This isn't just a site where we take the piss - nor is it a site designed purely for politics wonks. Set out below is not The Road to Utopia, but rather what I see as the best way to avoid what will soon be The Drift into Dystopia.

There is little in any of this which is truly original - although one or two of the practical ideas have not, I think, been aired elsewhere. But what I hope it does present is the thinking behind the argument from end to end - and written in a way that is accessible to anyone likely to grasp the need in the first place.

In a sentence, it is an outline of how to ensure the maximum number of new-born babies turn into balanced and content citizens. Because without the right individuals, any society is only as good or as bad as any other.

1. The Citizen - foundations and early influences

1.1 Family

As awareness of others around them gradually dawns during the first ten months or so after birth, babies adapt their view of the Universe as a place with them at the centre. From then onwards until an age that varies wildly by individual and culture (but has a median around age seventeen) the new entrant into the world looks for guidance from those around it.

The process is inevitably one of trial and error. If an action is praised, pleasure-centres in the brain act to encourage it. Actions that meet with resistance in any form - scolding, physical restraint loss of privileges, raising of the voice and so on - are filed under Not a Good Idea and, by and large, avoided thereafter. People with a serious congenital mental condition such as psychopathy fail to do this,as do those born with other major disablements of the brain.

Other 'body language' and traumatic events (especially if in concert) can easily produce inaccurate or neurotic belief systems in the young. All of us suffer one or both of these. They can be corrected afterwards, but a combination of parental influence and professional incompetence often militates against this.

In short, it's possible to mess almost any kid up by the age of four.

The family environment is obviously central to this. Thus at one extreme, constant exposure to perversion in childhood evokes the sense that such is almost certainly normal behaviour. In the more general areas of family life, the actions of the main authority figure will be seen in a similar light: male violence, female obsessions, sibling cruelty and so on. The fact of those subjected to abuse performing it themselves in later life is so well established now as to no longer require evidence. But people of average intelligence can quite easily be dissuaded from some of these actions by later influences - especially cognitive behaviour therapy. In the case of less socially dysfunctional learning in infancy, many people of above average intelligence work this out for themselves. (In some cases, of course, they over-compensate for childhood parental mistakes - with potentially disastrous outcomes).

If the balanced, kind and thoughtful family unit becomes anything from an exception to a rarity, there is little or no hope of a stable and contented culture emerging. Arguments rage back and forth about what 'a family unit' is these days, but forgetting 'these days' and returning to species design, the family unit is two parents as teachers applying social discipline in a lovingly effective manner. The ideal unit is two parents displaying parental and mutual affection and respect.

I would submit that in contemporary Britain, this is a minority and declining proportion of the whole.

1.2 Community

At the age of five comes 'proper' school, although other children inside and outside the family will have emerged before then. The influence of peers from families with different values is so obvious as to barely need pointing out. A key influence from five onwards, however, is the style and attitudes of the teaching staff to which children are exposed - and of course, the content of that teaching.

During the period after age two, media exposure is for most Western children almost constant. So too are regular visits for health check-ups, and dental care. They go to shops and see many behaviours, ranges of products and packaging - and money changing hands. They see police moving about in the community. A minority will be involved in religious observance or go (at least at first) to schools where only those of their religion are present.

These too are all vital and early influences, and what they add up to is a pack - or what we would call a Community. A stable nation state is usually a macro-reflection of these communities, with those rejecting its values (or living lives attempting a different mode of existence) a tiny minority. Over time they may become the majority, as the benefits of their alternative system come to light. What never works is a plentiful spectrum of large minorities each following radically different ideas of how the bases of a social culture should be applied in daily life.

Almost every State bedevilled by internecine violence has, by definition, begun from a multi-cultural start-point. I do not say 'model' here, because when models are applied to serious social strife,it is usually to remove or separate the element of multiculturalism. India/Pakistan and Eire/Ulster are classic examples. So to is Israel/Palestine. No known society of any size has ever started with multiculturalism as a model - such a state simply happens over time through a process of invasion and migration. And very, very few states have a 'successful' (a word we must define soon) multicultural society.

Multiculturalism in recent years has been confused (sometimes cynically by all sides) with multi-ethnicity. Examples of successful multiethnic societies abound for the simple reason that the human voyager gene dictates their existence almost everywhere. But over time, the dominant ethnic group usually asserts its supremacy over the others (by everything from penal laws, covert prejudice and genocide). The result again here is monoculturalism - often accompanied by the minorit(ies) migrating elsewhere. This process created what eventually became the USA, and is busy today recreating smaller national states in south-eastern Europe.

Since the late 1950s, the post-imperialist West has accepted and encouraged a multiethnic reality with one dominant (or 'host') culture. Over the last twenty years in the UK, however, multiculturalism has been put forward as a better alternative. It isn't.

The influences upon the young child described so far are above all about learning values, boundaries, rules, legalities - in a phrase, standards of behaviour. Confusion about these leads to neurosis and anti-social behaviour - alongside depression, anxiety and suicidal tendencies. The reason is straightforward enough: the wiring of Homo sapiens doesn't cope well with such 'choice': rather, it sees it as uncertainty.

Equally, the term 'multicultural legal system' is an oxymoron. The basis of liberal democracy is The Rule of Law - one code of law to which there are no exceptions. Since Magna Carta in 1215, gradually every citizen (high or low) in Britain has been (in theory) removed from a position 'above' the law.

Those who push for the adoption of 'alternative' legal systems within one culture are either naive or bent upon the destruction of that host culture. There is nothing 'extreme' in this observation: it is an empirical reality. Ever since the Weimar Republic spawned Nazism in the 1920s, the rule for all thinking, wordly libertarians has been simple: offer freedom of speech to all those who will guarantee the same right to you.

1.3 Central, 'national' government

Although very few children grasp the nature of national government until their early teens (at the earliest) their lives are unavoidably affected and moulded by the views and mores of those in ultimate charge of legislation and tax expenditure. Equally, what opinion-leaders and peers around them say about such senior policy-makers and politicians counteracts - and often negates - the views put forward by that central government and its agents - commonly referred to by political scientists as 'The State'.

For centuries, ever since the early formation of national groupings, much of social and cultural development has been influenced by argument and debate about the relaitonship between 'the State and the individual'. But the evidence of how societies function suggests that much of this debate has confused the individual with the more 'realistic' family and community units. 'No man is an island' as Donne correctly observed: the real struggle that has been taking place involved the national and local forces,within which there are individuals on both sides.

If the basic unit of humanity is the family, the basic unit of cooperation and competition is the pack. This is a real grouping, and in an ideal size involves few if any 'secondary' (ie,truly remote) media for communication between all the members to take place. But by and large, a 'community' of packs in a smallish geographic location can stay in touch through individual and mass meetings, newsletters - and nowadays, local intranet communities.

Above these foundation-stones of genuine 'society' (in the word's classic sense of direct spoken intercourse) the concept rapidly becomes vague and (literally) remote. Resentment of orders from afar morphs over time into a generalised dislike of those who live at or near the centre of such government: Be it France, England or the USA, widespread enmity towards Paris, London and Washington exists respectively among those in smaller provincial communities. Equally, those in the 'capital' lose touch with everyday life. Those in Government (increasingly protected by security in the modern State) lose touch almost completely with 'normal' life.

Without an emphasis on (and genuine power devolved to) communities and families accustomed to the idea of 'self-starter' responsibility and regular social participation, the aims of nation states become divorced from the realities of 'real' citizens. Even worse, local communities become disillusioned with the reality of their inability to effect real change without the dead hand of Whitehall (or wherever), and thus retreat into isolationism. Technological advances like television, recorded music and the personal computer act alongside increased corporate demands on personal time, rising levels of street crime and alcohol-fuelled violence to encourage this trend. The community becomes less and less active, and the State more and more intrusive.

Yet - as Benjamin Franklin wonderfully observed - 'History is made by those who turn up'. In a generally negative sense, this was classically demonstrated by the activities of a few convinced Marxists and Hard-Left Labour supporters in 1970s local government. Margaret Thatcher's response was to starve these local power-centres of funds,and if necessary abolish them. Here clearly displayed by both ends of political extremism is the fate of communities where civic involvement has eroded: people wind up being told what to do by unrepresentative elite. As Franklin's amusing observation correctly asserts, the few can be influential if they turn up - and they can be a force for good as well as evil.

In the context outlined so far above, it is a key contention of Not Born Yesterday that the power of national - and even worse, supra-national - government has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished. And that as familial and community actions to produce optimally contented, functional citizens are far more likely to have a successful influence, they should be encouraged as often as possible.

Associated with this is the observation (hard for anyone to deny any more) that every one of the individual's potential authority figures in early life so far enumerated in this paper - fathers, mothers, teachers, police, clergymen and other community leaders - have seen that authority lampooned, questioned and eroded during the last forty years.

2. The cultural Establishment

2.1 Irrelevant process versus practical creativity

Some of what I discuss here (and develop later ideas about) focuses on the political processes, voting methods and Parliamentary system we employ in Britain currently. Because above all other factors, they stand in the way of nby's desire to assist in shifting the emphasis back to community and family responsibility.

However, the overriding problem remains one of a leadership elite whose lives are hermetically sealed and utterly remote from the concerns of most of the pack members they claim to represent. This is partly the inevitable result of powerful people being surrounded by good-news bears - and partly the untypical background from which so many of our ruling elite are chosen.

The problem with being removed from the day-to-day realities of proving one's worth, making payments towards some form of retirement, finding a job - even maintaining the health and income required for survival - is that inevitably it gives the less creative mind time to debate esoteric irrelevances and Utopian goals. These only come onto such a person's radar in the first place because they have lost sight of basic realities and needs.

I am not promoting the case for being anti-intellectual and anti-arts here - quite the contrary. Truly great minds aim to find elegant solutions, simple processes, straightforward forms of expression and genuinely novel ways to 'see' the nature of our brief physical existence. Those who own such minds reject shibboleths, break rules and find better ways to think about the Universe and its dilemmas - while living in harmony with others who either think differently....or prefer not to think about such things at all.

But as David Hockney has remarked, "One must first of all know the rules in order to know why one wants to break them". Like all genuine innovators, Hockney is the master of his subject and the associated techniques necessary to excel at it. Half-baked amateurs of little talent adopt two entirely different approaches to life: they cover their inadequacies behind a cloud of idiotic jargon, and they deny any experiential realities they have not bothered to learn about as and when these get in the way of their pet theories.

Creative people always think there might be something better. Banal, controlling people always look for an absolute truth to make them completely right. Most things that enrich our lives are the product of creative people. Most things that are at best laughable and at worst destructive emerge from the pedestrian minds of controlling people.

This latter group is, sadly, in the ascendancy in our Western World today. They include accountants who cannot see the difference between cost and investment, management consultants whose only driver is efficiency (and whose only modus operandum is strangulating the obvious), Globalist corporate leaders in denial about the alternatives to multinational business, neo-liberalist economists unwilling to see the dangers of universal private ownership of everything, the politically correct ignoring the mountains of evidence that give the lie to many of their ex cathedra beliefs, and the egalitarian tendency. This last group seems determined to squash any and all evidence that equality full stop is the same as equality of opportunity; and hell-bent on the insane assertion that all cultures, genders, age-groups and physical or mental ability levels are equally capable of performing a given function.

If complex jargon fails to convince the bewildered onlooker of their genius, these folk resort to the age-old trick of rapidly (and incessantly) repeated mantras: there is no such thing as an obscene profit, property is theft, there is no such thing as society, male sex is rape....and even in recent years 'every man for himself'. For those who may have forgotten,'every man for himself' is the last desperate cry of those on a foundering ship.

Given that such ideas rule our economic, social and political spheres in the contemporary western world, an erosion and dilution of creativity is taking place. Media copy formats from one another (as do media contractors) architecture revives past styles (as do music and fashion) publishers obsess upon 'genre' (often a cover-term for 'formula') and money has replaced excellence as the criterion of success in every one of these fields.

In turn, all 'thought crime' daring to oppose the assumptions of the elite is brushed aside, spiked or evokes hypocritically horrified responses ("How can you even think such a thing?"), a tendency that has produced a philosophically stagnant culture - and a political environment petrified by fear and conformity.

Because no new ideas are coming through in this creatively stultifying atmosphere, those incapable of anything beyond process draw the expected, linear conclusion: there are no new ideas any more. It is a wonderfully self-fulfilling extrapolation, but of course completely erroneous - and not a little ironic.

There being no new ideas - and the old ones having no value - it seems to these people that tactics must be the order of the day: for there is no higher goal any more, no over-arching strategy....and above all, no 'bourgeois' ethical construction to cloud their wordly-unwise judgement that 'anything goes'.

In the tactical, headless, idea-free environment that is business, politics - and yes, even The Law - today, morals are for wimps: achievement is everything - do what you have to do, just don't get caught.

I have heard this milieu referred to as 'sterile', but it is anything but. For the emerging citizen, its values are highly infectious.

2.2 The maturing citizen's infection

Leaders in many spheres of contemporary life are fond of blaming our culture's ills on 'role models' - those on the stage, television and sports fields, those in the movies and gossip columns. In some ways the criticism is justified, but at base the behaviour they condemn is more symptom than cause: role models too get their ideas from somewhere. It is the authorities (and lack of authority) that convince such damaged personalities of the righteousness of their misguided behaviour.

These same authorities have a similar effect on the semi-formed individuals who pass through their spheres of influence.

They turn a blind eye to skunk. Encourage the falsification of career histories. Scorn those who wish to be honest with wronged clients. Reward those who find new ways to screw customers, or invisibly 'load' charges to clients. The message is clear: it's normal to be doing this stuff. Everyone's doing it - don't be a sap, or you'll be left behind. Nice guys come last.

The predominant answer to any social, economic, business, legal, governmental or political problem nowadays is to cheat. To lie, to 'sex up' the evidence, to massage the statistics - even to alter the statistics, or deny their existence. The rare occasions on which they are caught doing so generate little beyond a bombastic determination to 'tough out' the storm of disapproval - which more often than not turns out to be a storm in a teacup.

You know that society's ethics have hit rock bottom - and the epidemiology of mass infection is out of control - when the man responsible for guiding the Prime Minister's press relations for nearly a decade is asked on national television which 'story' he thought the best of his journalistic career...and names one in which he accused an enemy Cabinet Minister of having sex in a Chelsea soccer-replica shirt.

"But you know the best bit?" he asks rhetorically, "I made it all up".

And the audience guffaws with laughter, while applauding his wonderful achievement.

3. A Level of change

3.1 Summary of argument

The thesis I am advancing can be summarised as follows:

Familial, social, medical, educational and other leaders of local communities are both closer to the problems people face and more likely to offer practical, persuasive guidance or solutions to their fellow pack-members than an unrepresentative elite issuing unreal orders from some remote, ill-informed and lofty place.

The people in this rarified upper atmosphere need to be more in touch and more accountable - but for many of the things that require action for ordinary citizens, those at the Centre need also to have their powers curtailed, resistance to new ideas challenged, and competition from other areas of society increased.

They are unlikely to do this willingly - action will have to come from local communities. This is no bad thing, in that a greater sense of communal and individual responsibility for outcomes is entirely beneficial to the production of a stable, healthy society at ease with itself.

If readers interpret this as 'change from the top down' then they are largely right. But I do not either propose - and nor would I entertain - the idea of 'revolution' in the usual (violent) meaning of the word. Nor do I accept that those 'in power' are at the top while we are at the bottom.

The age we are about to enter properly offers two alternative roads: one where the technology of surveillance prefaces the final victory of the State over communal power and personal liberty; and another wherein the technology of virtual communication - moving almost instantaneously from narrow to broad, from micro to mass - delivers ultimate power to the People. (While this latter result is far preferable in the view of most sane thinkers, it could obviously also lead to an equally appalling Dictatorship of the Brutes - the sort of mob rule which terrified Plato, and came to pass in the last years of the Roman Empire. As such, it is a dilemma that must be addressed.)

To avoid the continuance of ill-conceived policies (with, consequently, a further dip in socio-economic ethics and the inevitable repressive power that the State would employ at the end of that process) change will have to be radical - but with the pressure applied technologically and communally, not violently.

Equally, the process will be helped by the catalysts nby has been predicting with various degrees of confidence since its foundation in 2003: a tectonic shift in both the performance and geographical emphasis of commercial activity on the planet; and the ecological effects of both overused fossil fuels and overpopulation.

3.2 The interdependence of all but self-regarding actions

No one act involving two or more people in any society is devoid of an effect on other areas of life. Marxists insist that 'all acts are political', but this they use to justify unlimited State interference in the lives of groups, families and individuals. My point is a different one: all other-regarding acts - sexual, social, familial, economic, medical, legal, political and so on - have a degree of interdependence. There can never be a clear 'chicken and egg' of cause and effect because modern society is multi-layered and endlessly complex. All one can reasonably assert at the start of a reform process is that the more areas of outward-moving human behaviour to which one applies the personal responsibility approach, the more speedy and enduring any improvement will be.

To exemplify briefly, it is my view that doctors should not have the right to decide whether or not to treat somebody, because their hypocratic oath dictates they must treat everyone they find who is ill. But simply reminding doctors of this without recognising the social, familial and politically adverse trends (which have changed their role to one almost inviting such a judgement) is a ridiculous concept and rightly doomed to failure.

In this example, my remedial action would involve moving the role of doctors more towards that of teachers (and mutual cooperation between the two professions) alongside a totally revamped health service preaching the values of diet and dangers of substance abuse to citizens from an early age...by which time positive parental influences are having some effect anyway.

The remedy would also involve how doctors are remunerated, the way in which the successor to an NHS is funded, evolution of the tax system to favour those 'saving' the Community's money by 'good' behaviour, distancing politicians from the whole area of health, providing parenting lessons in all schools from age ten....and on and on until all the important influences on a doctor's ethical position had been covered.

New Labour is fond of talking about 'bottom up' reform,without really understanding either the good or bad points about such an approach. They do so, of course, to suggest that dictatorial 'top-down' reform is not on their agenda: but as always with such spin, they protest too much.

I prefer to see social interaction not as a autocratic hierarchy or mob anarchy. My vision is of a spectrum of behaviours and attitudes that must be addressed.

3.3 'Total spectrum' Change

The opening section attempted to describe all the powerful influences shaping the outlook and behaviour of a young citizen growing to maturity. These make up the 'spectrum' to which I refer - but they should not represent a 'from top to bottom' approach.

One of the main things frequently forgotten by all classes and ages in contemporary Britain is that politicians, civil servants, the police and tax inspectors work for us, not the other way round.

It is chiefly for this reason that I make citizen and community action central to the process of wresting back power and responsibility from distant elites who act, on a routine basis, as if we worked for them. Only by consistent civic encouragement from an early age (with regular reminders) can we rebuild the idea of making a personal contribution to community success, and thus augment self-respect on a near-Universal basis.

At the moment, it is the individuals and atypical opinion-groups forming The State who desire to lead, guide and exhort in every area of our lives. We must relearn the skills of doing this ourselves - as fathers, doctors, policemen or participants in any other walk of life - in order to ensure that the power of any State elite to abuse its position is kept to a bare minimum.

As I never tire of reminding people, if you can't control yourself, the State will be only too happy to do it for you.

Such an attitude change is needed not 'at every level' - but rather, it requires a high level of change across the spectrum: in the very acceptance of a cultural hierarchy,we are dooming ourselves to the slave rather than colleague role in society and how it runs.

3.4 Key bands in the spectrum

A compendium covering even the tiny minutiae of social action presents the same 'busy-body' possibilities at community level as we already have at national government level. The role of this piece now is therefore to list the vital macro-bands of cultural behaviour where attitudes must change. In the panel to the right, some specific actions (by no means anywhere near exhaustive) are suggested. They aim to act as pointers - no more than that: as examples, more than anything else, of just how much scope there is for fresh radical thinking without any need at all for violence and extremism.

For me, the bands would pan out as follows, with a rough and ready 'order of urgency' indicated where possible.

Overture - Constitutional

* National and local voting methods to become more representative immediately.

* Reform of MP rules of behaviour & their relationship with political Parties.

* New Second Chamber with increased powers

* Reinstatement of citizen protection under Rule of Law

Socio-Political

* Obligatory 'social service'

* Urgent action to control supplies of communal assets

* Devolution of policy and administrative power to local level

Socio-economic

* Radical reform of the Banking and Bourse finance-raising systems with much tougher rules on speculation and charges

* Massive tax encouragement for private company status with limited outside shareholders

* Repeal of Harman Laws

* Abolition of 'legal claims' advertising

Social

* Redefinition of education's broader civic role beyond academic learning and medicine

* 'Start again' reform of State health provision and its funding/income mechanics

* Reversal of 'up-sized' health service units (Polyclinics)

* Complete overhaul of police funding and administration

* Penal reform with a view towards medium-term abolition of prison as an incarceration method

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