It was astonishing intellectual bravado – and utterly duplicitous. David Cameron has taken 15 years of thinking on the left – Naomi Klein, Zygmunt Bauman, Richard Layard, Richard Sennett among others – and put the whole back catalogue on its head.

The critique of our present atomised, individualistic, fragmented lives was all there. As Cameron lamented, what matters most is "our personal journey and our right to pursue our own happiness regardless of others around us". But having hijacked the leftwing analysis, he stripped out every reference to the corroding force of a free market economic system predicated on persuading us of a good life defined purely in terms of material goods because "we are worth it". He resolutely ignored the billions poured into an advertising and marketing industry that grooms us to believe in our own sense of entitlement.

In the place of this powerful amalgam of economic and cultural imperatives which have insisted that the individual's primary purpose is the fulfilment of their own desires, who does Cameron blame but, unbelievably, the state. It is all the fault of the beleaguered, derided public sector painfully trying to hold together basic standards of decency and social solidarity. Who can he be thinking of? Replace his frequent and dismissive references to the "big state" and think instead of thousands of teachers trying every day to tell children to share, and respect each other, thousands of nurses trying to care for the frightened and frail, or thousands of park keepers and street cleaners trying to create liveable environments. It is all their fault.

Yes, we can agree with Cameron that "obligation and duty are in danger of becoming dead concepts"; yes, we can offer a cheer for his call for a "broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation"; but how dare he insult our intelligence to suggest that the blame for our ills lies at the door of millions of hard-working employees of the state. It is this yoking of legitimate concerns to spurious diagnosis which infuriates.

This is a nonsense: European countries whose standards of welfare and education we most admire fully recognise that such common goods are expensive and complex to deliver effectively. Try suggesting to the deeply civic Scandinavians that their "big" state erodes responsibility and they will choke; how can Cameron be suggesting that the expansion of state services in the UK since 1997 has eroded my sense of responsibility? Strip out the references to shibboleths on the left such as the recent admirable work on inequality, The Spirit Level, and you find Thatcherism written into every paragraph of this speech. "The state undermines personal responsibility" is an old theme; Norman Tebbit was more blunt – "get on your bike," he told the unemployed.

Or take another paragraph on the need to redistribute power and control from the central state to individuals and local communities. That took me straight back to 1988 to an interview by Hugo Young with Kenneth Baker, then education secretary; I was the lowly television researcher and I listened bemused to Baker waxing lyrical on how their government was pushing power back to the people, using the metaphor of a wheel. Power pushed from the hub out to the rim. Afterwards I asked Hugo: what about the spokes – how can a wheel hold together without them? He generously took on the idea, agreeing that the spokes are the institutions, the vital structures by which power is channelled effectively from the rim to the hub as well as back again.

Yet here we are, 21 years on, and still Conservativism shows no understanding of the importance of institutions in fostering the culture of mutuality. For all Cameron's forelock-tugging at friendly societies and the self-improving institutions of working-class life, his predecessors did more to smash those ethics of responsibility and solidarity than any previous government.

The irony of this extraordinarily incoherent speech is that in the end Cameron describes a state that sounds uncannily like the one he proposes to dismantle. He tilts at windmills, knocks down his fictional state and erects this energetic, catalytic, galvanising state in its place. If New Labour's was a nanny state, this is a pester power state: not a lot of difference.