Nick Cohen: He talks about money and it's quite important to follow the money on these things. I agree with a lot of what George says. George's argument is against egalitarianism. I agree that we are burdened with a condescending elite in culture, in the arts, in the press-very much in the press-and to some extent the BBC that panders to mass taste. But I am a little wary of saying that the trouble with Britain is that it suffers from too much egalitarianism when we have divisions in society which are wider now than at any time since the 1920s. I've been shocked by the behaviour of the Conservatives since the crash. Until 2008 you could say reasonably that the free market delivers the goods, you may not like bankers in Kensington but that's the way it works. But now it doesn't work. The public, George's masses, have had to reach into their pockets to bail out the richest and most privileged people in the country. And that seems to me to have changed everything. Stagnation seems to go on for ever, but we are struggling to face it and move from the world which was essentially Tony Blair's world that George described and analysed well. 

It is unfair to blame Blair for all of it. If Blair were here he'd be able to throw all sorts of things at you. But it was that world of the Millennium Dome and Greg Dyke and Tony Blair, which flourished during the longest boom in the history of capitalism. That boom has gone. Remnants of its thinking are left behind like fossils after a mass exinction but it doesn't seem to me that George's description is a true description of how Britain is any more.

GW: I accept your point on egalitarianism. We agree because I'm talking about false egalitarianism. Egalitarian elites wear the masses' clothes. They affect to like, or even worse actually do like, the masses' musical tastes. But of course they live in a completely different world financially and in different parts of town. On Blair, I agree with what you say. Financially there has been a huge rupture between the two eras of Blair and Cameron. Yet these are the same people. Before Blair and Cameron you had Callaghan, you had Thatcher, you had John Major. None of them ingratiated themselves with mass culture in the way that Blair and Cameron have done. That seems to me rather important. 

NC: I'm not disagreeing with you that Cameron models himself on Blair to some extent. But in important respects he doesn't, actually. For instance, he's not tough on crime, whereas Blair would always automatically have a tough criminal justice policy. If I'm allowed to quote Italian Marxists in Standpoint, Antonio Gramsci said: "The old is dead and the new cannot be born." You still have politicians, people in the media going on in the same old way, a way of thinking  which good times have embedded. Starting with the Thatcherite revival in the Eighties and building during the long boom of 1992 to 2008, we have had a continuous period of success and enrichment for people at the top. Those underneath have not been so lucky. An interesting thing about Britain is that we're starting to get like America. Average wages in Britain started stagnating in 2003 just as average wages in America haven't risen at all perhaps for a generation. We have an elite brought up in a boom culture finding itself in a new world where there's a recession, and none of the old levers work and they don't know what to do. And the danger of George's argument is that it misses how lost the elite  are. I was struck by the confidence of people around  Blair. They would say, "Oh Nick, shut up, blabbering on about this, blabbering on about that. We understand this country, we know how to run it." Their successors don't.