We worry too much about sending people to prison. So what if we have more people immured than any other country in Europe? We have the greater need. I wouldn’t boast about it but I wouldn’t go around apologising either. We were the first to have an industrial revolution, therefore the first to have a proletariat. Breed people for the single purpose of manning machinery and you are left with the problem of what to do with them when machines learn to man themselves. Either you re-educate them, recalibrating their aspirations and theology, or you pay them to go on living as they did when they had a function, keeping them poor, drunk and befuddled but idealising their way of life. We have chosen the latter course. We will not talk down to you, we say, we will not teach you how you might to more purpose fill the vacancy of your hours – because that’s elitism – we will simply venerate your salty values and send you to prison when they encroach on ours.