Walking across Trafalgar Square the other day I paused before the statue of General Charles Napier. And I realised where we'd gone wrong as a country.

I knew of Napier for two reasons. He was the classically educated soldier whose one-word telegram made diplomatic history. And, 150 years before the Archbishop of Canterbury offered his thoughts on Sharia, he provided the most powerful refutation of that cleric's case. The telegram? Well, immediately after taking control of a particular South Asian province in the 1840s, Napier sent to London the single-word message “Peccavi”. Latin for “I have sinned”, or in Napier's case on that occasion, Sindh.

The story of that pun might earn Napier an appreciative footnote in any imperial history. What secures him a more substantial presence in any chronicle of Britain's past is his response to the suggestion that the practice of suttee be allowed to continue, as part of a sort of “parallel jurisdiction” to the law he was asked to police as the Commander-in-Chief of the Queen's Forces in India. Napier listened politely to the request and replied: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

The world has moved on since Napier's day and it's not my intention here either to bang on about the lack of classical knowledge among our principal public servants or lament the decline in the robustness with which our leaders reject claims for special treatment from minority groups that wish to see their faith-based customs trump the existing legal code.

No, what struck me with particular force as I stood there admiring the memorial to the general was the inscription below. The statue of Napier, it recorded, had been erected by “public subscription”, with the major part of the costs coming from “private soldiers”. It wasn't the state that had secured a memorial for Napier, but society. It wasn't a committee that had raided the Exchequer for the funds to secure this work of art, but fighting men who had set aside a little of their salaries, or their pensions, to erect a memorial to the man who had led them.

Just a few yards away is Trafalgar Square's “Fourth Plinth”. Designed to accommodate an equestrian statue in 1841, it was left vacant for decades. Since 1999 it has been earmarked as a site for changing displays of new work. It is currently occupied by a geometric structure fashioned from plates of coloured glass by the German artist Thomas Schütte. It is called Model for a Hotel 2007 and is described as “sculpture, model and architecture all in one. It is also, at the same time, a commentary on the present”. Indeed it is.

Model for a Hotel will, shortly, be replaced by one of a number of other works being considered by a committee. Among the possible replacements are a sculptural representation of a group of meerkats (by Tracey Emin), a burnt-out car designed to remind us of the evil of the Iraq war and an illuminated “peace sign” powered by sun and wind. The committee, which includes Ekow Eshun of the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Channel 4's Jon Snow, will let us know what will be put on the plinth later this year.

Now I have nothing against Snow or Eshun. But I wonder how many of the shortlisted works would, like the statue of Napier, be able to cover their costs of design and production by public subscription? Indeed, I wonder how many private soldiers would dip into their pensions to pay for a collection of bronze meerkats or subsidise the erection of a structure in the centre of the capital designed to portray an enterprise that required their courage and self-sacrifice as so much empty wickedness?

I don't need another reminder that the chattering classes regard our presence in Iraq as an ongoing and unassuageable crime. I get all that anyway from Channel 4 News every night. But my own personal taste, and views, as someone with his own platform in public life, shouldn't come into it.

And that's my point. I've already got my own plinth from which to project my world view. As have Snow, Eshun and their colleagues on their committee. So why are they taking over another one? Why is it that in choosing a piece of significant public art, the public aren't thought fit to decide? Why, when it comes to distributing largesse and cultural favours, is it a committee of those who have already commandeered a large slice of public largesse and already enjoy cultural favour, who get to dole out the goodies? And why do committees and quangos made up of members of the cultural Establishment so often decide where public money goes without the public's wishes or sentiments ever being decisive?

My own suggestion is that the fourth plinth should be occupied by the work of art, or memorial to an individual, best capable of mobilising public support and, crucially, their freely given cash. And then we'll see how many objects that trash the values of our best and bravest get commissioned.

My own prejudice is against the presumption that the public can't best decide how their own money is spent. Why should what gets erected in Trafalgar Square now be the consequence of a process more closed and elitist than 150 years ago? Over on Comment Central we're being asked what was the biggest mistake in British history. My own view is that it wasn't a moment, but a process. The loss of faith in local democracy that gave unaccountable elites the power over our cities and brought us sink estates, crumbling concrete schools and committees who think meerkats are the characters we should be looking up to...

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

The store that's middle-class heaven

Which is the quintessential middle-class shop? Waitrose with its organic chickens and bags of carefully washed rucola? Brora with its beautiful cashmere knits and air of heather-scented outdoorsiness? Waterstone's with the 3 for 2 table offering us all we need to while away the flying time on our mid-term break? The answer, of course, is none of the above. For middle-class families can't afford luxury groceries, cashmere clothing or mid-term holidays abroad. The only people still enjoying those are the rich.

No, the real middle-class shop of the moment is Woolworths. It's the one outlet that provides the range of key family essentials at genuinely affordable prices. For the coping classes whose bills are rocketing, no one helps more with the little things, or the little ones, than Woollies. They do a range of toys at compellingly low prices.

So if you want to find the biggest concentration of the middle classes anywhere in England, apart from a Skoda dealership, check out Woollies...

Look back proudly

Further to Comment Central's idea to find the biggest mistake in British history, isn't it indicative of how we see ourselves, and our past, that we're running a competition to review our past with the sole aim of identifying errors.

Would it be possible to follow with a contest to find the proudest moment in British history? Or is the suggestion that we should look at our national story with the principal aim of taking pride in it a very old-fashioned way of thinking on my part? And if so, what does that tell us about the scale of the mistakes we are making now, and didn't make in the past, when it comes to thinking about history?

In any case, I'll offer a prize of Macaulay's History of the English-Speaking Peoples for those who come up with the proudest moments in our national story. And the worst reply will get a copy of E.J. Hobsbawm's memoirs.

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