The big political question of the coming decades is how to find a socially acceptable means of dismantling democracy.How can Middle England trust the present cast of parliamentary degenerates to lead us into this Brave New World? How can we expect leadership from those who get elected by kissing babies, and stay there by kissing backsides? The Tories, apologists for an aristocracy, have chosen the wrong aristocracy: yesterday’s rather than tomorrow’s. The politics of envy is suicide.Democracy will degenerate to being the means of governing the immobile and dependent service workers. That citizens elect their slave masters makes their democracy slavery none the less. Democracy is an artefact from a time when the masses were needed. The “will of the people” voting for full employment, a minimum wage and fair taxation is merely turkeys voting for Christmas. It must represent success not failure; but in the Information Age, governments chosen by the majority are governments chosen by losers.

Government, like every other enterprise, will have to survive on the efforts of an elite few. The new Criminal Justice legislation is just the first step to the reinvention of the Poor Laws.The state must behave as an economic institution, a national firm judged against the new economic circumstances No state has an automatic right to exist. Those tax-payers will demand restrictions on the mobility of travellers in return for their charity. The self-glamorising “New Age travellers” cannot disguise the fact that they are just a bunch of nomadic losers, whose survival depends on handouts from the tax-payer. The disposable income of the majority will be drastically reduced.

The rich are getting richer, and the poor poorer: the future is inequality.At the bottom of the heap we are witnessing an expanding underclass The streets of London are again littered with beggars. In the winter of 1995, French workers and students took to the streets against Alain Juppe’s government in a futile defence of their cradle-to- grave health and welfare systems. But as the peasants were protesting in Paris, the “gnomes of London” were profiting from speculation.The slow redistribution of wealth that has occurred over the last centuries is being rapidly reversed. Dissent is fermenting, and normally law-abiding citizens, who have nothing to lose, are being sucked into a culture of protest and crime.