The middle class have not abdicated their responsibilities--they have simply changed their priorities. There is not enough time in the average middle class life style to maintain cultural standards and at the same time to ensure that the next generation of young engineers and technicians are suitably qualified to maintain an increasingly complex society.

Every time you look around you and see a technically complex society working: planes flying; mobile phone networks operating; , increasingly complex hospitals operating; thank the middle class because they are doing their job and ensuring that there are sufficient suitably motivated young men and women going through the system to keep the whole thing going. It isn't easy but it is being done and it is being done by middle class parents making sacrifices and planning ahead--and it was ever thus

So nice to read a good old fashioned Jeremiad and duck the approbrium of having to write it myself. I thought that my poor assessment of British society was conditioned by watching the Bill, but I am sure Alexander is right. His observations are backed by trenchent criticism of modernity that is coming thick and fast from writers with a theological orientation. Not least of these is Rowan Williams with his "Lost Icons". Alexander is also right in not looking to government for the solution, we do not have to reinvent the wheel. A deeper analysis will show that our malaise grows from our loss of the story at the base of Western Society and only a recovery of that story will help.
Peter Sellick

Alexander Dean is a shining light in a sea of weakness and self deprication.The west have been too ashamed of their achievements and allowed themselves to be brow beaten by a bunch leftist under achievers.

We had the discipline,respect,work ethic ,trust and a mission to rise above our immediate self indulgences.Yes some things needed to be changed, but we threw the baby out with the bath water.

the middle class- talk talk talk , drinka the vino , spenda da money ,buy the new car and dodga the tax.

kartiya ,you are making reference to the upper class.The middle class are the managers and motivators of people .This is the hardest and most productive engine room in our economy,not some impotent bureaucrat intent on making us all dependant upon Govt handouts and thus expanding their own public service empires.

marvellous article. Responses seeem to me to miss an obvious connection ~ that we did not get the way we are by accident. When researching my recent book "Rymill, his life and times" I remembered our library in Benalla had an interesting-looking title "We Will Bury You" by (Colonel)Jan Sejna, Sidgewick & Jackson 1982. I found the book had been withdrawn, and delated from the computer. But the librarian remembered having it. I finally bought it, from America.
Colonel Sejna was the highest-ranking defector from the USSR to the west, and worked in a Czech espionage organisation which should have been called, briefly, "How to muck up the West". All those valid points in the "abdication" article were carefully planned and executed from there, mostly by visiting western trade-union delegations. Slightly disappointing that Education and Churches did not come under his personal authority. The book's title is a quote from Khruschev ~ well, they buried themselves first, but not without doing us endless ongoing harm in every facet of our lives. No wonder Moslems think we are degenerate. Where will we end? Perhaps the Iraq war repercussions will eventually force us to behave a bit better.
Rosemary.