Polly Toynbee’s volume rises in direct proportion to the slide in share prices.

Her latest rather freewheeling thoughts open thusly:

A remarkable 10,000 people marched on Trafalgar Square at the weekend to hold the government to its promise to end child poverty.

This somehow reminded me of my visit back in 1987 or so to Red Location, one of the most awful apartheid South African ‘townships’ near Port Elizabeth.

Named after the rusting corrugated iron barracks there, it is now the site of a sharp new museum commemorating the anti-apartheid struggle.

When I passed through back then, the desolation and poverty were all too obvious. The sanitation was beyond description – only a handful of blocked semi-public WCs for hundreds of people.

At that time the memory of Bantu Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement was still fresh, even if the BCM as such was under attack from the communistic ANC/SACP who wanted no rivals. Those townships where the BCM had a presence seemed to feature a greater emphasis on self-help and self-reliance.

I later went to visit veteran communist leader Govan Mbeki (father of the now fallen Thabo, then recently released from Robben Island) at his little house. This recalls that memorable encounter.

I described to G Mbeki my visit to Red Location – surely the ANC as the local power should be doing more to motivate the people living there to clean things up a bit and try to improve their lot.

"It’s not the job of the people to do the job of the government", retorted Mbeki, tetchily.

Which of course may be true. Yet what a bleak practical philosophy that attitude brings with it: a willingness to let people rot – if not to encourage them to rot to pep up their sporadic militancy – until the state fixes things.

Toynbeeism (as befits the Guardian with its Broad Left anti-libertarian outlook) is all about collectivist compulsion. How inspiring that supposedly poor people march to demand that not so poor people give them more money! And not by choice, but by force of the weight of the state.

The then Ambassador at my first posting in Belgrade was Sir Edwin Bolland. As we trundled round former Yugoslavia on long car journeys he would talk of his upbringing in a mining community in northern England in the 1930s, a brutish poor existence. Amidst the deprivation the working-class families invested heavily in self-help and education, setting up hard-working study groups with a view to improving their lot and giving their children a better chance.

If as seems likely we all need to take a ‘back to basics’ new look at what works and what does not in sustaining modern society, maybe that should include a hard look at the role of the state in dumbing down over many decades those principles of self-reliance and self-motivation, in favour of ignorant demands that ‘the government’ take more and more decisions for us?