Behind the thin veil of the Conservative regime's rationale of deficit reduction hides the final demolition of public comprehensive education and Raymond Williams's more expansive long revolution unfolding over a century of creating a democratic state that affords opportunity, voice and justice for all. Restoring the politics of a pre-war or Edwardian era, opportunity is now being rationed and education returned to its tradition of social selection and class subordination. Autocratic power is being constructed at the expense of "inefficient" democratic spaces that voice appeal and deliberate policy in relation to need. Yet democracy is not the problem but the solution to the collective action dilemmas facing civil society. The potential of comprehensive learning communities to develop democratic collective agency is proposed. (Contains 24 notes.)