Organisers of the Dome's opening night show snubbed the Spice Girls and Robbie Williams because, says the creative director, they were afraid that "the big names would have completely shanghaied the event and detracted from the rest of the show". In other words, the new cultural elite was petrified that the Queen, the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury would all be upstaged by Scary, Posh and Co. This revealing story does not quite chime with Tony Blair's description of New Britain as a confident, forward-looking nation. Perhaps that nervousness explains why his people tried to "completely shanghai" the celebrations, by imposing Millennial Correctness.

Delivering his end-of-year address the day before the big bash, Mr Blair announced that, in the 21st century, successful nations would have to "see education as the key economic and social imperative for us all". They would need to "develop new bonds of connection, of community" in an "individuated" world. And they would have to become "tolerant, respectful of diversity, multiracial, multicultural societies". The millennium events organisers followed his script to the letter. From the worthy emphasis of the Dome's zones to the dreary "entertainment" along the banks of the Thames, they tried to turn the party into a re-education seminar in new Labour values of community, inclusion and diversity. And the greatest of these is community.

After the anniversary of VE-Day in 1995, Diana Week in 1997 and Total Eclipse Ten Minutes earlier in 1999, Millennium Eve became the latest attempt to create ersatz emotions of togetherness in our disconnected society. News coverage emphasised the "shared experience" around the world. Everybody seemed keen to invent new national rituals for the occasion, from Fiji's fire of life ceremony to the communal singing of All You Need is Love (theme tune of Diana, Princess of Wales) in the Dome. Among the Thameside throng, people already sported souvenir "I was there" T-shirts as they posed with the obligatory drag queens on stilts. The degree to which the moralistic message triumphed over naked hedonism was suggested by the reported lack of one decent outbreak of public disorder, a traditional British party piece.

Despite the emphasis on diversity, nobody was allowed to stray off message. So the caring People's Queen had to deliver a Christmas message about loving thy neighbours (although what she knows about having neighbours is unclear), put up with burger vans in The Mall, visit a homeless shelter, and even do Auld Lang Syne with Tony and Cherie before publicly kissing Philip at midnight. Little wonder there is talk of abdication if this is the price of modern kingship.

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All of the attempts to invest an accident of the clock with some deeper communal meaning only pointed up the question: what meaning, exactly? What do the Dome and the millennium events signify that New Britain stands for now? The moral vacuum was captured by the banal "Millennium Resolution", which dropped any mention of God in favour of eco-pieties about respecting the Earth. (One assumes this was not because organisers feared having a "big name" like Him in the Dome might detract from the jugglers dressed in tutti-frutti condoms.)

On the threshold of a century of opportunity, ours is a society with no more vision of where it is going than those stumbling home early on New Year's Day. The Dome is a fitting national symbol, a wonderful structure that stands for nothing, a stunning shell with a hole where its heart should be. In that speech, Tony Blair said that he wanted New Britain to be an inspiring "beacon to the world" in the next century. A bit like the River of Fire, perhaps?

The author is editor of LM magazine

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