I have just read Roger Scruton’s The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope. It could be a philosophic commentary on David Cameron’s message at the party conference this week. Scruton, as is well-known from his other writings, favours small government, vigorous local communities, long-established traditions, individual responsibility and public accountability. As a romantic Englishman he loathes the dogma of multiculturalism, Left-wing educational ideologies, Le Corbusier-type architecture and all the other movements, whether cultural or otherwise, that have been imposed on the populace by strategists, so-called experts and planners.