Mind the Gap: the new class divide in Britain Ferdinand Mount Short Books, 316pp, £14.99 ISBN 1904095941

Most writers who object to the class system come at the subject from below. In demanding a more equal society, they denounce the greed and fat-headedness of the ruling class, and protest at the affronts to human dignity that dance in the service of wealth and power. Ferdinand Mount is not a writer of this sort. A one-nation Tory - and the holder (as he fetchingly concedes) of "a semi-dormant baronetcy" - he is an author, editor and columnist who has also, as head of the No 10 policy unit under Margaret Thatcher, been a Tory policy wonk.

These are not the usual qualifications for the author of a warm tribute to the British working class. Indeed, the association with Thatcher's Britain will, as Mount knows, be enough to disqualify him altogether in some quarters. Yet this is itself a lively demonstration of his main point. Far from growing narrower, Britain's class divide gapes wider - wider still and wider - all the time. And though outright social snobbery has lost some of its larger teeth, the politics of identity, with its plaintive insistence that we are symptoms of our background, can still line us up in enemy camps and keep us pinned to fixed positions on the social ladder.

"The worst-off in this country live impoverished lives," Mount begins, comparing Britain's underclass unfavourably with the overseas competition. The glue that used to bind us together, through ties of deference and respect, has dissolved, leaving an untidy and fractious free-for-all. While looser and less class-conscious in some areas - in our clothes, language and "lifestyle choices" - a deep gulf still yawns beneath our careless feet.

Mount looks for evidence everywhere, casting a swift eye over politics, property, education, decor, food and manners. That classism is a fact of life is not a surprise. We may no longer have a rigid class system, and snobbery is often inverted - "posh" is usually an insult - but the class habit shapes everything, from our feelings about Tim Henman, fox-hunting and the monarchy to our viewing habits, our diets and our haircuts. Deadlines did not allow Mount to mention how many of our Olympic gold medallists went to private schools, where a fondness for equestrian events, rowing, fencing and sailing is not thought outlandish. However, he has a moan, in line with John Humphrys's recent cri de coeur, about trash television, which patronises and insults working-class Britain even as it attempts to pander to it.

So the class gap is alive and well. Fine. Mount argues the point with odd vehemence, insisting that it is radical or "counter- intuitive", though for many it will seem a statement of the obvious. In listing the symptoms that make him glum - bloated fat-cat pay-outs, the decline of proud institutions, the shabby culture spawned by our deregulated media - he is only echoing what dismayed anti-Tories have been saying for decades. But he has the grace to admit that "it is People Like Us who are largely responsible for the present state of the lower classes in Britain". And he declares that: "It is our misunderstandings, meddlings and manipulations which have transformed a British working class that was the envy of foreign observers in the 19th century into a so-called underclass which is often the subject of baffled despair today both at home and abroad."

The book is at its most vibrant in passages such as these, where a cosmopolitan, literary or historical perspective elevates the argument. Mount, seeking a diagnosis, looks at the rise of working-class idealism in the 19th century, and delivers a moving and patriotic homage to the old working class - its Nonconformist chapels, schools and sports clubs, its benevolent societies and co-operatives, its allotments, bands and choral societies. This tremendous "working-class civilisation", as Mount calls it, has been buried or supplanted by vacuous modern amusements, degrading television, shoddy education and an every-man-for-himself approach to civilised life.

It is not a pretty picture, but it provokes two important questions. Who is to blame? And what then must we do? So far as culprits are concerned, Mount is swift to finger the "liberal" consensus, with its dehumanising faith in state intervention and its lack of respect for the working class itself. This will make some readers gasp: public provision may be dispiriting, but so - to say the least - can be the rangy, take-no-prisoners atmosphere of the privatised utopia that Mount advocates in its place.

On the issue of a cure, Mount talks expansively of a "wholehearted, reckless opening up of genuine, substantial power to the bottom classes", but shies away from explaining how this could be achieved. Instead, he offers a "wild scatter" of ideas which proceed from an assumption that wealth and power need to be redistributed not from rich to poor, but from the overweight state to keen private citizens. He especially likes the idea of small stakeholdings, be they in business or land. Readers who gasped earlier might gulp when they read that "any revival of the social fabric must surely go hand in hand with a return of the church". It is sweet, the notion that parish councils should have more power to dispense shelter, wisdom and succour to the desperate, but it won't win many Realistic Suggestion of the Month awards. And it leaves Mount sounding like nothing so much as a grumpy old Tory wanting to turn the clock back.

Worse, such suggestions represent an uncomfortably constrained form of patriotic nostalgia. Mount's image of industrious families filing into chapel to sing hymns alongside luckless "hoodlums" is all very well, but what if the chapel is a mosque or a temple? The book neglects to discuss or even allude to modern Britain's racial make-up. Mount does not investigate the extent to which the notorious racial antagonisms that have disfigured Britain's towns and cities for so long may be a colourful form of classism; nor does it seem to trouble to him that the old working-class forums he admires were stubbornly woman-free.

Yet it is one of the book's virtues that there is plenty to argue with. Who wants polemics that make one shrug? Mount is smart enough to know when he is being inconsistent, and wisely opts to keep things broad. If it is only acumen that leads him to plant the conservative flag in Britain's working-class tradition, he is at least hoping for the best in arguing for a country of fellow citizens with appetites, assumptions and aspirations in common. The opposite of a socialist, he'll keep the red flag flying in Oxfordshire yet.

Robert Winder's latest book is Bloody Foreigners: the story of immigration to Britain (Little, Brown)

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