Robert Mugabe recently stated that Britain was a rotting, decadent country run by a government of gay gangsters. However galling it may be to be lectured to and insulted by the likes of Mugabe, his comments have the distressing air of truth about them.

What words could suffice to describe the politicians who have reduced us to such a plight? Though loaded with titles and baubles, they may not unfairly be described as the scum of the earth, who have given us thirty years of relative decline and twenty years of absolute decline.

Once upon a time, in the April 1949 edition of National Geographic, to be precise, Sir Evelyn Wrench, head man at the English-Speaking Union, effused that: "The Tyne is a scene of ceaseless activity. Britain builds more than half of the world's shipping tonnage." Fifty years on, the Tyne's dockyards are silent and the gulls sweep down on rusty, muddy pools.

The only printable words that come to mind to describe those who have allowed this to happen are the words used by Louis Cohen to describe his former associates, the South African Randlords: "The greatest rascals nature ever spawned, and who would sell their souls if a purchaser could be found for such vile trash."

Corruption, half-truth and downright lies flourish in the foetid atmosphere of British public life. I don't know if it's some civil servant's idea of a bizarre joke, but the monthly announcement of the new, very low, unemployment figures always seem to come on the same day as that of yet more massive job losses. This rather obvious bit of humour was a little tempered this November with the adjusted dole tally given on the day before the customary 1,000-plus redundancies. Naturally, the firms involved in such job cutbacks are almost invariably the expendable satellites of US, German or Japanese parent companies.

Everything is up for grabs. The stage is set for the privatisation of the world! A minor, though distasteful, development in this line has been the new spate of sales of Roman Catholic churches. Places of worship are now turned into yuppie flatlets or warehouses without rhyme or reason, just sacrificed to the almighty god of cash. Contemptible - when one considers that such buildings were financed by the pennies of the poor. I bet the latter could never have envisaged the baseness of the smarmy ecclesiastical types infiltrated after the Second Vatican Council.

Disabled on the scrapheap

Amid the porn, violence and unclassifiable garbage now seen on our television screens, one interesting nugget cropped up recently in the late-night schedules. This was called Life on the Breadline. Insomniacs or video-recorder adepts could see a disabled ex-teacher and his social worker wife trembling and weeping with fear in their Norfolk cottage as a Labour Government chopped their benefits. A delightful spectacle for an allegedly civilised country to exhibit, don't you think? Vote Labour and give the disabled ex-teacher a good kick up the rear! There is no animal so stupid that it doesn't defend itself when under attack, unless that animal be the modern white Briton!

Non-perception of elementary realities is part of this pathology too. One could indeed take a bag of sewage sludge and place it in a shiny box labelled, say, New Labour Super Detergent, and no doubt there would be plenty who would buy it!

As a symptom of the crumbling society, the crime wave has spread even to places like rural Sussex, where Dame Vera Lynn has been burgled an astonishing nine times! But sympathy for the victim might be tempered by the reflection that all the chaos we see around us is, in substantial part, an indirect consequence of Britain's Pyrrhic victory in World War II. Be careful, because you may one day get what you prayed for, as the old saying goes. Some, of course, just manage to escape the consequences of the world they help to create. If Vera's pal, Arthur Harris, had lived just a few years longer, he might have been accidentally shot by a drug-dealer while on his way to the annual 'Bomber Reunion Dinner' at the Manchester Free Trade Hall!

What, too, can be said of a country which wages a ruthless, undeclared and largely unreported air war against Iraq? This has taken a bizarre turn in recent months, with British and American forces staging bombing raids on flocks of sheep and their shepherds in the area around Mosul. Apparently, the Iraqis haven't yet turned their mosques into auto-part warehouses, but our aviators have wrecked them anyway, turning 1,500-year-old shrines into roofless rubble. But of course, readers of this magazine know well enough that the bombing of Iraq is not 'our' conflict, any more than the Boer War was. Like Germany in the later stages of World War II, Iraq is the supine recipient of an unbelievable ancient hatred and malice delivered in the form of high explosive bombs. Sanctions have claimed the lives of 500,000 Iraqi children, who have perished for want of simple food and medical supplies.

Media glossing over holocaust

The official media in this country have ignored or condoned the Iraqi holocaust, a misdeed whose grim details are better established and authenticated than some other claimed atrocities. The Liverpool Echo of the October 7th 1999 cheerily commented under the heading of 'Arabian Nights': "Four Liverpool lads are flying the flag for Merseyside aboard the Royal Navy's oldest Type 42 destroyer. They are on patrol in the Arabian Gulf aboard HMS Birmingham as part of a multi-national force whose task is to enforce United Nations sanctions against Iraq." Naturally, the Echo didn't say that over a million Iraqis have been liquidated by UN sanctions!

These Liverpudlians who have, perforce, been turned into Madeleine Albright's (unwilling?) executioners all came from areas like Bootle, Walton or Huyton. When they serve in the Navy, is it really to aid or protect the inhabitants of some of the most deprived places in Britain? While they fight someone else's war, I wonder if they reflect on how little the powers that be in this country have done for their own people.

Readers who think that some of my articles are a little apocalyptic should try listening to the Merseyside local radio stations. Numerous callers on the phone-in programmes tell disturbing tales of how crime and drugs are tearing apart one Liverpool community after another. Granted, such districts were never over-prosperous, but not so long ago they were decent and friendly places. Now even city parks are wastelands, wrecked after years of cutbacks, with floral clocks and palm houses replaced by hypodermic needles and empty bottles formerly containing cheap strong alcohol.

Decay at home and futile conflict abroad are part of the same axis of decadence and corruption. But there are now signs that that axis is starting to wobble. More and more ordinary people are beginning to wake up to the fact that free trade means the destruction of livelihoods, and that the bottom line of 'globalisation' is the ruin of national identity and existence.