How can Britain cut its spiralling benefits budget and the number of alienated youths spending taxpayer-generated monies on frivolous consumer goods, facing off against the police and making life unpleasant for those of us not involved in creating poverty porn documentaries? Traditional answers – such as colonising Africa or declaring war on, let’s say, Russia – are off the table. Drones, AI and our defence budget mean that there is no prospect of a Crimean War II, led by the kind of martial Britons who so frightened the Duke of Wellington on the Peninsular campaign.

What then? Britain’s current problem is one that the heroes of Joad Raymond Wren’s scintillating book never had: a complete want of thinking outside the box.

In the 19th century, the utopian socialist Robert Owen proposed an interesting solution that might have 21st-century applications. In his 1817 Reports to the Committee of the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor, he advised MPs examining the poor laws that charity and poor relief compounded both poverty and the vices of the poor, and the problem of crime was not addressed by executing or incarcerating the starving man who steals food. Instead, he proposed planned towns for 500-1,000 people, composed of residential squares. Imagine, if you can, tiny versions of Leon Krier’s Poundbury or Ebenezer Howard’s Letchworth, without Waitroses and populated by society’s most disadvantaged, ignorant and vicious. 

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I’m not sure how the citizens of Owen’s utopia were to be induced to live in these glum-sounding burgs, but it is not impossible that something like the feminist utopia imagined in Joanna Russ’s 1975 science fiction The Female Man could have acted as a spur. In Russ’s Whileaway, the only capital offence is refusing to........

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