Britain has perfected a modern agricultural ballet: paving over fields at home while ordering dinner from abroad, preferably via several borders, two currencies, and a shipping lane having a nervous breakdown. It is a choreography of cranes, lorries, planning notices and supermarket aisles, all moving in opposite directions with absolute confidence and no visible sense of irony.

There are many ways to unsettle the powerful. One may march, shout, draft legislation, or commission a commemorative mural of interpretive despair. But nothing quite rearranges the furniture of authority like a simple, inconvenient sentence spoken aloud at the wrong moment. The old Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci once observed that telling the truth is revolutionary. He was correct, not because truth carries a red flag, but because it carries a crowbar.

Money collapses, socialism rises. Socialism rises, society wobbles. Society wobbles, capitalism strolls back in wearing a hard hat and carrying a ledger. It is less a Theory than a recurring British pantomime — except nobody enjoys the interval and the popcorn costs £11.

Civilisation, on closer inspection, has always been run by people who read quietly, doubted themselves often, and took far too long to clear their throats, while being shouted over by louder specimens who mistook volume for wisdom and enthusiasm for competence. William Butler Yeats spotted the problem over a century ago and summarised it with surgical efficiency: the thoughtful hesitate, the reckless roar, and history usually hands the megaphone to the wrong lot.