In the Midlands the other day a taxi driver told me about a young bloke in the next village who won a few million quid on the lottery. I don't know why I bother to retail the subsequent progress of this latter-day rake, since you can guess every detail. He packed in his job; bought a Ferrari and a wardrobe of Gucci; hit the booze, the nose-powder and the clubs; and cavorted with good-time girls who sashayed off with more than their weight in bling. For a year he lived like a prince (I won't say which prince, because it would make our lawyers nervous).

Then, as night follows day, came the hour of reckoning. The money ran out, closely followed by his new chums. His old chums, hacked off by being sidelined for so many months, gave him the cold shoulder too. Then the lad wrapped his Ferrari round a lamppost. Because he was out of his head on coke and cocktails at the time, the insurance company wouldn't pay out. He ended up penniless, friendless, jobless - and banged up in prison for reckless driving. In every sense, you might say, he'd had a crash-course in the good life.

I daresay that Camelot's spin-doctors will shower me with aggrieved statistics showing that 99 per cent of lottery winners do nothing more damaging with their new loot than upgrade their garden gnomes. That's as maybe. What can't be denied is that Britain is passing through an age in which, on the whole, it seems to be expected that the rich will behave with shameless, contemptuous, conspicuous selfishness when it comes to the spending of their dosh.

I write “Britain” because the US has always had a strong tradition of philanthropy on a vast scale. And it's a record that the likes of Bill Gates seem intent on maintaining. Of course our country, too, has had enlightened benefactors: the Paul Hamlyns, Henry Wellcomes and Vivien Duffields who donated millions because they wanted to give something back to a world that had been good to them. But those grand-gesture benefactors now seem much thinner on the ground. Even more worrying, the whole principle of charitable giving - at every income level - appears to be crumbling.

Don't take my word for that. A letter from Lord Joffe in The Times on Monday said it all. In the past 15 years, he pointed out, average incomes in Britain have risen in real terms by more than 25 per cent, and personal wealth has doubled. (Yes, I know; you and I are the exceptions that prove the rule.) Yet, in that same period, charitable giving fell 25 per cent as a percentage of our GDP. Most of us give away just 7p of every £10 we earn. But that figure masks a more startling fact. The well-off generally give far less than 7p; the stinking rich least of all. It's the poor wot's most generous.

Anecdotal evidence bears out that shaming revelation. The day that my taxi driver told me about the reckless lottery winner, the papers were full of the case of the young City broker who became hooked on cocaine and started dealing it, on a massive scale, to other City workers. The revelation of how much money a City trader would customarily blow on his intake of white powder and alcohol (£400 a day was the figure quoted in court) would have been funny if it wasn't obscene. Clearly, the quickest way to put Colombia's drug barons out of business would be to close the London Stock Exchange and a couple of big merchant banks. But this grotesque level of substance abuse worries me less than the philosophy underlying it - if philosophy isn't too dignified a word. Which is that if you are lucky enough to make far more money than you need, it's morally and socially OK to spend the dosh entirely on yourself. A few weeks ago the Government was looking for a motto to sum up what it means to be British in 2008. “Look After No 1” would fit the bill.

For centuries the Church expected its members to donate a tenth of their income to charity. OK, that wasn't an entirely disinterested notion, since the charity that the Church had in mind was itself. But it's a useful yardstick. Unless you are one of London's 23 resident billionaires, you would certainly notice the gap left by giving away ten per cent of your income. But would the gap really cut into your lifestyle? My hunch is that most middle-class people like me would somehow manage to stagger on.

So why are the British so stingy? There are many possible answers to that. Given how much tax we pay, perhaps we feel that the Government should have quite enough money to bail out the poor and the afflicted, here and abroad. After all, if the £100 billion of our cash being risked to rescue Northern Crock were instead spent on the three million British children living below the poverty line, it would be enough to put them all through Eton. Well, for a year anyway.

Or maybe we have grown cynical about big charities and weary of their conscience-pricking tactics. Perhaps we are starting to question how much they are feeding the corruption of Africa's despots rather than the bellies of its starving orphans.

But I think the true answer is sadder. The first definition of the word “charity” is simply “love” - love of one's fellow human beings. This is the impulse that seems crucially missing from 21st-century Britain. We now practise every sort of love - self-love, sexual love, money love, shopping love, food love, booze love, pet love, football-club love - except the love that inspires us to support those worse off than ourselves.

Yet the paradox is that self-love doesn't increase self-worth; it destroys it. The lad who won the lottery and then lost everything can tell you all about that. But at least he learnt his hard lesson in the space of a few months. Many people drift through their whole lives, sated with material comforts, and never manage to work out why they have this nagging, “is this all there is?” feeling. The collapse of charity in Britain is a tragedy for those who don't give, as well as those who don't receive.

Beware the mutton-jackers

More trouble for Britain's woebegone farmers. My tractor-driving friends tell me that a new crime is sweeping the country. Or rather, a very old one revived. It's sheep rustling. More than 1,000 sheep were stolen from farms in Devon and Dorset last year, and the dastardly mutton-jackers have now struck in Scotland and Co Durham as well. The police are said to be baffled as to how flocks of large white woolly creatures can be rounded up, transported and sold in 21st-century Britain without anyone noticing - especially given the health and safety checks supposedly in place in the modern food industry. However, if a dodgy bloke in a pub offers you 100 lamb chops for a tenner, be suspicious.

Plaid out

Sad news from Land of the Leek. Long-cherished plans to start the first Welsh-language daily newspaper, called Y Byd (“The World”), have been dumped. Its would-be publishers accuse the Welsh Assembly of offering them insufficient subsidy (notions of what constitutes an “independent press” are clearly a little different west of the Severn). But some sceptics say that the publishers just couldn't find enough sub-editors capable of writing terrible punning headlines ... in Welsh.

It's insane

Near where I live, one of London's huge, forbidding 19th-century lunatic asylums, Colney Hatch, has been converted into flats. The price of living in rooms once occupied for nothing by the poor befuddled rejects of Victorian England? From £350,000 up to £2.5 million. Good grief. You have to wonder whether the new inhabitants are any less bonkers than the old ones.

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