I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I can’t deny that I did. I believed all that stuff about privatisation and free trade and the unrestrained market. I think I may even have been taken in by the prophecies of a great share-owning democracy.

I thought – this now seems especially funny – that private British Telecom would be automatically better than crabby old Post Office Telephones.

I think anyone who has ever tried to contact BT when things go wrong would now happily go back to the days of nationalisation. Soviet-style slowness was bad, but surely better than total indifference.

I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I can’t deny that I did, writes PETER HITCHENS

And it’s all very well being able to buy cheap goods from all over the world, as we fling our borders wide and abandon the protection of our own industries that everyone says is so wicked and will make us poor and backward.

How I miss the old names of trusted brands, and the knowledge that these things had been made for generations by my fellow countrymen.

But the new broom swept, and it swept pretty clean. In towns I know well, car assembly lines, railway workshops, glassworks engineering plants, chocolate factories vanished or shrank to nothing.

A journey across the heart of England, once an exhilarating vista of muscular manufacturing, especially glorious by night, turned into archaeology. Now, if it looked like a factory, it was really a ruin.

Someone usually pops up at this stage and says that we still manufacture a lot. If you say so, but then why are the drug-dealers so busy in our new factory-free industrial areas, and why can I never buy anything that was made here, except from absurdly expensive luxury shops?

Why are our warships made of foreign steel? Why are the few factories that do exist almost always foreign-owned, their fate decided far away by people who don’t much care about this country?

And why is our current-account deficit with the rest of the world the worst it’s ever been in peacetime, and nearly as bad as it was during the Great War that first bankrupted this country a century ago?

If it’s all been so beneficial, why do so many of the containers that arrive in British ports, full of expensive imports, leave this country empty?

Sure, some things have got cheaper, and there are a lot more little treats and luxuries available.

The coffee and the restaurants are better – but the essentials of life are harder to find than ever: a good life and an honest place; a solid, modest home big enough to house a small family in a peaceful, orderly landscape; good local schools open to all who need them; reasonably paid secure work for this generation and the next; competent government and wise laws.

These have become luxuries, unattainable for millions who once took them for granted.

And now the remains of our steel industry are vanishing, not because nothing can be done (any determined government could save it if it really wanted to) but because we’re all still worshipping that free-market dogma that captivated us 30 years ago.

I never thought I’d yearn for the National Coal Board or British Steel or, good heavens, British Leyland. But I do begin to feel I was fooled into thinking that what was coming next would be any better. At this rate it may soon be much, much worse.

Maybe our real enemy isn't ISIS...

The cross-eyed prejudice of this country’s chattering classes sometimes gets beyond all bearing.

We all loathe Islamic State. We were all rightly dismayed when these maniacs captured Palmyra, one of the great monuments of human civilisation, murdered its chief curator and began to smash it up.

Syrian troops pictured after retaking Palmyra - one of the great monuments of human civilisation

Yet when the Syrian army, backed by Russian air power, succeeded in driving the fanatics out of Palmyra, the media could hardly bring themselves to put it anywhere further forward than page 94, and the politicians, always ready to say rude things about IS, could barely utter a word.

It’s this kind of thing that makes me wonder whether the alleged hostility of the West to IS is genuine, or a pose.

It often seems to me that they loathe Russia, and Syria’s President Assad, much more. Which side are we really on in this conflict?

Striving to identify the maddest moment of the week, I am forced to choose between two: the crazed closure of the majestic coal-fired power station at Ferrybridge to satisfy green zealots (remember that when the power cuts come, as they soon will); and the police ordering paying passengers off a Cornwall-bound train because it was too full – the culmination of a 50-year policy of trying to drive custom away from the railways, rather than expanding and modernising them.

Elizabeth Debicki

So bad, it had me backing the villains

I have actually been watching the BBC’s dramatisation of John le Carré’s The Night Manager because it is so bad. How much worse could it get?

A secret agent in deep cover who simpers nervously every time he is rightly accused of treachery and can’t stop himself ogling the boss’s girlfriend, while the boss is looking?

A supposed spy chief, who more closely resembles a grumpy Barnsley social worker who has just failed to arrange a gay adoption – and who, while many months pregnant, travels across the world and outshoots a professional assassin?

After not too much of this I was rooting heartily for the villains, who seemed to me to be making a perfectly sound case for the arms trade.

And, while I understand that plots sometimes have to be changed for TV, I think it was utterly gratuitous to invent scenes in which the beautiful Elizabeth Debicki was sadistically tortured, when no such thing happens in the book. Not to mention the ridiculous ‘happy’ ending. Please, spare us a sequel.

Archbishop in an unholy mess

I am still scratching my head over the Archbishop of Canterbury’s bizarre response to powerful evidence, gathered and assembled by eminent lawyers, a former police officer and a judge experienced in child abuse trials, that abuse allegations against the late Bishop George Bell are highly questionable, and based on a sloppy, inadequate investigation.

The Archbishop, Justin Welby, hasn’t given an inch and continues to defend the Church’s acceptance of a solitary, ancient, uncorroborated, anonymous charge – even though, since it was made public, there have been no further accusations.

But Archbishop Justin has now told the BBC that George Bell – a man he believes to be a filthy child molester who dishonestly and selfishly abused a little girl – is also ‘the greatest hero that most of us have’. I’ve heard of a broad church, but this is ridiculous. One or the other. Not both.