on the struggling and aspirational classes. Benefits must never go up faster than wages. High taxes and excessive spending should be condemned as a means of cutting off opportunities, eroding living standards, reducing growth and jobs and making it harder to set up small businesses. Rather than focusing on our credit rating, the Treasury ought to be selling every reform on the basis that they would make it easier for hard-working folk to get on in life. Remarkably, despite the recession, there has never been a better time for the Government to reshape Britain along more pro-capitalist lines. But for that the Tories urgently need to find a new, more self-confident and less technocratic voice.