How to take Britain from Bleak House to Great Expectations In these circumstances, it starts to look logical to vote for candidates who challenge the system on behalf of the workers. If I were Greek, I would have voted for Alexis Tsipras, whose Syriza Party rejected the EU "memorandum." At least if he had won (which he nearly did), he might have been able to screw more money out of his country's foreign oppressors. Luckily for conservatives, however, politicians of the mainstream Left (Mr Zapatero is a good example) seem just as overawed by big banks and eurocrats as anyone else. Here in Britain, Ed Miliband is edging towards the appropriate political terrain of standing up for the small guy. He raises issues such as the high fees charged by pension providers; but he has not yet tackled the first-order questions. And beside him sits Ed Balls, who, with Gordon Brown, made Labour and Britain more dependent on big bankers than ever before in our history. A profound economic crisis reveals what leaders actually think about the people they lead. Free marketeers and socialists differ about most things, but they do, in fact, share a high idea about what people are capable of. Current Western leaders, who tend to cluster nervously on the centre ground, are more fearful. They see themselves as propping up something which is tottering rather than letting citizens build anew something that is soundly based. All their discussions focus on what should be done to the people by those who have power, rather than what the people might do for themselves, if only they would let them. Even schemes like Funding for Lending, the details of which were announced yesterday, are offers by the central bank to the big banks to pay them to help business, rather than direct opportunities for businesses to help themselves. The result is that the pain is prolonged. If leaders are motivated by fear, they do not inspire confidence. If people do not have confidence, they do not dare do things. So nothing much happens. Throughout the credit crunch, the British public have not really been given a chance. We have been told that we are all in this together, but discouraged from trying to help find the way out. The reason that Neville Chamberlain could take the country confidently from a gloomy Dickens title to a more cheerful one was that he had got the public finances right by acting toughly and quickly at first. Then he could cut taxes and ease business access to credit. In the year of his promise of Great Expectations, there was an industrial and consumer boom. Economic growth went from minus nearly 6 per cent to plus over 6 per cent in three years. In the following year, his party won the general election hands down. By the end of the decade, 2.8 million new houses had been built for a population only 70 per cent of our present size. Our current rate of house-building is much less than half that. Read the full story in George Trefgarne's excellent pamphlet Metroboom: Lessons from Britain's 1930s Recovery, Centre for Policy Studies. Terrified of being seen to enjoy cutting, our Government lacks focus. Its guide should not be equality of misery, but rather, as the arch-moderniser Nick Boles argued in a lecture this week, government should cut whichever programmes do not advance productivity and competitiveness. His provocative examples include free television licences for pensioners and the Sure Start programme, as well as holding down policing, defence, the prison service, the environment, agriculture and the arts. It is not a good use of public resources, Boles points out, that, from 2015, Sir Paul McCartney will receive a winter fuel allowance. Those of us unimpeded by modernising anxieties would add overseas aid and even the NHS budget to reinforce Boles's list of targets. We would also recall how Ronald Reagan enabled the creation of more than 20 million jobs in the United States. If you hold down the minimum wage and give small businesses a holiday from the appalling expense of equality, employment, environmental health and other regulations, you suddenly make it a pleasure to give people jobs. If you combine this with lower taxes on low incomes, and tighter control of welfare benefits, you bring on a new generation of workers. What about the workers, then? Work is the first building block for owning the society of which you are a citizen. When better times come, the worker starts to own other things as well as his or her labour - a house, a pension and other savings, perhaps some shares. The word "ownership" is a key concept for the health of any advanced society, yet the Coalition has almost no policies for advancing it. Under socialism, the state grabs property, and calls it ownership in the name of the people. If the people can no longer own things through their own efforts, then socialism will appeal to them once again.