The Blair Administration is fighting a war on two fronts. Against the firefighters the Government scrambles to find a defensible line which it can hold from hour to hour, like the Wehrmacht falling back through trackless Baltic wastes before a disciplined Red Army. But on its other front, the Government’s progress is steady, disciplined and remorseless. As readers of this newspaper are discovering to their cost.

For years now ministers have been conducting a form of submarine warfare. The scale of the campaign has been shielded from view, with only the shrieks of those caught by the latest torpedo blast alerting others to the scale of the endless attrition. The Government’s enemies in this war, who are only just realising the scale of the assault, are Britain’s productive middle classes. They are the real losers in the defining fight of our time — the war on independence.

Although this Government is middle-class in form, with Blairite children at St Paul’s School for Boys and a Prime Minister more at home on the tennis court than on the terraces, it is deeply anti-bourgeois in practice. Like a radical Archbishop of Canterbury using the authority of his office to question the faithful’s beliefs, the Blair Government seeks the natural authority which comes from appearing to be of the respectable classes while all the time working to undermine the scale of values on which the respectable rely.

The British middle classes are defined not so much by income, or neighbourhood, as attitude. The values which define them are a belief in self-reliance, an aspiration to self-improvement, an attachment to respectability and an instinctive respect for property rights which manifests itself in attachment to home. These values are the foundation of national stability, culturalhealth and economic growth. And they are all under attack from this Government.

Self-reliance is undermined by the assault on saving built into Gordon Brown’s pension tax rises and it is mocked by the massive increase in the level of state dependency engineered by Treasury changes such as the tax credit system. Last year 22 per cent of families relied on the Government for half or more of their income. And the Government has relied on more and more middle-class money to fund that increase in dependency.

The principle of self-improvement, and the instinct to self-reliance, is also challenged by the Government’s education policy. Those who are public-spirited enough, and sufficiently devoted to their children, to pay for private education deserve the State’s gratitude. Anyone who can afford school fees will, by definition, already have paid handsomely through their taxes for the state education system yet they choose not to burden it. But far from enjoying either government gratitude, or even neutrality, such parents face outright hostility. Their children will be actively discriminated against when it comes to securing a university place, their futures will be blighted specifically because their parents chose to invest in them.

The middle classes’ attachment to respectability is the value which is undergoing the subtlest, but perhaps most long-lasting, damage. Marriage, a symbol of unselfish commitment not just to another individual but to the transmission of our shared culture, is now actively penalised by the State. Detailed work by the think-tank Civitas shows that for young couples at the bottom of the income ladder, who aspire to better themselves, marriage can cost up to a quarter of their income, after housing costs have been paid for.

As for the middle-class belief in the independence which comes from acquiring one’s own capital, that has been undermined, alongside the instinct to self-reliance, by the Chancellor’s tax changes. Stamp duties have risen on house purchases, with the Treasury pocketing a sum that amounts to half the average annual wage from the purchase of a standard London family home. Overall, taxes increased by £28 billion in the Government’s first four years of office, and still they grow, with next spring’s rise in national insurance contributions a clear breach of the Government’s pledge not to raise direct taxes on income. These increases deprive middle-class families of the sums with which they could make provision for themselves and feed a public sector which nearly all are compelled to use but on which none can safely rely.

The growth of Government is in itself an attack on independence, but even the middle classes who serve the State are under assault. Dependency on the Government muffles the cries of pain, but they are growing. Whether it is the decision of a leading Oxford academic like Richard Jenkyns to transfer to America, the rejection of a pay deal by consultants unhappy at the degree of political control they now have to endure, or the direct insubordination towards his political master shown last week by the Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Michael Boyce, those professionals who can are demonstrating their disaffection.

All this week the Government’s fight against the firefighters has been depicted by the naive as a re-run of Margaret Thatcher’s battle against the miners. The fatuity of the comparison between ministers’ stumbling response to the FBU and Thatcher’s resolution towards the NUM hardly needs spelling out. But what was truly important about Mrs Thatcher’s victory in that struggle was that it was part of a longer campaign against collectivism, an enduring crusade to promote what the academic Shirley Robin Letwin has called the “vigorous virtues”, the values of self-reliance, respectability and above all independence.

Now it is precisely those values, and their defenders, which are under long-term attack. Whoever wins this winter war of fire, the middle classes are undeniably losing their war of independence.

michael.gove@thetimes.co.uk