In which the author draws a line between Purves and Balls, but begins with a don. A week or so ago, during the conference of the American Historical Association in Atlanta, Georgia, the history professor, Felipe Fernández-Armesto sought to cross the street between the Hyatt and Hilton hotels. Early in his short trip Professor FFA was told to stop by a man in what the historian described later as “a rather louche garment”, which was in fact the zipped bomber-jacket part of the uniform of the Atlanta PD. This failure to recognise the weeds of the local plod helped to earn Professor FFA some bruises, a kick, manacles, a charge of jaywalking (subsequently dropped) and eight hours in a particularly offensive part of Cell Block D.

When I read this I thought of Libby Purves and of many of our readers. In a splendid polemic last week, Libby extended outwards from an unpleasant rail journey in East Anglia after a European holiday, and discovered a nation profoundly at unease with itself. This was “slum Britannia” with its “all-pervading sense of reduced citizenship and snarling neglect”. One had the impression that she’d rather have stayed away, and — from the extraordinary response that article provoked — that a large number of you would have liked to stay there with her.

In France, perhaps, where the riots in the incomparably bleak suburbs or banlieues of Paris and other cities raged for weeks last year. To Australia maybe, where a mass fight between thousands of white and Middle-Eastern boys took place along the Sydney beach line last winter. Or Atlanta, where historians can be wrestled to the ground, manhandled, and held in chokey, because they’ve crossed the road.

So, not for the first time I found myself wondering whether I am not one of the lucky two or three people in the whole of Britain whose quality of life is not rapidly deteriorating. Our primary school has been refurbished, the teachers are better paid, the waiting time for cataract operations was reduced by 90 per cent between my first and second operation; and, while this may seem trivial, rubbish collection and street-cleaning in most of London is far better than it was 20 years ago. It’s all not quick enough, of course. For some people, such as those with children with disabilities, life is a struggle. But the shrieks of “it’s going to the dogs” seem to me not so much exaggerated as vaguely demented. If I had to choose my two totems of modern Britain they would be the person who commutes from the country to the city “for the children” and the cabbie who tells me he’s playing golf after this fare, and have I ever been to St Lucia, because it’s great.

I also can’t help noticing the contradictions in the Great National Whinge, such as the desire to have fast new trains on fast new tracks, combined with the British determination to thwart almost any novelty through deployment of public inquiries and petitions. You can imagine what would happen in Nimbyville if the Fat Controller simply turned up one day with a 200-mile-long compulsory purchase order.

But my colleague has captured a mood of almost existential malaise. We’re crap (or carp, as my spellchecker keeps on trying to get me to say). Either we’re victims of horrible officialdom or, according to Neal Lawson of the Labour left Compass ginger group, we’re “a society of smug complacency”, in which people wallow in “the anaesthetised contentment of our consumerised lives”, while “injustice, poverty, corruption, insecurity and disaffection sweep our nation”. Well, this is also the country of the minimum wage and Make Poverty History, and the country whose social policies Paul Krugman, the progressive economist, last week recommended to any new American Administration. Even so, Mr Lawson may be right in thinking that the current angst does have some political causes. While it’s clear to me that this isn’t a bad country, even though it’s manifestly imperfect, I also think that people are losing sight of what is essentially good about it. One of the big motifs at the moment — and the reason why atheism is under such intellectual assault — is the idea that religion, involving the individual in something bigger than themselves, is the coming ideology. Religion brings people together to pray, be charitable, feel communal and — sometimes — think themselves better than unbelievers or people of other religions. Socialism was similar.

For me the banner bright is that of liberal democracy. This great cause is the right of anyone to vote, of anyone to stand for election, for voters to make and unmake governments, for anyone pretty much, short of incitement, to say and publish what they like. It is as great a cause in Britain as it is in South America or Africa or China. I say that the worst democracy is preferable to the best tyranny.

There are plenty of people who don’t agree with this, and who want to remake or keep societies as theocracies or patriarchies or popular dictatorships. In other words, there is actually a fight on, but we are incredibly reluctant — embarrassed almost — to take part in it. We are either apologetic about liberal democracy (“of course, not everyone wants it”, though how you know this without a vote is hard to calculate), or even lazily, almost treacherously, cynical. And modern liberal democracy, unlike religions, demands nothing from us. We don’t have to vote, we don’t have to join political parties, we don’t seem to have to do a damn thing. That, it seems to me, is the problem. With no fight, we fall back on religion or despair.

And that’s where we come to Balls. At the weekend the Chancellor’s main man, Ed Balls, was talking about the struggle against Islamist ideology. He drew a parallel between today and the Cold War. During the Cold War, he said, we’d fought against totalitarianism (what do you mean “we”, paleface?) with the weapons of culture. We’d used publications, books, films, everything we could, to join ideological battle with Soviet-style Communism. Had we done the same thing, he asked, in the fight against Islamism and authoritarianism?

The answer is no, we haven’t. We’ve been too busy complaining about the trains.

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