The model of the atomised, acquisitive individual, dealing with others only through secularised market relations regulated by self-interest, is disas… - J. C. D. Clark

PCism...is about manipulating public doctrine for private ends. The form it takes depends on the nature of national values. In America, PCism derives from three unchallengeable ideals. The ideal of equality is used to promote the interests of women and racial minorities, often ending in very inegalitarian provisions such as quotas. Collective moral improvement is used selectively to deny people what will supposedly harm them, formerly alcohol, soon tobacco. The sanctity of the individual is interpreted to demand parity of esteem for unconventional lifestyles, especially homosexuality, and can be exploited in all sorts of ways through the new sexual harassment industry. In Britain, the pattern is different. None of these things have gained nearly as much ground as in the United States, but the same technique of making a sectional self-interest unchallengeable and using totalitarian methods to inhibit criticism is used in favour of regional cultures against metropolitan culture; used in our endlessly various class war by plebeians against patricians, and, especially, used in that strange crusade of denigration of our national institutions.

Far from being uplifted by their history, the Scots have over many centuries been strikingly bad at maintaining and developing a useful sense of national identity. Worse, Scotland lost much of the self-image it once possessed. Medieval Scotland was a considerable achievement of dynastic politics over poverty and localism. It boasted four universities to England's two, and into the 16th century, Scottish culture was famous across Europe. This mental world of renaissance latinity sustained a Scots identity built around dynastic history and religion rather than the folk culture of Robert Burns. It was this which went disastrously wrong...
The Glorious Revolution, ardently espoused by Scots Presbyterians, began the break-up and suppression of this high culture of latinity, episcopalianism and dynastic legitimacy. With dour thoroughness, episcopalians and nonjurors were expelled from their posts as clergy, schoolmasters and academics, and were subjected to lasting and effective persecution.
Presbyterians hailed William III, and later the Hanoverians, as saviours of their religious and civil liberties; but, far more than in England, Scots were divided. Presbyterianism survived at the cost of sacrificing a national identity which had grown up in another mental world.

It has been traditional in British historiography to trace industrial growth and technological innovation to the sturdy virtues of bourgeois individualism, and especially to the individualism of Protestant-democratic England... [T]he example of Japan in our time refutes the necessity of any such connection, for Japan has demonstrated the possible industrial dynamism of a highly deferential society, indeed a society which has only recently masked the values and practices of a divine-right monarchy. It is perhaps possible in the changed climate of the 1980s to re-emphasise the extent to which England's commercial and industrial achievement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rested not only on success in war, averting revolution and eliminating French competition, but also on the virtues of loyalty, diligence, discipline, subordination and obedience in the work-place, whether factory, mine or office (indeed the British economy was eventually overtaken by others which practised these virtues to a higher degree). But such practices had already been elevated to the status of social ideals within the Anglican-aristocratic nexus; and it was the military elite, not the nation of shopkeepers, which won the wars. The values of nineteenth-century industrial society owed far more to the values of the ancien regime than the Victorians were prepared to admit.