosper – and indeed enjoy the active support of politicians like Boris Johnson, who appears to believe that the sole purpose of the Mayor of London is to promote the interests of banking and finance.  Cameron makes a stand at Brussels against the proposal to write austerity economics into the EU constitution, not on behalf of the people whose lives would be affected by it, but to protect his friends in the City of London.  The Conservative Party remains overwhelmingly a party bankrolled by bankers and financiers.

Against this background, it’s worth remembering that Goodwin’s conduct, while reprehensible, does not appear to have been illegal. This contrasts with the activities of Lord Archer, who served a prison sentence for perjury, or Lord Hanningfield, who served a prison sentence for fiddling his House of Lords expenses.  Both continue to hold their titles, and in the case of Archer retain the Conservative whip.  Lord Taylor is suspended from Parliament but keeps his title.  Evidently there is no overriding principle that criminals forfeit their honours; it seems inconsistent that a man who remained within the law should do so.

This, then, is gesture politics. By removing Fred the Shred’s knighthood, Cameron and his allies can be seen to be doing something, while in fact doing nothing to deal with the root causes of what went wrong in 2008.  Cameron is in effect signalling business as usual to the City, and reminding them that the real offence is getting found out. It gives the illusion of action while avoiding calls for real reform.

The honours system has long been the whited sepulchre of the British establishment.  It evidently has not outlived that usefulness.

There has been some controversy about what Ed Balls actually meant in his comments about a future Labour government and cuts in an interview in last Saturday’s Guardian. The fact that so much ink has been spilt in trying to decipher Balls’ gnomic utterances is in itself part of Labour’s problem; an opposition that cannot express itself clearly has obviously got a problem. Those who defend Balls argue that he is simply being realistic – that by the time Labour comes to office it will confront a situation in which deep cuts have been made and which will form the baseline for what Labour does. But Balls went much further than that – he stated that public sector workers will continue to take pay cuts and public expenditure decisions that have eviscerated the living standards of the most vulnerable will not be reversed. It’s all very well to talk about the need to preserve jobs, but in doing so Balls has failed to notice that it is the economics of austerity that is putting jobs at risk. The clear message from Balls is that the poorest in society will continue to bear the costs of the failures of economic elites, and talking about tax evasion is no more than a cosmetic sop. He’s adopted the Tory axioms and assumptions and has allowed Cameron, Osborne and the Orange Bookers to drive the economic agenda.

This is serious, but not surprising. Labour has long since ceased to be a party that challenges the neoliberal ideology, but in the past the complicity has gone by default rather than being explicit. It seems to mark something of a turning point, though, in the tone of political debate; after a year and a half of coalition government, the Tory party is resurgent and appears to dominate debate.

But there’s a subtext too – one that is reflected in the current debate about independence for Scotland. I have spent quite a lot of cyber-ink on this blog talking about crises of democratic legitimacy; this appears to be the moment at which Westminster politics finally took leave of its democratic pretence. It’s not just the fact that a ruling party which dared not expose the extent of its ambitions to the electorate, and which achieved a little more a third of votes cast in 2010, is now left without any meaningful opposition to its imposition of  a feral neoliberal agenda – it’s that the ethos of the ruling coalition is defined, not by what it told the electorate in 2010, but what it tried to conceal. And now the official opposition has joined in.

Whatever that may be, it is not a healthy democracy. The large majority of the electorate did not vote for this – which is why the Westminster neoliberals use the language of necessity, of realism, of common-sense to describe a set of ideas and values which are largely unsupported by any empirical evidence. Austerity is failing and the burden of that failure is falling overwhelmingly, and in some cases almost exclusively, on the people who are least able to bear it, while the perpetrators of the latest round of crisis continue to enrich themselves. It need not and should not be like that, but there are no voices in the political mainstream with the courage or insight to say so.

The obvious implication is that opposition to neoliberalism must now take place entirely outside the Parliamentary process. Three mainstream political party share the same assumptions and debate across ever-shrinking territory while the real questions facing our society are all about the validity of their consensus.  It is impossible to see any realistic prospect of change within the three-party system that is not forced from outside (and which depends on the mainstream media). The neoliberals realise this – the closing down of public space, the criminalisation of protest and the active promotion of hatred for the poor and vulnerable demonstrate this. Consider the case of the students – many of whom voted Liberal Democrat in 2010, the first time they were able to vote, on the basis of Clegg’s promise on tuition fees; when Clegg and his party of fools and liars pissed on their idealism they took the path of legitimate protest only to find themselves collectively punished by kettling and beating. Of course there was a strong element of self-interest in the student movement; but what I remember from that first demonstration in November 2010 was a belief that they were upholding democracy and had yet to learn that this was how Westminster politics worked.  Or we could ask why the neoliberals are so afraid of the Occupy movement and have, especially in the United States, deployed such extreme violence against it.  The threat is not about a few dozen people establishing camps; it’s about the risk that questions will be asked and answers proffered that blow apart the fictions on which the elite justifies its power and wealth.

Above all, this is the Government – and now the opposition – that chose to abandon evidence. I mentioned the way on which the political elite has sought to demonise the vulnerable. It has done this through a combination of spin, insinuation and downright dishonesty.  Its guiding principle is not truth but pandering to the prejudices of a mass media which is, at almost every level, a fantasy factory. Those of us who have long understood the evidential base for climate change, or watchers of the US Republican primaries in recent weeks, or even followed the genesis of the Tea Party, will recognise the methods; it seems that all mainstream Westminster parties are striving for a politics of unsupported ideological statements in which victory goes to the producer of the most attractive lie. For all the language of realism and common-sense it is those who criticise neoliberalism from the Left who remain grounded in the world of evidence.

The sight of a political elite abandoning wholesale the intellectual disciplines of empiricism is deeply disturbing.  It’s very easy to criticise the position of the Republican Right; but our political mainstream is, in essence, no different. What Labour has done is make that abandonment of empiricism public and obvious.

Returning to Miliband and Balls, I for one am getting very fed up with hearing special pleading by people whose loyalty to Labour as an institution is greater than to the people on whose behalf Labour used to speak. Labour, after all, began as a movement to give a voice to the voiceless – to bring the trade unions, with their everyday experience of the daily lives of working people, into Parliament.  It now joins in a political consensus that diminishes those authentic voices, and spins away the witness of ordinary people about their lives.

First, it cannot be said strongly enough that where health and safety issues appear to be intruding on common-sense, it is almost always an exercise in back-minding prompted by concerns about insurance and litigation. Health and safety regulation, like much other regulation, provides a degree of certainty.  It provides a legislative framework supported by guidelines, to be interpreted on the basis of what is reasonable. Businesses and other undertakings are given clarity and guidance (which, in my experience as a civil servant, was what business always wanted from Government).  The alternative – a culture which is governed by private insurance and the threat of litigation – is far more likely to promote a culture of back-minding, because, faced with the risks and uncertainties of court rulings and the caprice of insurers, businesses will take the most cautious route.  What Cameron and his speechwriters don’t get is that regulation makes it clear what undertakings can do.  It’s actually potentially far more expensive and more restrictive than a properly-managed system of public regulation, especially where all those involved know their rights and obligations (something that is the cornerstone of health and safety legislation).  A Government which has an ideological disdain for the public sector has no stomach for the truth that health and safety culture – to the extent that it exists – is really a private sector problem, and that here, as in so much else, collective public regulation is the more efficient path.

Second, what does health and safety legislation actually require firms to do? It requires planning, training, awareness and diligent documentation.  Cameron has never worked in a productive environment, so he doesn’t understand that this is what successful and innovative organisations, in both public and private sectors, do.  Good health and safety practice will usually go in hand with good business practices and culture.  Cameron’s line is better suited to bucket-shops and companies obsessed with the short-term bottom line.  It’s symptomatic of a race to the bottom which equates economic success with becoming Europe’s offshore sweatshop. The statement that “health and safety are holding back business” implies any number of wholly ideological assumptions about what constitutes efficiency, productiveness and success.

One of the ironies is that Cameron rails against the need for businesses to carry out risk assessments.  Not only does he fail to realise that assessing risk is right at the heart of all project management disciplines – whether in the public or private sector – but that rolling back regulation is actually a massive transfer of risk to individuals and – especially through healthcare – the state. In effect, this is potentially a massive subsidy to bad employers. Is that what Cameron really wants?

Third, nowhere does the piece mention Europe.  Much Health and Safety legislation derives from the EU. How is Cameron planning to deal with this? True, the tenor of debate in Europe has moved to the right since much of this legislation was put in place.  But even so, Cameron’s adolescent posturing in Europe – more interested, it seems, in playing to the Eurosceptic lower fourth than securing Britain’s negotiating position – does not put the UK in a good position in future negotiations.  And what is he going to do about existing regulation? Ignore it, and face huge fines as a result?

Cameron’s posturing seems to me to point to one of the salient feaures of this Government – that it’s not actually interested in governing. It’s more interested in ill-informed populist grandstanding than dealing with the serious business of government.  And these particular statements are grounded in an ideological and ignorant misconception of how enterprises actually work, and show a disdain for evidence (and, one might add, a basic economic illiteracy) that is one of the hallmarks of the Coalition’s policy-making.

Perhaps the most alarming thing is that Molesworth remains relevant today; it’s about a lot more than nostalgia.  Sixty years on, the morality of the English public school system is still with us, and Searle and Willans’ characters still live.  Grabber, the school bully, destined for a lifetime of power and influence off the back of his father’s wealth; Grimes, offering  the appearance of moral leadership while holding his hand open for backhanders; the playing-field as the crucible of public morality, and putting on a show for parents’ day – the same ethos that characterises Cameron’s comments about the Olympics and the Jubilee in his new year’s message.  Above all – especially in Searle’s cartoons – the aura of decay and failure, of corruption and unjustified hierarchy and moral dissembling,  dressed up as a fit and honourable set of guidelines for life.

Molesworth and his best friend Peason represent an anarchical vigour that perhaps has found its best expression recently in movements like Occupy and UK Uncut – but what seems clear is that Britain remains in thrall to the values of St Custard’s. Orwell famously wrote that England was like a family where the wrong members were in control; Cameron and Clegg’s England looks increasingly like a decaying minor public school, clinging to discredited values while failing to recognise that the world has passed it by.

However, one of the stranger aspects of the whole business is that Liam Byrne makes these comments in the context of a forthcoming lecture on William Beveridge, and tries to portray himself as Beveridge’s legitimate heir.  It’s an interesting parallel to Nick Clegg trying to do the same in front of the Liberal Democrat conference last March.

It’s strange because Beveridge was a powerful advocate of universal benefits. And, following Beveridge, there are two types of  arguments; the practical and the political.

First, the practical – obviously if a benefit is universal it cannot be claimed fraudulently.  The moment you means test a benefit you have to set up an apparatus to evaluate claims, process paperwork, manage changes in circumstances, enforce against abuse (the last of which turns the state into enforcer where it should be enabler).  Universal benefits are cheap to administer, fair and in principle free of abuse.  Indeed the very act of means-testing introduces abuse into the system – abuse happens because people try to beat the rules and the suggestion that you can exclude abuse by tinkering with those rules is asinine.  More seriously – since there is little hard evidence of deliberate abuse – you introduce the risk of mistakes in the system, and you raise barriers that make it more difficult for people to claim their entitlement.  That is the position in Britain, where the amounts of benefit that go unclaimed are vastly greater than the amount of fraud.

Second, there is a serious political point about how universal benefits emphasise what one is entitled to as a citizen – the citizen is not a supplicant, and although some of those benefits may go to the middle classes who do not, in the strictest sense, need them they help make society more cohesive and ensure that those who depend on those benefits are not stigmatised.  It emphasises that we are, to coin a phrase, all in it together.  It is about society establishing that everyone is entitled to a decent minimum as a matter of right.

Where would Beveridge stand today? It’s worth remembering that for Beveridge, enforced idleness was a terrible social evil.  The level of mass unemployment among young people in particular under the Con Dems would have horrified him; the idea that mass unemployment was a price worth paying for clearing a deficit caused by the fecklessness of the bankers would have repelled Beveridge’s old-fashioned sense of morality and probity. And he saw a National Health Service as an absolute condition of a decent society.

The narrative of benefit scroungers is an ideological myth. Yes, there is undoubtedly abuse, but compared with the £16 billion of unclaimed benefit each year and the squalor and despair of mass unemployment, it is minor.  If Labour was a decent party, true to its roots in Trade Unionism, in Christian socialism and Fabian improvement, and retained a shred of the decency and compassion that drove its founders, it would have the moral courage to stand up to the myth and debunk it.  As R H Tawney wrote in his great essay on the choices before the Labour Party following the split of 1931, “to kick over an idol you must first get up off your knees.”

But Labour’s leaders no longer have that decency – the latest pronouncement reflect their policy in Government and in opposition.  They’re quite happy it seems to dance along to the Tories’ ideological tunes and abandon the people on whose behalf they once spoke.  The poorest in society – single mothers on benefits – have seen their real income fall by nearly 20% in the past year. There are many people for whom Miliband and Byrne’s latest pronouncement are enough, and have packed up their Labour membership.  Others who choose to stay should examine their consciences – and understand why a growing number of people on the Left see Labour as part of the problem, and nothing to do with the solution.

And, please, could they, and Clegg, have the decency to leave Beveridge out of this.

It’s an understandable sentiment.  The Oxford degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics has long been seen as the prime qualification for a career in British party politics.  As it happens, thirty years ago I was reading PPE at Oxford; the more I reflect on the course I pursued the more it seems to be a key part of the British political malaise.

To be fair, a glance at the Oxford University website suggests that the course has broadened a bit since then. However, the course structure I followed is likely to have been what those at the peak of the British political elite will have read, and on reflection what characterises the course from those days is how little you could get away with learning.

In the 1980s the core politics course was all about institutions in Britain, the US and France and British political history; philosophy was about the British empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) with a cursory nod towards logical positivism, and moral philosophy; economics was a bit of theory and the organisation of the British economy.  If you were doing all three subjects, these subjects accounted for six out of your eight final papers.

The implication was that you could get a First in PPE without reading a word of Marx or Kant or Plato, or studying any politics of developing nations (or the economics of development), or without reading any continental philosophy apart from Descartes, or without doing any political or sociological theory, or studying philosophical method (a series of worries about the basis of economic theory led me to do an optional paper in social scientific theory – I think in my year the number of entrants in this fascinating and fundamental area barely reached double figures).  Of course for those who wanted to do something more rigorous and worthwhile there was a big range of options, but the fact remained that you could get away with doing what with hindsight looks very much like the sort of broad-based and superficial curriculum that resembles one of those general-studies A level courses that Russell Group universities are quick to point out don’t really count. And it’s a consensual and safe curriculum – it’s one that enables the ambitious but intellectually incurious to spend three years without having their assumptions really challenged.

And not just with hindsight – I had a vacation job working alongside a colleague who was studying philosophy at what was then Staffordshire Polytechnic, and it very quickly emerged that she was doing a more rigorous, stimulating and comprehensive course than I was at Oxford. And I recall the raised eyebrows when, having been awarded a College prize in Philosophy in my final year, I chose to spend the book tokens that came with it on, inter alia, a copy of Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies – a key political and philosophical text of the twentieth century, but one that Oxford ignored. My own experience is that such understanding of politics and economics as I possess now derives overwhelmingly from my reading since leaving Oxford, not what I learned there.

In other words, PPE – certainly as it was when the current British political class was studying it – is not remotely a gold standard for intellectual rigour.  Oxbridge is itself a problem – it remains, along with the rest of the Russell Group, a reminder that the hierarchy of academic achievement in Britain is every bit as much about class and privilege as it is about academic ability, continuing to draw on a minority of the intensively-coached privileged for a proportion of its intake that has remained broadly unchanged in thirty years.  But the idea that PPE gives one the intellectual grounding to deal with the problems facing our society seems to me to be entirely false.

And a society with the depth and nature of the problems that we have cannot afford to indulge in this sort of lazy intellectual idolatry.

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It’s worth though taking a moment to reflect on the significance of Popper.  Written in exile in wartime New Zealand, Popper’s great work The Open Society and its Enemies is both a tome for its times and a work that has acquired totemic value in some rather unlikely circles.  It is at one level a counterblast for empiricism against ideology – but in the 1980s, with the active encouragement of the older Popper himself, it became associated with free-market liberalism.  Popper was a stauch supporter of Margaret Thatcher, who reciprocated the admiration.  But it’s quite obvious that the method Popper deploys against Plato, Marx and Hegel can also be turned on neoliberalism – which, even more so than in the 1980s, appears to have lost all sense of empirical grounding.

Clegg writes:

We British are an open-spirited people. But we are hobbled by closed institutions. By instinct we believe in fair play and giving everyone a fair chance in life.
But our politics and economy are distorted by unaccountable hoards of power, wealth and influence: media moguls; dodgy lobbyists corrupting our politics; irresponsible bankers taking us for a ride and then helping themselves to massive bonuses; boardrooms closed against the interests of shareholders and workers. The values of the hoarders are increasingly out of touch with the spirit of openness alive in the UK.
It is not often you’ll hear me say this, but I agree with Tony Blair. In his words “the big difference is no longer between left and right, it is between open and closed”.
So what is an open society?

It is a society where powerful citizens are free to shape their own lives. It has five vital features:

i) social mobility, so that all are free to rise;

ii) dispersed power in politics, the media and the economy;

iii) transparency, and the sharing of knowledge and information;

iv) a fair distribution of wealth and property; and

v) an internationalist outlook

By contrast a closed society is one in which:

i) a child’s opportunities are decided by the circumstances of their birth

ii) power is hoarded by the elite

iii) information is jealously guarded

iv) wealth accumulates in the hands of the few, not the many; and

v) narrow nationalism trumps enlightened internationalism

Closed societies – opaque, hierarchical, insular – are the sorts of society my party has opposed for over a hundred and fifty years.

The obvious question, of course, is just what planet Clegg thinks he’s living on. If you wanted to list the essential political agenda of the coalition of which he is a (admittedly not very influential) part, it would look awfully like those five characteristics of the closed society. Whether Clegg is simply delusional, or now so impotent in Government that the only outlet he has for his beliefs is making sideswipes at Tories in obscure lectures to think-tanks, is not something I could judge.  But it is obvious that by almost every test that Clegg sets for the open society, the coalition is failing.  We are becoming less equal, social mobility has undoubtedly fallen (the man who has perhaps done more than anyone to keep able children from poorer backgrounds to get a higher education touches dizzying heights of hypocrisy in this passage), wealth has been ruthlessly redistributed from poor to rich, and Clegg’s government has in eighteen months probably done more to damage Britain’s relations with Europe than a decade of Thatcher’s relentless handbagging.  And at every stage Liberal Democrat MPs and Peers have meekly trooped through the lobbies to vote the Tory agenda.  Whatever you may think of Popper’s writing, he was a courageous and outspoken individual in a way that Clegg and his party simply could not begin to comprehend.

But one issue that Clegg ignores is that of empiricism.  This Government has done more than any in recent history to take Government away from an evidential to an ideological base.  In every sphere this has been the case – look at the recent committment to increase motorway speed limits – but most of all it has been true in the economic sense.  At the heart of the Coalition agenda is an economic policy that is built on delusion and faith – the faith that reducing public expenditure  will encourage prosperity.  It is a statement for which there is absolutely no empirical evidence, and is based on pure ideology and faith in the confidence fairy.  Social policy is based on ideological tropes about the family and morality that simply do not stand up to empirical scrutiny.  And party politics is based on three parties slugging it out across an ideological consensus that is increasingly detached from the daily realities of life for the vast majority of the population.

Popper feared the triumph of ideology.  The government of which Clegg is nominally a leading member is delivering exactly that.