A rather tough-hitting, tough-charging essay in the latest Spectator, pricking the "greatest generation" balloon just a bit. The generation that saved England and the West from Hitlerian tyranny, turned tail and led the UK into a swamp of welfare state decline. For all their heroism in war, it was the D-Day generation that clamoured for, developed and exploited a welfare state. For more than 30 years they fostered the belief that the statism so necessary in conflict could be continued, with advantage, into the peace. The very institutions that had nurtured their resilience and sense of duty were, in turn, undermined by them. The family was torpedoed by the liberal divorce laws, and by the removal of the stigmas upon single parenthood and bastardy. The extended family, so vital in the 1920s and 1930s when the D-Day generation were children, was supplanted by the welfare state. Patriotism was ridiculed and caricatured by the very generation whose freedoms were secured by it, and cast aside in favour of post-imperial guilt. It is surprising, given the success with which the values and attitudes of the 1930s were put to use during the war, that the very people who harnessed them should have, in the subsequent peace, reacted so violently against them. What irony.

Party of the People? The wealthiest members of the Supreme Court (with investments in the millions) are David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sandra Day O'Connor, and John Paul Stevens. The "poorest?" Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and William Rehnquist.