Knowledgeably

"Britons whose grandfathers, earning perhaps five per cent of their descendants’ present-day income, debated knowledgeably about Free Trade, Imperial Preference, Irish Home Rule and a host of other issues today struggle to identify Cabinet ministers, to grasp the basic elements of our relationship with the EU or to confront the collapse of society around them."

Good to read Gerald Warner paying tribute to the world of the pitmen painters and the pitmen poets, the Workers’ Educational Association and the Miners’ Lodge Libraries, the brass and silver bands, the unions and the workingmens’ clubs, the co-operatives and the credit unions, among so very many other good things: a civilisation - civilised and civilising - destroyed by the most philistine Prime Minister until Blair.

What next? An acknowledgement that today's problems with immigration could not have happened if we had retained the trade union closed shop, which also gave working-class Tories a moderating influence on the selection of Labour candidates for safe Labour seats?