Not that the Conservative manifesto was any less dispiriting. Not only does the promise of a “long-term plan” embrace frankly socialist rhetoric, but it implies a will to power cynical enough to make big government even bigger. Take the “Right to Buy” plan to force housing associations (which, unlike councils, are independent, efficient charities) to sell their housing stock at below the market rate. It will require a huge extension of state power (which could and should be challenged in the courts), a subsidy running into many billions, and a missed opportunity to relieve the housing shortage. If the forced disposal of local authority assets that will supposedly pay for Right to Buy is practical, why should the proceeds be used, not to build houses, but to benefit a minority of housing association tenants — or property developers who will quickly snap up these bargains? This pseudo-Right is unpopular, unfair and inimical to bourgeois virtues. By contrast, the Conservative promise to exempt homes worth up to £1 million from inheritance tax is popular, because it chimes with the bourgeois desire to pass something on to the next generation.

Neither of the two main parties, then, has heeded Aristotle’s advice. This is bad news for the poor. The only societies in history that have made strenuous efforts to improve the condition of outsiders — women, ethnic and religious minorities, the unemployed, the disabled, the destitute — have been bourgeois societies. None of this happens in places where there is only a weak middle class, or none at all — which is to say, in most places and at most times in history. Only an entrepreneurial capitalist society can create the wealth needed to care for those less able to compete. A middle-class China would be formidable indeed, but as George Walden argues on page 21, right now the Chinese Communist Party is taking the country in the opposite direction, away from the bourgeois model of Singapore created by the Chinese-born but British-educated Lee Kuan Yew. This is bad news for China, where the weakest have so often been allowed to go to the wall, but also for the rest of us. Likewise, the failure of the Islamic world to permit the emergence of a prosperous, educated middle class is catastrophic — and not only for Muslims.

The United Kingdom was the first country to be run by the middle class and the first to demonstrate that this was not the same as being run exclusively for the middle class. We urgently need to return to our historic role as a beacon of bourgeois virtues. No party that fails to understand this deserves to form the next government.