OSCAR WILDE ONCE REMARKED THAT the Church of England is the only church where the sceptic stands at the altar.

Perhaps it is a particular English disease to believe in nothing. It might be why we are one of the unhappiest nations on earth.

It need not be God who fires your heart and shapes your values, but it had better be something, because we seem, as a species, and as individuals, to fare better when there is something other than our own narrow interests to propel us. The last war, for all its horrors, bound people together in a common cause, and the scientist James Lovelock has said that the inevitable climate catastrophe awaiting us will, at least, force us all out of pettiness and towards purpose.

I am not a Labour supporter, because I have never known what the new incarnation of that party really believes in, but what I am sure it doesn't believe in is the importance of art and culture.

In an earlier column I wrote with bafflement and dismay at Lord Dearing's recommendation that foreign language teaching in schools must dispense with the oral examination because it is “too stressful”. This week we hear that literature is not to be taught at A level, either. Camus and Dante, Pushkin and Proust are just too difficult. Instead, the syllabus will focus on lifestyle, and students can write an essay of around 250 words on some literary topic of their choosing.

Stop right here. Yes, right here. An essay in 250 words? Let's hope the reporter missed out the final nought.

We are breeding monoglot idiots. I am sorry to be rude to Lord Dearing and his well-paid lowbrow egalitarian worshippers of the stupidest and laziest among us, but the effect of Labour's ignorant policies can only be the survival of the thickest.

There is no point in ordering the best universities to take state school candidates if those candidates will not be able to manage the courses. You cannot study a foreign language at degree level if you cannot read the literature of that language in the original.

Unsurprisingly, the fee-paying schools aren't going to bother with new Labour's toytown qualifications (yippee, all the kids will get grade A). The smart schools will teach as they always have done.

So if you have about £12,000 a year to spare, your children will learn expensively what used to be taught free.

At the heart of this nonsense is lack of belief. Literature, especially literature by foreigners, has the same status in the eyes of Labour reformers as train spotting. It is a harmless, unnecessary, slightly eccentric way to pass the time and has no relevance to the busy, self-important world of employment and money-making.

The idea that young people would find worth and reason and excitement and discovery in literature of any kind is beyond the grasp of Labourites. To me, as a child from a working-class household without books, Labour has become the party of betrayal.

I am here because of books. One of the reasons I am here is because I read Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, aged 16, at the second of being chucked out of the house. Camus is perfect for young people because he is all ardour and belief - his quest to believe in nothing lands him back at believing in each person's spirited defiance against the numbing operations of a machine-world.

Why is Labour intent on turning education into a machine-world instead of a journey into life?

Already, in English literature, kids are not required to read the whole of a text. They are led to believe by their weary and worn-out teachers that a book is not worth reading all the way through. You can spend hours on Facebook, but not Middlemarch?

Hermann Hesse, who is also off the syllabus, wrote a strange and prophetic book, The Glass Bead Game, about a future world where society has become utterly divided into those who are initiated into the mysteries of the game, and the masses who are not.

Reading is a cheap and democratic way of revealing the human mind to itself - all you need is someone to teach you to read and, after that, some books. Why are we turning literature into a new mystery? Why are we saying to millions of kids: “This is not for you?” I'll tell you why, because the sceptics at the altar don't believe a word of this. Their message is clear - literature is of no value to the masses.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist