CAN you hear the rumble in the jungle? Yes, the dinosaurs are back. There was Tony Blair chortling for the last five years about all the dinosaurs being extinct and suddenly they're back, bigger and fiercer and hungrier than ever.

What these beasts are going to do is eat New Labour. Now is the summer of our discontent as the militants have staged a resurrection from the dead. The strikes are on again, with worse to come. Well, it wasn't really as dramatic as that, not really a resurrection from the dead: the forces of disruption and peevish envy never went away; they just hid in the woodwork for a few years from whence they have now crawled out again.

Britain is rapidly heading for a huge financial and social collapse caused directly by the Government but now made worse by the militant trades unionists. The Government's mistake was to think it could use the same methods in power as served it so well in opposition. That is to spin, to manage the news and to lie in the hope that nobody would point to the vacuum where its policies ought to be. So despite the slogans about better public services, our schools, hospitals and transport network have declined to third world status.

There are more people than ever waiting to get into hospital, and the only reason the figures don't look even worse is that the Government statisticians are fiddling them. And God help the poor patient when he does get to hospital: the places are filthy and many of the staff are careless and under-trained. The examination results in our schools are imaginative fiction. Today, as I write, there is a new report from the Institute of Directors to say that students leaving school and universities can't read, write or count well enough to do routine work.

Whatever happened to "two Jags" Prescott's "integrated transport plan"? Nothing. The roads remain overcrowded where they're not dug up. The trains are still late, filthy and expensive, and this week we are told of yet another increase in fares. In London the Underground is squalid. It stinks - literally. Come by car then? You must be joking. The streets of London are a permanent traffic jam.

Well, recently New Labour rediscovered its Old Labour instincts and returned to the failed, destructive policy of tax and spend. Gordon Brown has thrown nearly £100bn into the bottomless pit that is the public services. If the money were properly directed and used, the exercise might be worth it. But what's the point chucking endless billions into a system that has proved itself over many years to be inefficient and corrupt? Brown has also stolen from us all by taxing our pension funds. Taken as a whole, taxation has increased by 20 per cent since Labour came to power.

All our pensions have been drastically reduced because of Brown's tax on them and the collapse of the stock market. And yet this week MPs are to vote themselves a 20 per cent pensions rise! Brace yourselves, chums: we're in for a very rough ride.

*Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange

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