It’s always darkest before the dawn, they tell me. But then, it’s also very dark indeed just as the cloaks of the riders on the Four Apocalyptic Horses envelope one, immediately before a horrible death beneath their hooves. I suppose you could call me a glass half-empty person, but there are moments when reporting what’s happening in Britain at the moment leaves me without hope for either side.

The people pulling this sh*t are obviously beyond help, but the forces lining up to support them are now overwhelmingly powerful, while the forces that should be uniting against them are still talking about action to crush the harassing of lesbianism in Tanzania. Crushing lesbians is a filthy habit, but not enough thought is being given to those certain to be on the receiving end of the power-grab under way in the United Kingdom: the folks who, for the Hard Left, represent largely a stratum in a theory: the proletariat.

I am not a member of the proletariat: to be exact, I never was. I was a lucky boy born into a decent but struggling family who went to Grammar School and then University before eventually settling into the job of marketing stuff to that proletariat. This involved me in helping create many proletarian jobs, as well as interviewing, over 37 years, thousands of what were then called C2Ds during a long stream of occasionally illuminating market research projects. Some of them were unutterably awful, most of them were pleasant, one or two were alarmingly smart, but almost none of them were paying attention. And that was just the interviewers.

But seriously though, friends. Most of the working class hasn’t been paying attention for over fifty years. If they were, they’d have noticed that a busload of patronising public school intellectuals had hijacked their Labour Party a long time ago, and perverted all its ideas about personal betterment. Under the Crossmans, Croslands, Benns and Blairs, social mobility and knowledge aspiration were subjects of sneering disapproval, to be hissed at in sentences invariably containing the word ‘bourgeois’. And as a result of swapping personal improvement for laurels-resting sufficiency, we got doctored educational standards and inhuman NHS targets. We got people who called you “colleague” and others with big hair holding clipboards during “ongoing surgical procedure monitoring” who were using the proletariat’s hard-earned tax monies to stay out of the unemployment pool.

I know I’m losing followers and friends with every word here; but f**k it, I’m going to keep on keeping on because I am sick to the few back teeth I have left of watching ageing, wrinkly old Britannia being beaten to a pulp by the products of a badly-engineered culture. This self-styled civilisation has proved good at pretty much the one thing: producing self-abusing sham technocrats and insincere crooks whose only concerns are power and wealth.

In reaching that conclusion, I invite all naysayers to square this circle: on the Left, if it’s all the Tories’ fault, how do you explain away the 26 years since 1960 during which you fashioned a crap education system from a flawed one, a bloated NHS from one which was at least functional, an anti-democratic and greedy TUC power base from a campaigning trades union movement, and a disastrous banking system from a dangerous one; and on the Right, if everything was “the Socialists'” fault, what about the 23 years since 1960 during which you reduced Britain’s manufacturing base to vindictively scorched earth, destroyed the mutual savings sector, created the first mass-scale negative property equity in our history, and handed the keys of the City to 17,000 spivs?

The working class as we used to know it no longer exists, because we no longer make stuff that requires factories. This is the fault of both the TUC and the asset-stripping banks. The social mobility I took for granted as a kid no longer exists, because we have buggered the empirical standards by which we used to gauge educational merit. This is the fault of both the starvation years of Thatcher, and the spending years of Blair.

So here we are, 54 years on from the election of a young and seemingly vital Catholic US President – upon whom so many of we Brits pinned our hopes. And the result of all the technological white heat, economic revolution, Comprehensive education, financial Big Bang, privatised State monopolies, revitalised NHS, Europeanised society and deregulated employment markets is…..2014 Britain.

The mouse that roared.

A Britain of falling pay, poorer life balance, sh*t media content (“choice”), falling social mobility, yawning inequities of wealth, massive personal and Sovereign debt, a huge pool of unemployed, 34% of workers saying they want more work even if they are employed, the vandalisation of both Magna Carta and Habeus Corpus, a concentration of power in a few hands, greater threats to liberty than ever before, and an arts sector more stagnant and directionless than at any time in my nearly 66 years of being on this mortal coil.

This somewhat splenetic piece wishes to make just two points. First, I am not a grumpy old git who can’t see the good in things: I am an auditor of failure who refuses to see one ‘side’ in all of it as somehow blameless. And second, we can no longer rely on the vigilance of The People. They’ve been dumbed down and distracted: the task of radicals today is to protect that cheated class from the worst excesses of those who despise them.

Somewhere down the line, those who run away from that reality need to reappraise their definition of citizenship. Tomorrow’s first post at The Slog will, I hope, be another small step aimed at bringing into sharp focus what the country I love has become, and even now continues to morph into something much worse.

Stay tuned.

Earlier at The Slog: The Geopolitical reality behind the pauperisation of Greece