David Cameron recently called for government access to all private bank accounts as a means of fighting tax evasion. Dalrymple ponders the cultural implications:

This would be respectable enough if Mr. Cameron were the leader of a collectivist party that openly favored a centrally administered, collectivist state on the grounds that only thus could the interests of the poorest 51 per cent of the population be protected; but he leads the party of individual freedom and limited government. This, at least to me, is depressing.

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When you bear in mind that the votes he fears to lose are those of people who might conceivably vote for him, and not those of supporters of the avowedly collectivist other party, you begin to grasp just how deeply collectivism has entered the population’s soul, after only two generations of such collectivism.