Politicians will tell you that the modern State is immensely complex – and indeed it is. But the principles and aims behind it should be very simple. The forthcoming election – and the three meaningless manifestos now revealed for our astonished admiration – show the profound degree to which all the major Parties have lost whatever plot upon which they ever had a grip.

To recap on the story of Homo sapiens to date:

We are a pack species which, via a mixture of accident and evolution, has developed to be intelligent, selfish, and yet as dependent upon cooperation as it is upon competition. Having rid ourselves of most animal and bacterial predators, we have reproduced on a gargantuan scale – to the point where our consumption of water and oxygen (along with CO2 production via our breathing, farming and industry) threatens the viability of the one planet we have.

Most of us are today living in packs far too big for us to feel any genuine affinity towards. The bigger the pack, the more we feel removed from it. The more diverse the pack, the more out of touch with the rank and file the leaders are. The longer this goes on, the more likely (history tells us) the pack will implode, and allow the poorer, more controlling genes to triumph. Aware of their innate inferiority, these replacement leaders must restrict the liberty of ordinary pack members still more: so draconian dictatorship is the inevitable result. In Greece, Rome, France, Russia, Germany and Iran, it came to pass. It will do so here unless things change radically and rapidly.

One answer to this conundrum is to devolve power from the controlling centre, and give ordinary people back their sense of personal and community responsibility. Another answer is to tax people based on the level of community concern their actions betray. A third answer is to take the control of water and energy out of private hands. A fourth is to focus on self-sustainability as a nation, rather than obsessing about bogey-men, genetic ID forms, and constant surveillance.

None of the Parties asking for our votes are suggesting any of this. They aren’t suggesting even a minute fraction of it. Given the challenges facing the world (and Britain’s survival as a financial entity in it) this represents a surreal dereliction of the State’s first duty: the wellbeing and liberty of the individual citizen.

Fifty years ago – at the tender and precocious age of twelve – I decided that the Tories represented selfish competition, the Labour Party stagnant redistribution, and the Liberals a bold attempt to produce cooperative and civics-aware citizens who could take a fair share of the wealth-creation of the selfish. But the only way the Liberals could achieve that would be by changing to a fairer electoral system.

Today, the Libdems (a messy oil-and-water suspension of social democrats and libertarians) effectively abandoned the Page One starting principle of radical changes to the representation system. The New Labour Government has abandoned any thought of civic education, choosing instead to frame a model Animal Farm of learning, in which fantasy Five Year Plans are everything – and mules are the same as dogs. And faced with a form of capitalism that has been an even more grisly failure than socialism, the Conservative Opposition offers Thatcher Lite – an oxymoron if ever there was one.

The dog has been shown the rabbit. It is now up to those of us who broadly agree with the foregoing to do two things. First, write on our ballot papers ‘None of the above’. Second, look towards online/internet actions that will frustrate the Establishment – and, more positively, lead to the formation of a Party that looks to the future needs of real communities and individual citizens – rather than backwards, in the hope of air-brushing the mistakes of their self-serving leaders.