Central to that decline is something else you'll never see in this election – the pauperisation of the working class.
The pauperisation of huge parts of the developing world through so-called globalisation, the earth-shaking effects of war, repression, separatist violence and counter violence, the allure of the filthy rich west viewed from the dustbowls and rubbish-tips of shantyvilles outside our fortress, are creating a swell of millions of would-be immigrants.
It pays tribute to a class of people that, although exalted under Mao as a revolutionary vanguard, has constantly to face the threat of pauperisation.
A fear of pauperisation is vital if people are to be persuaded not to reject whatever zero-hours contract or minimum-wage-plus-humiliation job they are offered, and there is no greater cause of fear than not being able to feed yourself or your children.
Instead, as Jon Snow's compelling TV documentary Hidden Iraq underlined this week, they have seen the physical and social destruction of their country, mass killing, tens of thousands thrown into jail without trial, rampant torture, an epidemic of sectarian terror attacks, pauperisation, and the complete breakdown of basic services and supplies.
Many of these "creatives" lauded by Chancellors for "disrupting" our economy have merely found themselves with the luxury of oodles of time to relax in a coffee shop observing their own pauperisation in the name of companies now deliciously freed from all labour legislation to make super-normal profits.
Capitalist restoration brought in its wake mass pauperisation and unemployment; wild extremes of inequality; rampant crime; virulent anti-semitism and ethnic violence; combined with legalised gangsterism on a heroic scale and precipitous looting of public assets.
As a result of long-term researches it has been established, that creation of a friable blanket on leached chernozem in the conditions of Western Siberia leads to its gradual pauperisation by physical clay (<0.01mm) at the expense of washing away.
Faced with such grim economic prospects, thousands have voted with their feet, preferring the uncertainties of a new life abroad to pauperisation at home.
Dislike of the way communist states constrained ordinary people's lives led me into undercover work, but witnessing mass pauperisation and cynical opportunism in the 1990s bred my disillusionment.
"Pauperisation is a fact even though there is global growth," he says.
