'THE Condition of England is justly regarded as one of the most ominous,' wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1843 when he began to map the changing moral, political and economic state of the nation.

'England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in every kind,' he said, 'yet England is dying of inanition!'

When Carlyle cast a jaundiced eye over mid 19th century England's 'enchanted wealth' and asked, 'but which of us has it enriched?' he might just as well have been passing judgement on early 21st century England whose emptiness and inequalities are equally as blatant.

As the British economy edges towards the cliff the Office for National Statistics reported the results of its Happiness Survey. And we discover that instead of asking a faintly intelligent question like 'would you feel happier living in a free and independent Britain?' the survey enquired with mind-numbing banality 'overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?'

David Cameron, who ordered the Happiness Survey at a cost of £2 million, seems not to be aware of the 18th century philosopher John Stuart Mill ('if you ask yourself whether you're happy you cease to be so'), or George Bernard Shaw ('a lifetime of happiness would be hell on earth'), let alone realise that people who aim to achieve something attach little importance to happiness.

In any event since the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs has just reported that 'one in ten bank notes is tainted with cocaine,' the survey's results should be treated with caution.

But back to The Condition of England, which posed the spiritual rebirth of the individual and society, and exerted a profound influence on Benjamin Disraeli,?Britain's greatest 19th century prime minister, who tried to tackle it politically as well as in his fiction.

In his novel Sybii, or the Two Nations, Disraeli admitted that the working-class was exploited by the laissez-faire system.?Despite the dramatic increase in the production of wealth, prosperity lay in the hands of the landed aristocracy. Not much has changed there.?According to Kevin?Cahill, author of Who Owns Britain, 69 per cent of the land in Britain is now owned by 0.6 per cent of the population.

The solution for Disraeli, as it was for Carlyle, was Chartism. The movement was set up in the years following The Peterloo Massacre to bring about political and social reform. But it was a movement which Disraeli thought lacked a 'legitimate and noble leader' because of the prolonged crisis in the Tory party.

In 1837 Disraeli was elected to Parliament and became leader of a Tory splinter group called 'Young England' which consisted of young Tory idealists who wanted to bridge the gulf between the rich and the poor through the revival of conservatism.

Under Sir Robert Peel, who spoke frequently about conservatism but appeared to have no idea what to conserve, Disraeli considered the Conservative party an army without a faith because the chief was not a believer. 'The imagination of men cannot be set afire with customs regulations,' he said. 'Men are lead only by force of imagination.'

As today's Englishmen attempt to come to terms with a Coalition comprising Conservative Members of Parliament...who, when they're not agitating for ever more construction on an over-populated England, are fence-sitting on the crucial subject of the country's EU membership...and a Conservative Prime Minister who claims, without blinking, that it's because he's a Conservative that he supports gay marriage, it's little wonder that Conservative politicians are seen as grasping or confused philistines.

'That great party has ceased to exist,' Disraeli said. 'In an age of political materialism...that aspires only to wealth because it has faith in no other accomplishment... Toryism will yet rise from the tomb...to announce that power has only one duty: to secure the social welfare of the people.'

Carlyle said 'a man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder' and Disraeli thought a Tory Party without heroic ambition was like a dish without salt.

England's ship of state is listing and rudderless, and its captain, like a latter day Queeg, is locked in a cabin of his own design. The country's institutions are decayed, its leadership corrupted and its citizens estranged.

If David Cameron is to raise Toryism from the tomb, he needs first to rub salt in its wound. Then a heroic Tory Party might set about restoring the people's welfare and freeing them from the yoke of EU serfdom.

– John Muir, Newnham.