ABSTRACT
The middle class, the heartland of Tory voters, has many virtues; and many vices. Working-class people felt it most; it follows that the movement into relativism affected them most; they had more to shake off; the change ‘liberated’ them more than other groups. One can retain the right to regret some of their manifestations; not to do so would be to assume – and that is common – that all social changes are, simply by happening, self-validating, to be accepted without question. ‘Change for change’s sake’ is less a critical phrase than a statement of a conventionally agreed fact of life. In 1979, even more than usually, that change had to be towards a set of radically different attitudes. Not foreign or unusual or outlandish attitudes; simply attitudes from another facet of the collective English character.
