EVEN though the seed of this book was planted after an interview with Tony Benn in the Post Office Tower, it hasn’t germinated into a virulent anti-capitalist tirade. Broadcaster, journalist and BBC teamster Stuart Maconie is no revolutionary.

But in The Nanny State Made Me he has produced an entertaining, though occasionally rambling, homage to the social security that many of us have enjoyed courtesy of a benevolent “big” state.

It yearns for a return to the commitment of public good over private profit and an escape from the freak zone of neoliberalism.

In documenting the vast community wealth that has been stolen from us, particularly during the Thatcher years, Maconie effectively leafs through Britain’s blossoming catalogue of failed privatisations and emphasises rampant capitalism’s propensity to destroy everything of real value.

He recognises that the basic fibres of society which hold us all together are in dire need of repair. Our last decades of so-called “free-market” dominance have rendered most of us “less happy, less productive and in a much duller and nastier place to live.”

Maconie blames Tory MP Iain Macleod for first coining the term “nanny state,” when bemoaning the introduction of motorway speed limits.

And he rails against the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, who still have nannies of their own and extremely cosseted lifestyles, while espousing a vague notion of “standing on one’s own two feet.”

Would that were the case with the private sector, often utterly dependent on the state’s generosity to make its money.

This part-autobiographical treatise proudly proclaims that nanny knows best when it comes to nationalised and properly funded health services, public transport systems, education and energy sectors, parks, libraries and even financial services and, at his firebrand best, Maconie slams any opinion other than a conviction that private education should be abolished immediately as “cant and bullshit.”

He recognises that the barbarians have stormed the gates and are inside Parliament and council offices ransacking society and need urgent removal.

But Maconie believes that the British will continue to disappoint left-wing intellectuals with their distinct lack of revolutionary ire.

While this is no modern-day What Is To Be Done? or Value, Price and Profit, this overtly left-leaning book cries out for the justice promised by the social contract from the post-war years to the 1970s.

Well worth a read, it might even lead some more inquisitive souls a few steps further along the British road to socialism.

Published by Ebury Press, £9.99.