National confidence is a good thing. Not blowhard trumpeting, overuse of the word “great” or the post-imperial delusion that Britain is a moral democratic beacon to an admiring world. It is not a grandiose John-of-Gaunt feeling for a sceptred isle, or even the emollient suavity of a globetrotting Cameron. The confidence I mean is a low-level daily contentment in ordinary lives.
It’s a majority sense that for all the grumbles and head shaking it is basically OK living here, and that given reasonable luck, and willingness to work and pay taxes, you can lead a private life in a private home and pursue whatever harmless private enthusiasms you can afford.
We need that feeling in order to remain a manageable and law-abiding people. Some citizens will always campaign politically or socially to make the country better, and that is admirable, but not every soul need be conscripted to the battle.
I never forgot a remark from Albie Sachs, the anti-apartheid activist who lost an arm and an eye to the South African security services. He was a freedom fighter at 17 but after the post-apartheid elections he told me he saw a future in which a bright South African kid might go through their teens without being particularly interested in politics: just free to find other interests, such as science or music. He saw that as an inestimable luxury of living in the decent country he hoped for.
There is immense understated value in basic security: membership of a vast, loosely connected national family that tolerates difference and absurdity but wants you to progress safely through life at your own pace. Lately I feel that value fraying. We aren’t in grave trouble yet, despite noisy divisions, a broken housing system and too wide a wealth gap, but there is a sense of wear and tear on a thinning social fabric.
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It is there in the increase of depressive and anxiety disorders and the panicky trend — not everywhere but too common — to claim some form of victimhood, because if you are a victim someone might rescue you and not blame you for anything.
It is there in sudden spurts of irrational political anger, and in a hunched defensiveness in public places as people retreat safely into their phone world rather than notice and be noticed by others.
Sometimes there is real joy and relief when a jokey or ridiculous PA announcement or unexpected creature in the wrong place jerks a group of strangers into looking up and laughing surprisedly together (a pigeon swooping through the cinema during the ads the other day). Some deliberately go out to seek that communality in anything from a gig or playhouse to a protest march, but many find most pleasure in privacy; a circle of small safe lives.
That need not be a selfish or unfair choice as long as you’re contributing, but it all hangs on a belief that your contribution earns you a safety net. You need to feel that the figures of your childhood books still exist: policeman, fireman, doctor, dentist, teacher, farmer, soldier, mayor, postie.
If you’re suddenly unwell you need to trust that a GP will see you before you panic, and that if your teeth hurt there is an NHS dentist. If you’re a victim of crime, or accused of one, you want to believe that the police will pay attention, and that there will be a prompt and fair court hearing — not months or years of fear and legal limbo.
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You hope your children will find a local school and be safe there, unlikely to be sold drugs or told counterfactual nonsense about gender without you knowing. Let them be safe in the park too, because the council keeps an eye on vandalism and discarded needles, and the local teenagers have creative outlets enabled by sensible adults.
You need to drink tap water without a second thought and trust that open swimming spots are clean, especially now that a thousand public pools have closed and others are crumbling. You also like to know that you can express without violence your personal opinions, however silly, and drive along an A-road without crashing into a pothole.
• The Times view on Britain’s utility companies: Troubled Waters
More widely, and without dwelling on terror, as a small private person you like to believe that Britain keeps an army, navy and air force able to protect you in a troubled world.
With all that granted, you can calmly and humorously live even the least luxurious life. However, if these services are rationed, degraded and uneven insecurity flows in, then only money feels safe: private health and schools and pools, gated estates, access to expensive lawyers, bottled water or fancy filter taps, exclusive “wellness” fads, holidays in countries where the air and water are clean. Only the top economic layers can do all this, so the worse our universal public services get, the more excluded and unhappy the main populace becomes and the more urgent the pay demands.
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It is extraordinary how little government, in the past 14 years in particular, has understood this as it brandished ideologies and wasteful vanity projects. Crazy to think how so-called conservatives pampered the richest and ignored the security of the rest, underfunding and under-supervising the local authorities that supply most of these ordinary needs.
Prating about tax cuts and individual benefits is utterly pointless when an administration undervalues the obvious and ignores the worried parent, the unrelieved toothache, the filthy water, the invisible police, the law court backlog and the prisons that make men worse. Dreams are dross: making ordinariness work is the only policy worth having.
