The Labour Party may do surprisingly well in the forthcoming general election. Indeed, the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) threat may actually benefit Labour south of Tweed by releasing an English nationalist reaction that can only find guilt-free expression if combined with collectivism.

English nationalism differs from the Celtic variety in having no ethnic component – the 'true-born Englishman' has been a joke for several hundred years. Indeed, it is almost entirely cultural, but this makes it a weak binding force; tea and marmite is no match for blut und boden, and cultural nationalism is very easily dissolved by historical criticism which can reveal, for example, that fish and chips are a recent import from Europe. But the longing for nationalism remains, and while this urge has achieved partial expression in UKIP, it is not flourishing, largely because it is in that party combined with an inconsistent and compromised individualism, as you would expect of cultural nationalism, and thus produces deep sensations of selfishness and consequent guilt, all of which results in self-repression. It is no accident that UKIP has had to wrap itself in the bizarre sweet-paper yellow-purple colour code and a currency symbol, of Roman origins, rather than the pigments and structure of the Union flag or the St George’s cross.

Needless to say, English nationalism has for some time been unable to find an outlet in the Labour party because the leadership has presented an increasingly internationalised version of socialism (see the Guardian, passim). This represents a break with the Attlee/Bevin position, which leaned heavily towards the national version (though so camouflaged as to break up its outlines, as was inevitable post 1945), and indeed explains to a degree the increasing gulf, present at the origins of the party of course, between the parliamentary and intellectual element of the party, which is theoretical and abstracted from real populations, and its base membership and support, which is practical and intensely conscious of regional identity.

But if this cultural nationalism finds a cause in resentment of the SNP, and a convenient and guilt-free vehicle by matching and perhaps exceeding Sturgeon’s ‘progressive’ claims, the situation changes. In other words, the electorate can express its nationalism without guilt if covered and propelled by collectivist rhetoric, towards which it has in any case a very strong leaning. Once in combination the effect could be mutually reinforcing and exothermic. I think in many cases an anti-Scottish reaction in England will express itself as a confident vote for Labour. Miliband will not be sympathetic to such feelings, but he will nonetheless benefit from them, and may have to collaborate in order to manage what could become a powerful element in his party's character. In other words, the Labour party, already very far left, may be forced into a much stronger nationalist position by the English anger of its voters. This seems unlikely to last (it is cultural nationalism, after all, and will blow away in a strong wind), but it will have vigour so long as it can define itself in opposition to a Scottish threat, and the SNP is trying to make that fault line permanent.

Wrapped in her castle of stone and bristling thorn
One fortunate girl slept through the dark till dawn
Brought love, a noble lover and a waking kiss,
Company, talk, and better far than this.

Her sister’s tale, sadder, real and grey,
Is never sung, though lived through every day;
No wish nor chance, of sleep, no star to guide
Or steed to bear her whither she would ride.

Lightless, restless, the whittling knife, her friend,
Counselled fierce combat or a tragedy’s end.

A flesh-fly, just breakfasted, looked over from his leaf,
And, knowing the world, took pity on her grief.

“Lady”, he said, “though you must pass these hours alone
Awake, aware, fearful, dull to the very bone
Think not but that your lover, though no lord,
Loves you as much as soul can well afford,
And will cut his way through these dark bowers,
To bring you both much lighter, happier hours.”

“Oh fly”, she said, “you know not how I long!”

“Oh Lady”, he replied, “plate glass is strong,
And hours have I spent, vainly striving
To be out again, winging and wiving,
Beating my head against its glacial wall
And hearing close by dear Musca’s plaintive call,
Seeing her trembling limbs, her gleaming wings
And in her rainbow eyes a million things,
The sky, the flowers, a rotting dump of dung,
And on the butcher’s slab a fresh-cut lung.

Oh tell me not of crueller, sharper pangs
Than pining for blood and lacking for diamond fangs.”

He paused, and shuffled his many shoeless feet,
She smiled, and thought of other cuts of meat.

So fly and lady talked the hours away
And talk so still, and must until the day
When Clod shall come at last with map and horse
Love in his heart, and a clear, fixed course.

Dicey's superb Law and Public Opinion refers to several varieties: public opinion, legislative opinion, and legal opinion; but he makes no extended reference, perhaps no reference at all, to that which is almost the most significant in our own time, namely executive opinion.

In Dicey's period, of course, employees of the state, including the armed services, were a small part of the total working population, and a smaller fraction still of the entire population. Now, the civil service alone, counting local authority employees, is vast, and when we further remember that many employees of private companies are predominantly engaged on public service contracts or within industries that are reliant on policies forcing purchase upon the consumer through levies (National Grid, insurance, the law...), we can see a very large part of the working population is indirectly or directly employed by the state.

Most remarkable, perhaps, about this swollen public sector, is that in spite of being non-net taxpayers, they are permitted to vote in both local and general elections, and that hardly anyone thinks this is odd. Indeed, it would seem to most that it would be wholly unreasonable to disenfranchise these people. But is it?; and can we go still further?

Pensioners on the state are only dubiously entitled, from this perspective, and recipients of benefits not at all. But a very large part of the population is actually already such a beneficiary; one thinks, for example, of child benefit, NHS services, or, even, the personal allowance. In fact, there is no need to worry about these details, for from the perspective of the civil servant the entire economy not engrossed by the state is seen as "tax expenditure", that is income and wealth that is foregone by the state and allowed to private individuals. Indeed, the grounding assumption in the informal political economy of our time is that the national income is, in its fundamentals, a public property, the distribution of which is one of the functions of government, if not the principle function.

In other words, we are reverting or have already reverted to a thoroughly archaic political view, namely that the Crown has possession of quite literally all, even the bodies of the citizens, and distributes largesse as a means of rewarding service; but with the variation, perhaps a very fragile one, that the ultimate beneficiary of the state is the the citizen; I say fragile since the citizen has very little power to enforce this view or to express disagreement with the wisdom of the state's dispensation.

This is so deep a reversion in public attitudes to property and income that it seems unlikely to be turned around by anything other than a major shock or, more likely, a steady shift in imperceptible increments, so small that at the time they are scarcely perceptible at all even to contemporaries. Some insight with regard to this movement, if it is ever to happen, might be found in the gradual transitions observed in the prehistorical past as tribal societies became primitive monarchies, and these monarchies eventually weakened and private property rights were granted (or re-granted) and came to be characteristic of a modernised society. Insofar as I understand this process it seems extremely slow and even erratic, with transformations simultaneously in both directions, for example a strengthening of the property rights of urban dwellers while those of rural wage earners might weaken.

The important question, then, is whether there is any indication that we might be moving away from the current view on property. I see no sign at all, and if anything think the tide has a little further to go in the current direction before it turns.

A key justification for the extraction of tax from the population is that individuals would not spend the resources as well or wisely as officers of the state. Namely, individuals might spend them selfishly, for example on food and drink, rather than a health service available to all.

Part of the justification of this view is found in the current behaviour of the population, which indeed often seems to be shortsighted even in terms of the self-interest of the individual, assuming that our perception of another individual's best interests has some validity, which in fact I am very reluctant to do. However, even granting perfect insight into the wisest course for another individual, this argument cannot be sound, since the observation of current behaviour is of individuals in a highly taxed society, and where actions are both constrained and distorted.

Indeed, heavily taxed individuals will probably discount the future very heavily on the ground that savings will be taxed and otherwise eroded by state manipulation of the currency, to reduce government debt for example, that it is best to eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we will have empty pockets in any case. Moreover, tax is in essence a coerced purchase, and only those on very high incomes will be in a position to duplicate that purchase by paying for private education and healthcare or engaging in substantial acts of private charity.

Thus, the behaviour of individuals under tax is no guide to their probable behaviour in the absence of tax.

Institutionalists in development and growth theory will point to features of law or ruler behavior that prevent the “accumulation of capital” (eg. Maddison, Contours of the World Economy (2007), 225), by which they seem to mean that accumulation was inhibited in private hands. The fact that this inhibition does not mean that a counterbalancing accumulation takes place in the hands of the state or the ruling authority is curious, but it appears to be a widespread assumption, and perhaps actually the case. Certainly it seems reasonable to assume, and to some extent evident from the facts, that expropriated capital tends to be consumed by the expropriating power. This occurs for two reasons; firstly a government rarely invests for income, largely because it need not plan for the future since the host does that in order to survive. Secondly, it may be best advised to consume the capital, since when rulers and their bureaucracies attempt to invest and strengthen their state and population, they tend to make errors; investment is an activity best left to the tax base. Furthermore, by consuming this capital the expropriator will augment its ability to extract more from the tax base by making itself temporarily stronger while simultaneously weakening the tax base. In other words, by consuming capital that would otherwise be returned to the private economy for management, the state can prevent the private world from becoming better able to resist taxation. It is thus obvious that expropriating powers tend to destroy economies on which they feed, which is perhaps why they so often end up being expansionists as well. There is no necessity in this destructive tendency; cunning expropriators will keep the host alive – that is the essence of the Third Way – but it is very hard to satisfy the bureacracy with a stable or steady state economy, and this need for growth in the state's own machinery will tend to push them towards exhausting the population and driving it to destruction.

The great paradox of collectivist politics is that in spite of its assertion that everyone matters and that the individual is subordinate, it has a strong, apparently inevitable tendency to concentrate decision-making in the hands of progressively fewer and fewer people. Only the most extreme royalist or Nietzschean elitist could contemplate with equanimity such a narrow base for the formation of policy determining the lives of millions.

The puzzle goes deeper than this, for collectivists happily invoke crowd-sourcing as a proof of the wisdom of the group, but when it comes to politics they are not only content with but they absolutely insist upon government in the name of the people by an elite civil service.

One may, of course, doubt the sincerity of the collectivist's interest in the aggregate output of the crowd, not least because they, unlike economic liberals, have no information theory to explain how a population of individuals can be so creative, but also because in most cases I suspect that the input of the mass is only sought to confirm views and directions already taken, as if it were a rigged plebiscite.

Or is it just another example of collectivist rhetoric being used as a mask for the prosecution of aggressive individual interest? It might be so, it might be so.

There are strong and weak uses or senses of the term 'circular economy'.

The strong sense, which is more often vaguely held or entertained than spelled out, supposes that an economy can proceed for an indefinite period without external input, simply by reprocessing the outputs of one stage as the inputs of a succeeding stage. There are no losses, and no wastes are discarded. We have never observed such an economy, and attempts to devise a system on these lines will fail because such a system is in effect a perpetual motion machine, which the laws of thermodynamics tells us is impossible.

The weak sense, which encompasses almost all practical suggestions for a circular economy, suggests that the economy achieves as much reprocessing of outputs as is possible without increasing the energy inputs to achieve reprocessing. In other words we recycle as much as is economic (that many recyclers are not aware of this limitation is true, but hardly worth discussion). This weak sense is only interesting insofar as it it represents a novel state of affairs. Since the proposition in fact describes the normal economy,it is empty rhetoric insofar as it claims novelty.

Thus the strong sense of the circular economy is false, and the weak sense is banal.

A few days ago, one of my friends, a now retired professor in the sciences, was telling me of his concern at the very large degree of overseas ownership of utilities and other assets, with consequent questions over security and the export of profits. He wondered whether the government should have stepped in to prevent this happening, and whether such things should ever be allowed to fall into private hands at all so that such onward sales couldn't occur in the future. Anxieties of this kind are very common in people of his age, if they aren't economists. It seems that the pre- and just post-war generation are thoroughly habituated to the concepts of if and only if national ownership therefore national benefit, introduced or at least institutionalised by the Attlee governments. For others, my teenage son for example, it is a spontaneous prejudice, part of what David Henderson referred to in his Reith Lectures as Do-It-Yourself Economics; but for those in their seventies it is a felt and a genuine experience, and almost unquestionable, though in my view almost certainly false.

Of course, it is not difficult to understand (yet disagree) with the anxiety at ownership by overseas nationals. That said, the remedy proposed is obviously more dangerous than the matter it seeks to address, and ought to worry any reflective person. State owned assets are usually run to an extreme of inefficiency, with terrible consequences for consumers of their product and the taxpayers who support them; and undue cost in the utilities is to be avoided if at all possible, since these are unavoidable expenditures for all or nearly all citizens and businesses, and such excesses could be very damaging to economic growth. In the case of energy they undoubtedly would be so (see my piece on Thermo-Economics).

However, rather than open up this tender subject with my friend (a lifelong civil servant), I defended overseas ownership with the observation that since 'we' couldn't ourselves afford to repair the capital in these sectors, non-British investors were unavoidable. My friend agreed, but repeated his view that perhaps these assets should never have been in private hands in the first place, at which point we started to go round in circles and broke off to talk of other things.

We should have persisted and asked ourselves why UK citizens did not actually retain or appear to retain ownership. Two answers suggest themselves:

a) In a highly taxed society the broader citizenry will simply be unable to save sufficiently to invest in assets within their own geography, other than the houses in which they live, and

b) The ownership of such sitting-duck assets, such as utilities and larger companies, will tend to become classified as foreign in order to reduce if not completely avoid taxation.

In other words, the exceptional weakening of indigenous ownership, if real, is the unintended consequence of other government interventions. The state had already stepped in, and muddied the waters.

It is remarkable that the debts of the state apparatus are usually regarded as the responsibility of the rest of the population. For this purpose the state is us, and when we say that the "the UK's debt (or deficit) must be reduced" we mean the debts incurred by the state. Yet, as Italy reminds us, the population can be productive and fundamentally healthy, but the state unable to deal with its spending and utterly unable to generate its own income through the sale of goods and services to willing rather than coerced purchasers. Indeed the state in these situations is only able to borrow because of the health of its supporting population and economy.

It is obvious that these debts were incurred in order to fund public spending, and it may be argued that the supporting population was the beneficiary of this spending. However, since the population was coerced into obtaining these goods and services, it seems that they need not acknowledge any responsibility. Those in government and employed by the state, are not only responsible, but in a defensible sense the ultimate beneficiary of state expenditure, since they end up with cash in hand to spend as they wish.

It is a curious possibility, therefore, that one way out of the horrific impasse of the public finances is for the non-state population simultaneously to repudiate the government and its employees and their debts, and say, in effect, "You, personally, borrowed this money and spent it on yourselves while palming us off with junk; it's your problem."

Cultural Buddhism is increasingly attractive. Far from trying to keep up, to be well-informed, to be well-read, to be widely cultured, or even to just be in the swim, all increasingly difficult and thankless tasks, intellectuals are becoming narrow and exclusive, a deliberate specialisation that proves, if proof is needed, that knowledge and the science that produces it is a private good.

In the literary arts this has resulted in a studied negligence of the media-endorsed writers. I am hardly illiterate, and I read a great deal, but I have no interest or much knowledge of contemporary fiction or poetry, and I feel no particular loss or guilt about this omission. In 2009 I took the trouble to read the Booker prize shortlist. It was a tedious experience, and only one of the books left any positive impression on me at all, Sarah Waters' Little Stranger, which is an unpleasant, indeed a nasty, but perfectly written and constructed satire on the National Trust and Mole's enthusiasm for the Water Rat's picnic. The rest I found lacking in interest and, in the case of Hilary Mantel, quite literally unreadable at the sentence level.

At around the same time I bought a number of anthologies of contemporary poetry, and even a few single volumes by better known writers, and read them diligently, but found the sight of mature adults affecting adolescent confusion and ignorance quite repellent. The experiment thus over I returned with relief to energy, economics, and political theory, which, though hard work and often monotonous does actually make progress. The range of reference is very broad, and often novel for even a well-educated reader, and these materials are handled in ways that are both imaginative and intellectually creative. Fiction generally, and modern fiction particularly, on the other hand, seems to leave no residual conceptual trace; it flares up and burns brightly, but the combustion does no work in the thermodynamic sense, and there is no residual trace except the unstructured ashes of a forgotten experience. It seems best to take the short-cut and, after recalling Hume's magnificent advice, throw the things into the metaphorical furnace immediately:

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact or existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.