In Suicide of a Nation?, a collection of pieces published under the auspices of Arthur Koestler in 1963, he saw Britain as a cross between a lion and an ostrich. For us, he wrote, “reality was an irritating word invented by foreigners”. So we could afford to keep our head in the sand, in the conviction that when the next crisis turned up we could pull it out and transform ourselves into lions, as we had done after the era of appeasement in the Second World War. For Koestler, complacency of this order was a recipe for suicide.

There seems a suicidal strain in our thinking all right as we contemplate the reality of our novel position as the economic laggards of the Western world, with galloping unemployment in the short term and an eternity of debt thereafter. But we should relax our finger on the trigger long enough to consider the grounds for hope. For me the most promising is the process of national purgation we have recently begun.

I don’t just mean the cleansing of the parliamentary stables, or the shock economic treatment we are steeling ourselves to undergo, though both could bring long-term benefits. Venality, excess, smugness and self-indulgence have not been confined to bankers and MPs: they are there in the culture of the country, and it is in our readiness to face up to this that the dawn of a new realism is to be found.

In the question mark in his title even Koestler, an admirer of the British — and especially British women — left open a chink of hope. Our very tolerance can be a culpable trait (mere “indolence of disposition” in Hazlitt’s superb phrase), but when we have finally had enough of something the country gives a great impatient heave and that thing is done with for ever.

Here and there are signs of that mighty heave of exasperation coming on. Socially it is there in the realisation that the life of whole communities cannot be indefinitely poisoned by a minority of delinquent families. People are beginning to stand up for the right to a civilised life, and the policy of appeasement of the young barbarians practised by local councils, the police and the judiciary are coming under challenge.

In education, soothing official claims of steadily improving standards are being steadily refuted, as the size of the gap in achievement between state and independent schools — the biggest in the Western world — sinks in. Transposed from race to class, the old blues number “If you’s white, you’s alright, if you’s brown, stick aroun’, but if you’s black, oh brother, get back get back get back” neatly describes the career prospects of many a private, grammar and comprehensive pupil.

The leadership of the Conservative Party stands as an ironic symbol of everything Labour has failed to achieve for social promotion in Britain. Meanwhile, the price of a university degree rises as its value plummets, although — mirabile dictu — the students themselves are demanding more and better teaching. More hope.

Anger about excessive rewards for mediocre performance is spreading far beyond the banks. The BBC, an organisation seen until recently as a national treasure not to be held to account, is under scrutiny as never before, as viewers compare our public service fare with commercially produced programmes of the quality and honesty of the The Wire. We have the actors, but not, it seems, the honesty.

The arts are another area where assumptions of effortless superiority are finally being pricked. At the onset of the recession it was common to read that, certainly the economy was not at its best but, by Jove, we were continuing to show the world who was master in the arts. The truth is that for every bonus bubble in the City there is a corresponding art bubble, with indecent rewards to match.

By their reluctance to make mature judgments, our least critical critics — for the most part middle-class folk in search of an insurrectionary image and perpetual youth — show their age. Now even they are being forced to recognise that there could be limits to the talents of Damien Hirst, and that the directors of the Wallace Collection should be ashamed of themselves for displaying his amateurish figurative tat. Then there was the sub-Warholian Trafalgar Square plinth, with its army of tawdry exhibitionists claiming their hour of fame, a spectacle so demeaning to the nation and its people that it was thought best not to talk about it at all. In our reaction to the culture of overexposure there are people ready to wonder whether it is possible to have a surfeit of Stephen Fry.

As reality bites, an era of national puffery is drawing to a close. Bloated reputations are under siege, along with plans for bloated airports, not so much for the travelling British public as for the convenience of shopaholic transit passengers and the rental revenues of a Spanish-owned airport company. It is good to see BAA getting the message about the third runway, especially if you live in West London and your suicidal tendencies are brought on by the sound of the first flight grazing your rooftop at 4.30am.

An all-party House of Commons group has even found the courage to question whether, on environmental as well as public expenditure grounds, it is wise to puff up the population of the most crowded region in Europe by the equivalent of another London or two over the next couple of decades. Of course, you could write off Frank Field, one of its leading lights, as a white supremacist, a eugenicist and proto-Nazi, but in our new mood of sobriety few might be convinced.

There are still plenty of people who prefer to keep their heads down and avoid the trouble of reflecting about how exactly we propose to project the former lustre of our sceptred isle into the future. But the ostrich in us may at last be starting to wonder how a country that spends its life with its brains underground and its rump in the air looks to the world.

Rumps are for kicking, and I see evidence that we may finally be ceasing to celebrate our gift for self-deprecation as yet another world-beating virtue and beginning to kick ourselves not jokily, but soundly, with a purpose. What is the point of a national crisis if it is not used to take on entrenched thinking, and effect painful reform?

Do not underestimate the invigorating effect. There is nothing like a questioning of outworn pieties and evasions to perk up a despondent country, and restore its will to live. If ever there was a time for the British lion to let out a Metro Goldwyn roar of anger, it is now.

George Walden is a former Conservative MP. His latest book is China: A Wolf in the World?

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