THE late Colin McInnes, of Absolute Beginners fame, wrote a fascinating article in 1973 about cultural differences between the social classes.

Horse-racing, he said, is of interest to the working class and upper class – but not the middle – while dog-racing is only followed by working class people; soccer is “certainly the greatest working-class achievement”.

The instincts of the social classes also differ: “In a crisis the middle-class mind thinks of a committee; the working-class of a mass-meeting.”

Well, quite.

Fifty years on, the classes may have stretched and fragmented but are still recognisable from his description.

Thatcherism may have boosted working-class capitalism, the white van man may have grown rich, and casualisation has replaced many traditional working-class jobs where they have not been automated out of existence.

A committee remains a thing unto itself with its own atmosphere and priorities. Retired school teachers trying to be helpful. There is the agenda to stick to, issues to be raised, great and small, any other business. This is politics at the micro level: undramatic and circular.

Something nearer to a mass meeting recently filled the Plymouth Proprietary Library in Stoke Ward, a full house of voters raising down-to-earth issues with Luke Pollard MP and Labour councillors, including deputy leader Jemima Laing: traffic outside schools, morale among workers at Derriford Hospital, gun control, trees.

Conservative-run Plymouth Council has had a rush of blood to the head and decided to cut down all the trees in Armada Way, despite the strong objections of the public.

To the last they remained defiant. The work of destruction was done by night behind barriers with police protection. Legally sanctioned strong-arm stuff like the forced installation of pre-payment meters by bailiffs forcing their way into people’s homes.

After the massacre of the trees, one Plymouth resident said to me it reminded him of the reaction after the Plymouth Blitz in 1941: “People were just looking.” They were silent as though they couldn’t quite believe it.

But the pattern is being repeated. It is as though the Conservatives sense electoral disaster coming and are determined to get their retaliation in first: trashing living standards and public services while they still can. The prophecy has been amply justified: “When jester is promoted king, six sagging Tories will represent (or not represent) Cornwall in Parliament.”

Hopefully the voters will shortly do to the Conservatives what they did to Plymouth’s trees.