The people who keep Britain sane don't give a fig for the greasy pole

What a driven people the British seem to be! Listening to the election rhetoric, I find it addressed not to citizens or consciences but to rats. A whole people is being reinvented as a scrabbling rat-race, squeaking for wealth and success.

We are all supposed to want as much money as possible, to be desperate to consume more, to see ourselves as savers and property-owners and potential entrepreneurs, to lust for power over others. The rats who have been trodden under in the rush, the unemployed and excluded, long only to be helped back into the race by education or a minimum wage or communitarian self- help wheezes. The king-rats are role-models, even though Labour would tax a few of their windfall profits in the public utilities. We would all, it's assumed, like to be king-rats if we could.

But this vision, lingering on from the yuppie decade of the 1980s, is a travesty of what the British are really like. There is a rat-race, of course, with many racers. But then I think of Liz McColgan, who failed so narrowly last Sunday to win the London Marathon and, on impulse, gave her runner's-up medal to a little girl in the crowd. There is more to life than winning, more to work than big salaries and promotion. Most people who inhabit this island have always known that, and their knowledge has kept Britain a bearable place to live in.

This other Britain, which the politicians find so irritating, has a marked ambition deficit. It is the forgotten country where people don't see why they should work their guts out, where balanced and intelligent men and women prefer lives with modest rewards. It is a reserve for human nature, in which capable people restrict themselves to private responsibilities because they value their independence.

Most of us who work are employed by institutions: private or public, factories and bus companies, local authorities or libraries, naval bases or newspaper chains. The free-market orthodoxy assumes that we feel loyalty to these institutions. We are supposed to identify with them, because of hopes for more money and power within the structure, or because of some Japanese corporate fiction of partnership.

But this private, mature Britain is not loyal in either of those ways. Most employees are sceptical about those who give them work. They know, as the best-educated and most sophisticated generation of British workers, that they could manage many things better than the management. They worry about wages, but far more about bad equipment and stupid decisions which mean that "the job" is not done as well as it should be. Their loyalty, if that is the word, is to the standards of what they do.

The other day I went to a small, specialised hospital near London and talked to the porters. The hospital was founded in Regency times by a gentleman who fell off his horse and felt obliged to the surgeons who mended his injuries. It has lived through private management and the National Health Service, and is now under commercialised trust management. Soon it will be closed, its generous grounds sold to a developer and its patients transferred to a huge teaching hospital some miles away.

The porter's room is a shabby refuge, with a few sagging easy chairs and an electric kettle. The porters find themselves doing all kinds of jobs, from manual work shifting patients on trolleys to the delicate "counselling" task of laying out the dead and displaying them to bereaved relations.

Peter is 43; he has been a civil servant and a teacher in other stages of his life. "Portering has no career structure. But I wouldn't be horrified to think I could go on doing this until I retire. It's the best job I've had."

I asked him if he didn't sometimes hanker to rise into management. "I think sometimes I could do better. But then I would have hassle and no time to myself. Portering is wearing, but you don't have to occupy your mind with career problems and who to outmanoeuvre."

Did he feel loyal to the hospital and, if so, to whom? "We feel a certain desire that patients shouldn't go away feeling that we are a slack bunch. And we feel a group loyalty among porters against management, especially since the trust put pressure on budgets. It's not their personal fault, but cost-cutting means that our loyalty grows less to the trust and more to each other and other groups - nurses, kitchen staff, even the junior doctors."

Management took all decisions among themselves, Peter said, and used consultation just to draw the sting. Those who had to use the equipment were not listened to. "The people who make these trolleys are never the people who use them, and nobody asks us about improving their design. It's a British failing generally. It's related to the British class structure - look at the mistakes made in the Great War!"

Another porter, a big burly man, had worked as a bus conductor, a publican and a tailor. "I earn wages just to pay the bills. I like the NHS; it's friendly here and I enjoy the work and talking to the patients. At home I build vintage cars, and with a more demanding job I couldn't do that. But the new big hospital - there we will just walk in, work, get our wages and go home like hospital robots."

Parts of the grounds had already been sold off to a developer for a car-park, to pay for new rehabilitation equipment. The porters found this shocking, a violation of the dead founder's generosity. A private clinic marketing MRI scans had been built in the garden, and NHS patients were allowed to use it at night. "The trolleys were jolting the patients as we took them down the cracked path, face up to the rain," said the burly porter. "We suggested a proper covered walkway. But they wouldn't act on our say-so. It was only when we got the relations to fuss that something was done."

The porters see decline all about them, part of the new "money, money" culture which is dissolving the more humane world in which they began their working lives. "There used to be a matron, a domestic supervisor, a mortician, a linen porter. All gone. The head porter has turned into a portering manager and spends all his time on the computer; in the old days, he used to muck in when we were short of hands and help with post- mortems or the switchboard. Now they just phone out for contract staff. And it's a bit unfair to accuse the managers of bureaucracy, because they, too, are doing more and more work with no more time or staff."

Was the hospital still doing the job it was set up to do? "Yes, I think so," said Peter. "Medicine is the new religion and doctors are like the old priests, so we may not be objective about what we achieve. But if ambulances come to us all the way from the Sussex coast or wherever, we must be doing our job right. And yet if we are now just one institution among many competing for customers, does it really matter that they come here rather than somewhere else?"

I left the porters feeling that I had met a group of free men. They had chosen independence at the price of money and power, but they were neither ascetics nor idealists. They were loyal to a sense of public service, and also to the collective in which they worked - even to the harassed and rather clueless managers who made their job harder.

But the porters were deeply pessimistic about the market culture which was beginning to envelop them, above all for the way it eroded human relationships. At home Peter does a bit of writing, and he is working on a study of prophecies of the Last Days and the Return of the Messiah. I could see why.