“Heritage”, as an idea, has long occupied an uncertain place in Britain’s modern pantheon. But now, as we fall out of love with our own past, the slide seems unavoidable. According to Historic England, 4,891 English heritage buildings are “at risk”; the fastest-rising group is “places of worship”, nearly all of which are churches. A high proportion of these “buildings at risk” are state-owned or Church of England.

Meanwhile, the Victorian Society warns of a “heritage skills crisis in local government”. Councils now refuse to employ enough conservation officers. Birmingham once had two full-time officers for its 2,000 listed buildings and 30 conservation areas. It currently has one, who is part-time. Unsurprisingly, the city is awash with fine historic buildings in decay. Handsworth Park Lodge, with its cheery clock tower, was occupied until only a few years ago but now stands abandoned and vandalized. One of The Telegraph’s “500 Best Pubs”, the Barton Arms — a “Victorian temple in carved wood, gleaming tile work, stained glass and wrought iron” according to Birmingham Live — has just closed. Its future is perilous.

Has the Government also called time on heritage? Labour ministers are notably more chary of protecting old buildings than their predecessors. According to the Architects’ Journal, ministers have only rejected Historic England’s advice to list buildings 10 times in five years, yet eight of them were in the last year under Labour.

And, when we lose buildings through insufficient protection, we lose part of our nation’s story. The loss of sites like Manchester’s Medlock Mill is profoundly depressing — the site was one of Cottonopolis’s older surviving mills. Britain’s global consequence was never greater than during the Industrial Revolution, whose tale is told by the mills that survive in Northern towns. They are as precious to our story as Blenheim or Chatsworth, but another has just slipped through our fingers through decay and conflagration.

Can the National Trust help? No such luck. After the disastrous 2015 fire at Clandon Park, it refused to restore its glorious interiors. Before frittering away its insurance largesse, the Trust could have recreated the house’s Rysbrack chimneypieces and sinuous plasterwork. No longer. Future generations must contend with “honest” walkways of steel and glass inserted into the blackened shell: a Meccano set checkered with a Fabergé egg.

It’s unsurprising that a Labour government is less well disposed to heritage than a Conservative one: the clue’s in the name. But something deeper is underway. For a generation, schoolteachers have taught history as a Manichean struggle between good and evil in which the British are in the baddies’ corner. The same ideology has mesmerized the BBC, which seems touchingly unaware that Britain has in it potential TV historians other than David Olusoga. Even Historic England, which I much admire, once judged it wise to release on social media a cartoon of a wrecking ball obliterating Nelson’s Column, advertising a debate over whether “controversial” national statues should be removed or not.

Chickens come home to roost. Words have consequences. If you keep telling a new generation that its “history is bunk”, ultimately, they will believe you. If we want our nation’s heritage to be loved and preserved, then our historical story must invest our heritage with moral virtue. Otherwise, one day soon, all of it will be “at risk” because it is just bricks and stone.