Conservative values require socialist policies. That's my reaction to this essay by Kevin Williamson. He bemoans the "degraded state of the conservative movement" for telling the poor that immigrants and elites are to blame for their hardship and neglecting the traditional conservative message that "what is not necessarily your fault may yet be your problem, that you must act and bear responsibility for your actions."

What Kevin fails to ask, though, is why is his conception of conservatism now out of favour?

In part, it was always an act of bad faith. In a hierarchical society somebody must be at the bottom of the heap. Sure, any individual might escape that fate by work, thrift and diligence. To believe that everybody can do so is, however, is to commit the fallacy of composition.

Also, even those who do escape need luck. I should be a poster boy for how you can escape poverty through work, study and savings: I grew up in a single-parent family hiding from the rentman behind the sofa to become a millionaire (just). Even this, though, needed luck: the luck of being perceived as intelligent; the luck of graduating in an age when well-paid jobs were expanding; and the luck of years of house price inflation. (No doubt posh cunts will poshplain why I'm wrong, but they can fuck right off).

What's more, the scars of child poverty don't heal. Those born poor are more likely to die young and be anxious and lonely than those born rich even if they do get good jobs.

The decline of traditional conservatism, though, might not be due simply to people waking up to reality. Instead, such conservatism has lost its economic base. I'll concede that there was a time when the bourgeois values of study, hard work, ambition and thrift paid off - if only by giving you more chance of being exposed to good luck. But things have changed, for example:

- Job polarization means it's harder for people without qualifications to achieve economic progress: some of the rungs of the jobs ladder are now missing. You can't progress from the postroom to the boardroom now there are no postrooms, and working-class women can't meet well-paid husbands in typing pools any more.

- If you get a degree and graduate job, you face more oppressive working conditions than we used to have: managerialism has eroded professional autonomy and so proletarianized what used to be the middle class.

- Younger people have no hope of buying a house, especially in London, unless they work in finance or have access to the bank of mum and dad. Even those who are otherwise upwardly mobile thus will remain propertyless.

- In an age of secular stagnation in which real interest rates are negative, there is no reward for thrift, even for the few who can save.

To put it bluntly, bourgeois virtues pay off in a bourgeois society - where there is a large middle class. But they don't pay off in a 1% takes all society where wealth is accumulated in shadier ways.

Which brings me to my point. If conservatism is to escape its current "degraded state" then we need to (re-)create the conditions in which it is something more than a sick joke - conditions in which hard work and self-help pay. Such conditions include:

- Measures to increase pay, by improving workers' bargaining power. Also, we need better jobs, which might require more government intervention to support technical progress.

- Improving the quality of work, which might require increased worker control. In truth, this shouldn't be as radical as it seems. Back when work did pay for the "middle class" it did so because many of them became (meaningful) partners in law or accountancy firms.

- Policies to reduce house prices and so facilitate mass property ownership. This requires more than housebuilding. It requires a reversal of the financialization of the housing market.

- Measures to make thrift pay. This entails a looser fiscal policy, one effect of which would be to raise interest rates and the return on savings.

Traditional conservatives - those who support the virtues of self-help - should therefore be sympathetic to Corbyn because he, more than others, is offering to create the conditions in which those virtues will again pay off.