I'm on the record many times now as asserting that very few doctors should be allowed any say at all beyond their medical specialism. Only a doctor could suggest that polyclinics (where the case history of a patient will quite likely be unknown to the quack he or she sees) are a good idea; and only doctors could 'discover' that parents who introduce their children to mild forms of alcohol at an early age will be responsible for breeding later binge drinkers. They may indeed find their children become binge drinkers, but wrapping the responsibility round their parental necks is just the sort of extrapolation I've come to expect from the hyppocratic oafs.

If such lucky children with enlightened parents become binge drinkers at all, they will do so mainly because their actions gain peer-group approval - on account of Britain being a binge culture....and perhaps because of a genetic cranial pleasure-centre problem. As normal practice in France, Spain and Italy has proven for centuries, when such an early introduction to the Demon Drink is made in a non-binge culture, it cements within most kids the idea of alcohol as something to complement food in moderation, rather than act as the precursor to punching people or having sex with strangers.

The same idiotic failure to take culture into account led Tessa Jowell and her fellow neighbourhood-wreckers to bring in 24/7 drink availability to a country where boozing was already at epidemic levels. And precisely the same blinkered myopia leads those in command to wonder, not why more and more drivers are speeding, but how many new cameras, points systems, speed awareness courses and heavier fines they can inflict upon them.

More financial providers are cheating, more politicians dissembling and troughing, more footballers throwing hissy fits and pushing referees around, and more retailers are misleading customers in every way possible. The prisons are not overflowing because some random and highly infectious virus is at large: everything is going tits up in Britain because our social mores and standards have been diluted beyond recognition.

To paraphrase Clinton, 'It's the culture, stupid'.

The people splendidly branded 'New Labour idiots' by Rupert Everett seem unable to grasp this very simple point. I suspect the chief reason for this is that they and their fellow-travellers both started and then cemented this approaching Dystopia in the first place. Where Rupert went wrong in his famous outburst was to tar only New Labour with this cheap nylon brush; were he an nbyer, he would know that the Wishful Unthinking Tendency (or WUTS) extend right across the spectrum of contemporary socio-economic thinking, all the way from braindead globalist Friedmanites to gender-balancing socialist Harmanites.

If only people given the chance to make money weren't greedy. If only people to whom one gives money for nothing forever didn't take the piss. If only people watching Eastenders week in week out saw it as a badly-written and acted sick comedy rather than real life. If only left-wing lesbians didn't teach their classes drivel, and believe anarchic crap about 'letting the children reach their own level'.

If only all these infuriating people could be bright, discerning, rational, tolerant and altogether perfect. Like we Top People. If only.

The culture of Cool Britannia explains almost everything that's wrong with our attitudes and behaviour. When one puts it like that, it is of course sight-shatteringly obvious. Kids will enter the X-Factor because the media culture admires the risible idea of celebrity. Everywhere one goes these days there are Wobblies because the retail culture approves the thought 'As much as you can eat for £5'. Hundreds of thousands of Britons are going to find themselves insolvent and homeless over the next three years because our culture says debt moderation is a laughably old-fashioned concept. Our mainstream performing arts are tediously derivative because the suits and their shareholder chums are risk-averse.

Cool Britannia didn't create this nightmare, but it does celebrate it as something quite normal - even desirable in a kind of perverted, levelling, democratic way. And oddly, even the mediocre superficiality of the spin doctors, MPs and other consultants who came up with the entirely daft phrase are themselves the products of our culture. One which thinks fiddling the exam result targets, lying in media stories, making empty Conference promises and altering reality is the way to ensure Things Can Only Get Better.

Last week's Opinion Column drew the entirely correct complaint from the nby faithful that I left everyone under a horribly dark cloud with no sign of even a bus shelter - let alone a bus. To be frank, that's exactly what we face as long as the current Administration stays in place. There is, however, still the chance to ensure the highly infectious baton is not passed onto the next lot - and that is to make it absolutely clear that enough is enough.

Here and there are some encouraging signs of above-average minds at work in the Tory Party. As ever, the thoughtful William Hague seems to have a reasoned but radical idea of how to distance ourselves from the Brussels madness if it shows no sign of curing itself. And the idea of schools run by involved parents and community contributions (while no substitute for the free high-quality system we had when I was young) shows awareness of where many of Britain's educational problems lie. But signs that the culture-crisis has been truly grasped can still be marked absent. Only this weekend it became clear that Cameron's Cads are seeking the backing of those very same greedy money-barons who have brought the world economy to its knees in their tireless pursuit of infinite personal wealth.

In the electronic age (sorry to keep boffing on about this) we have at our disposal as citizens the most powerful anti-Establishment weapon ever developed: the internet and its mass emails, astonishingly viral websites and huge virtual communities. There is a window of real opportunity available to almost all of us - before central government conspires with the lizards at Orange, Microsoft, Google et al to monitor what's going on and nip it in the bud. If we don't take it, then we will have only ourselves to blame.

My own view is that things are not yet bad enough for the mass of internet users to do anything concerted. As longer-suffering readers will know, I've tried on five occasions since 2006 to get something off the ground - always with a minute level of response. Getting bitter about this is pointless and unrealistic - but so is saying 'please give us some hope'. This is the hope, and it's the only one I can see.

Radical constitutional change is the only thing that can deliver a genuine desire to build a better culture to arm us during the very tough decades that lie ahead. Not show-trial abolitions of harmless second chambers, but the sweeping reform of our voting and legislative procedures on a grand scale. More devolution to local communities, more accountable bureaucrats, legally bound political behaviour, fewer Westminster MPs, an end to all representatives' privileges, and control of those supplies vital for human survival by men and women of spotless character. Not the dead hand of nationalisation, but the strong arm behind a new brush sweeping clean.

As nby has argued on many previous occasions, only one at best (and probably none) of the existing Party formats would ever allow this to happen. The only peaceful and legal way of effecting it is via overwhelming electronic pressure and - if necessary - widespread civil disobedience. There is in my opinion a very strong chance that at the physically civil level this may well start with those at or approaching retirement: not marching with carefully embroidered banners and Waitrose showcards, but simply saying 'no' when asked to cough up for cock-up - or put back their pensions yet again. (In the USA, Congressmen are already feeling the heat of this backlash on their necks)

A generation behind are the thirty-somethings about to find themselves tossed onto the streets by the fund-hedging 0.2% who sit smug, selfish and flatulent in their gated communities. The 18-30s so stigmatised by the club of that name are far from being the apathetic drones of imagination: if they were such, they could not possibly survive in our foully deregulated and bullying employment market. They are disengaged from the political process at present for one straighforward reason: they regard our legislators and leaders as unmitigated onanists.

What they - and just as much, we - lack is an inspiration. A spectacular demonstration of epower on a single issue - perhaps taxes raised to pay for the disaster created by the banking Masturbators of the Universe. Only by taking part in such an event can we regain our self-esteem, discover the ability to fight back - and tell the hopelessly distorted elite that they can delude themselves about cultural meltdown if they wish, but we won't.

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