If it allows you to stay here illegally, plunder benefits and exploit the NHS, why rock the boat by declaring you feel guilty about it and want to work with your neighbour for a better society?

No sensible person would disagree with Mr Cameron that under New Labour state control has grown to almost Orwellian proportions but the brutal fact is vast numbers of people in Britain are not sensible: we are reaping the diseased harvest, of 30 or 40 years of rotten state education (a Tory legacy almost as much as a Labour one) and a decade in which honest family values have been dragged through the mire.

There is no shame among vast numbers of young people today in having baby after baby out of wedlock with no one but the state to look after them: it’s a badge of honour in some quarters and an easy ticket to a free house or flat. Nor is there shame in cheating, stealing and, in some cases, killing, if the protagonist thinks he or she can get away with it (under Labour they often have).

The vast moral vacuum in Britain is going to take a far tougher approach than Mr Cameron’s to begin to rectify. What’s needed is not more state control as Labour understands it – endless bans and interference in the minutiae of our lives – nor, as Mr Cameron suggests, in devolving power back to the people. What’s needed is the state to take firm and practical steps to impose (yes, impose) a moral agenda.

It needs to make it a financial advantage through tax and other incentives, for couples to marry and stay together. it also needs to put financial and social disadvantages in the way of those who have child after child, then lean on the state.

It may sound tyrannical but why should the British taxpayer support feckless teenage mothers whose only contribution is in raising a new generation of fatherless criminals?

Enough is enough. Mr Cameron is keen not to be seen as Blair Mk2 but large parts of his speech this week echoed the outgoing PM’s hollow, Lefty thinking. Weasel-words such as ‘choice’, ‘diversity’ and so on are part of a New Labour vocabulary that should be consigned to history: they should not be part of any Tory leader’s speech or party manifesto.

Such words do not conjure up, as he might believe, an image of hope and opportunity but vanity, uncertainty and lack of statesmanship.

It has been said so many times before it has become a cliché but like many clichés it’s true: Britain is crying out for strong forthright, moral leadership. I don’t believe most right-thinking people want power handed back to them. the millions who are not sensible, the ones to whom Cameron is trying to appeal, have simply taken it anyway. What we want is for power to be wielded responsibly by Government, something that has never happened under New Labour.
We want discipline in our schools, order on our streets. We want criminals to be punished properly. We want to know we’re living in a society in which the responsible, law-abiding and taxpaying majority are put first. Why on earth shouldn’t they be?