A DEPLORABLE YOB CULTURE has become almost completely dominant in this country. This means that while pop stars and football players are feted, general knowledge of worthy figures from the past is virtually non-existent. One such great man, forgotten by most, was James Keir Hardie, who founded the Labour Party a hundred years ago. Keir Hardie didn't exactly have a good start in life, being born in a humble one-roomed cottage. Growing up in the industrial Scottish county of Lanarkshire, amid scenes of deprivation like those written about by Dickens and Zola, Keir Hardie went down the Mines at the age of ten. Illiterate until the age of eleven, he taught himself to read and write well enough to edit the Miner newspaper. By 1906, he was the leader of a Labour party with 29 members of Parliament.

Keir Hardie had done as much as one man could conceivably have done, given his time and situation, for the cause of social reform in Britain. One could disagree with his party in other respects, hut at least it did campaign powerfully for justice for the working man, and should have improved Britain in that respect. So what did go wrong, with a Labour Party which is proposing to raise £50 billion by privatising the digital airwaves? The Labour Council in Manchester is keen on sweeping the beggars from the streets - apparently buggers are very welcome there but beggars are not! Why indeed are all those beggars on the streets, surely in itself a pretty basic indicator of economic failure? Is this what we should expect from a Labour government with a huge majority?

British people in hock

Labour is going to leave the British people in hock via the innocuous-sounding Private Finance Initiative. Already Labour has sold off 600 Custom & Excise and Inland Revenue buildings to the Mapeley consortium, operated by - among others - the chief capitalist speculator baron - George Soros. The taxpayer will pay the rent on former public buildings to mega-rich property magnates, courtesy of Labour "forever," if Labour has its way! For a large NHS hospital, the amount of rent payable would be around £10 million. Are you suspicious? Do you smell lots and lots of sweet and sleazy deals in private? The life and strange death of Labour is so bizarre that it can only be understood in terms of parables.

While I've never wholly gone along with the doctrine that goes by the fancy title of Social Darwinism, I've always found that the study of nature provides many really interesting parallels with the human world. You hear or read snippets that make you start thinking. For instance, I once read about a bird called the Passenger Pigeon. A hundred or more years ago, this bird dominated the skies, but now it's extinct. According to the zoology book, "it was doomed by a combination of its unsuspicious stupidity and low reproductive rates." Mark those words well I'm sure no readers need to have the parallel stressed any further!

The analogy from nature that makes me think of the fate of Labour is the grim story of the caterpillar and the ichneumon wasp. A fat caterpillar innocently nibbles away on a stalk, when along comes an ichneumon wasp. This deposits an egg in the caterpillar. The egg becomes a larvae that proceeds to eat all the innards of the caterpillar. From the outside nothing appears to have happened to the caterpillar, till an ichneunion wasp emerges from the empty skin instead of a butterfly.

That's what's happened to Labour. The surface is still there - the title, the clubs and committees - but the rest has been swallowed up from within, and not a trace remains. The Labour Party is nothing but an empty husk, eviscerated just like that juicy caterpillar, replaced by something new, strange and sinister.

There's nothing left of Labour. If you have supported Labour in the past, for whatever reason - even if your old dad told you to years ago - then do have the courage to break with inertia and tradition. The party you once voted for no longer exists. Come to us instead! Why on earth should anyone want to he associated with a party that gives 75p a week to pensioners whilst spending millions bombing inoffensive countries abroad for no good reason? The name Labour remains - surely a direct contravention of the Trades Descriptions Act - but Blair's party is one of the most peculiar extremist groups that there's ever been.

Beyond contempt

These people really are beyond contempt. They had a mandate from the country, if not to reverse fifty years of national treason, then at least to attempt to reverse eighteen years of particularly unpleasant sleaze, corruption and decline. Instead, they have continued and even intensified the process. For years, Thatcher, Major, Blair and their masters in the world of high finance, Bilderbergers and Trilaterals, have been building up a big pressure cooker, intensifying the pressure bit by bit, dismantling society and family, the better to form convenient economic units. And now they have the cheek to be surprised that the pressure-cooker lid flies off into their faces. The hauliers' and farmers' demonstrations have sparked off an extraordinary wave of public sympathy and anti-government feeling. It would seem that the New World Order project is in deep trouble.

They thought they had won and turned us into spineless fools, dragging our way to extinction, a rabble of consumers and TV-addicted zombies. They were wrong! As Jung commented, the longer natural instincts and healthy life are suppressed, the more drastic and sudden will be their return. The old liberal order is over.