Moreover, remember that wildly inflated fuel prices, falling particularly hard on the poor (including very many of the old), are being enforced as part of the war against secure and skilled employment, against the paternal authority thus possessed of the necessary economic basis, against global economic development, against travel by us common people, and against our access to the meat that we are designed to eat.

Recent economic figures have shown that the government urgently needs to adopt a Plan B for the economy. As economists and academics, we know the breakneck deficit-reduction plan, based largely on spending cuts, is self-defeating even on its own terms. It will probably not manage to close the deficit in the planned time frame and the government's strategy is likely to result in a lot more pain and a lot less gain.

These are the foundation of a real alternative and it is time the government adopted it.

The “green” bit wants watching. But apart from that it is most heartening to see someone standing up to the ridiculous notion that the way to restore prosperity is to make people too poor to buy anything, or to dismantle key infrastructure, as well as the equal absurdity that a deficit can be reduced by the transformation of purchasing, tax-paying people into benefit claimants.

Come to that, of course there is a deficit. There is a recession. Of course there is a huge deficit. There is a huge recession, the result of 30 years of the economic policies advocated by the likes of George Osborne and the Orange Book Lib Dems, including the supporters of Tony Blair and David Miliband. Complaining about a deficit during a recession, or about an enormous deficit during an enormous recession, is like complaining about the rain: it cannot be stopped, and its benefits will in any case become apparent in the fullness of time.

Now that the debate is open again after a generation and more, let it be joined in earnest.

A domestic manufacturing base, a largely domestic food supply, and ownership of our own industries and resources by our own citizens, are all integral to national sovereignty, including national security. Nothing has weakened the Union more than the dismantlement of the nationalised industries, which created communities of interest among the several parts of the United Kingdom, and many of which had the word “British” in their names.

Quite possibly the most important of all the State’s duties is to guarantee the economic basis of paternal authority. Few things, if any, did this better than the digging of coal to power a country largely standing on it. The same can be said of nuclear power.

Requiring a union card is no different from requiring a British passport or a work permit. It was as wrong to silence the voice of the aristocratic social conscience by abolishing hereditary barons as to silence the voice of organised labour by abolishing trade union barons. One way or another, both of those voices must be heard again, just as the economic safeguards of national sovereignty, of the Union and of paternal authority must be restored.

We cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level.

Climate change must not be used as an excuse to destroy or prevent secure employment, to drive down wages or working conditions, to arrest economic development around the world, to forbid the working classes and non-white people from having children, to inflate the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, or to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.

If we believe in the social, cultural and political need for a large and thriving middle class, then we have to support and deliver the very extensive central and local government action without which such a class cannot exist.

There is no private sector, at least not as that term is ordinarily employed. Not in any advanced country, and not since the War at the latest. Take out bailouts or the permanent promise of them, take out central and local government contracts, take out planning deals and other sweeteners, and take out the guarantee of customer bases by means of public sector pay and the benefits system, and what is there left? They are all as dependent on public money as any teacher, nurse or road sweeper. Everyone is.

And with public money come public responsibilities, including public accountability for how those responsibilities are or are not being met, accountability and responsibilities defined by classical, historic, mainstream Christianity as the basis of the British State and as the guiding inspiration of all three of this State’s authentic, indigenous, popular political traditions.

Privatisation, globalisation, deregulation and demutualisation have turned out, in the most spectacular fashion, to have been anything but fiscally responsible. The same is true of a generation of scorn for full employment, leading to the massively increased benefit dependency of the 1980s and the institutionalisation of that mass indolence down to the present day.

The transfer of huge sums of public money to ostensibly private, but entirely risk-free, companies in order to run schools, hospitals, railways, rubbish collections, and so many other things: is that fiscally responsible? Bailing out the City at all, never mind so that it can carry on paying the same salaries and bonuses as before: is that fiscally responsible? Even leaving aside more rarefied academic pursuits, is it fiscally responsible to allow primary education, or healthcare, or public transport, or social housing to fall apart? Is that good for business? Are wars of aggression fiscally responsible? Are military-industrial complexes?

Will it be fiscally responsible to allow the private health insurance companies to charge the American taxpayer whatever they like, because the absence of a public option or a single-payer system was the price of the votes of Blue Dog Democrats who still voted against the Bill anyway and of wavering Republicans who turned out not to exist at all? Not by coincidence have those who have insisted on a Healthcare Bill without the public option also insisted on a Healthcare Bill with less protection for the child in the womb. In the same spirit did Margaret Thatcher give Britain abortion up to birth, entirely of a piece with the rest of her legacy, which is of unconservative irresponsibility, fiscal as much as every other kind.

Far from our having grown richer since 1979, we have in fact grown vastly poorer: only a generation ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today. This impoverishment has been so rapid and so extreme that most people, including almost all politicians and commentators, simply refuse to acknowledge that it has happened. But it has indeed happened. And it is still going on.

When will there be a political party to give voice to the opinion of most Telegraph and Mail readers, of most habitual Tory voters, and of most Tory councillors and activists, out here in the country at large? Previously confined to Neil Clark's column on the Morning Star, as of today it is apparently the editorial position of the Daily Mail. That newspaper might start campaigning against Loony Right councils, as once it campaigned against Loony Left ones. It could start with Birmingham, which is outsourcing municipal jobs to India.

There are those who, since even the forced nationalisation of several leading banks could not convince them, are certainly not going to be convinced by the nationalisation of a network of care homes whose bills are already paid by the council. But even so, how much longer is the swivel-eyed privatisation, globalisation, worker-bashing and war-mongering of the lost generation that began with the death of John Smith going to be presented as "the centre ground"?

There is the most urgent need for a political movement open to everyone whose priorities include any or all of the Welfare State, workers’ rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement and wider mutualism, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, public ownership, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, civil liberties, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, traditional structures and methods of education, traditional moral and social values, economic patriotism, balanced migration, a realist foreign policy, an unhysterical approach to climate change, and a base of real property for every household to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State.

Precisely what form that will take will depend on the outcome of the AV referendum, and in the event of a No vote on the success or otherwise of Peter Hain’s proposal for affiliated consultees.