Fast forward a few decades and what do today’s bourgeois radicals loathe most? Supermarkets. And cars. They sneer at those soulless huge stores in which the witless clientele ‘slump from place to place… listless and depressed’. ‘Supermarkets are evil’, they cry, with their ‘revolting wastefulness’. Cheap food and easy fashion horrify the well-off. They lament ‘supermarket white bread’, which is apparently as unhealthy as ‘a packet of crisps’. Yes, why won’t you little people buy a loaf of Seven Seeded Sourdough from Whole Foods? Celebrated novelist Jeanette Winterson says she doesn’t go anywhere near supermarkets because she wants ‘passion, commitment [and] conscience’ from the shopping experience. Okay. But other people might just want a pint of milk and some ham.

As for cars – nothing gets up the noses of the eco-orthodox middle classes as much as the sight of these four-wheeled machines trundling through their neighbourhoods. Motorphobia is rife among the bourgeois left. As cars ‘clog our streets’, we are ‘struggling to breathe’, cries a writer for the Guardian, conjuring up a beautiful image of metropolitan types going about like Edwardian ladies, a hanky at the nose to protect them from the fumes of the little people’s vehicles. ‘Get rid of your car’, barks one of the Guardian’s environment correspondents. Governments have got to wise up to the eco-calamity that will befall mankind if cars are not ‘removed from the street altogether’, he says.

The motorphobes might finally be getting their way.

[This is about the UK and cars, but it’s really more about the West and its liberties. Cars and supermarkets represent progress, efficiency, and choice, all three of which progressives loathe. The push to force everything onto the electric grid — cars and ovens — are also about control, which now can be imposed centrally thanks to smart grid systems. It’s enforced Marxism via a climate-control mechanism, a matter of taste solved by force. — Ed]