I HEARD an interesting talk last week entitled: "Is Britain A Third World Country?" It was by the veteran travel writer Don Thurbold. Don has travelled the world over the last 40 years and he knows as much as anybody about Third World countries. His conclusion? That we are well down the scoreboard that measures quality of life, and falling fast.

He said: "People would think of Mexico City as a good example of Third World squalor. A city, including its greater environs, of 19 million - but their tube trains run on time, they are clean and you can travel from one end of the city to the other for the equivalent of 18p. Taxis go at 30mph through the city. It's not perfect, but you can't claim as much for Britain."

Depressing but true. The traffic in London moves more slowly than it did in 1900. I step out of my front door into Newgate Street and walk past the Old Bailey into Cheapside and I can cover the three quarters of a mile to St Michael's church more quickly than any taxi, bus or private car.

Last week I had a meeting with the Archdeacon who lives in Trinity Square, near Tower Hill. I walked to Barbican station for what ought to have been a ten-minute journey of four stops on the Circle line. But of course, there was an announcement: "We apologise for the fact that no Circle line trains are running." It needed three trains and almost an hour to move me four stops. This is not a rare inconvenience but a daily occurrence. Add in the near impossibility of getting in or out of London at all from the far suburbs, and you have a picture of a country grinding to a halt.

So much for getting there. But what is it like when you actually arrive? Well, if it's a hospital, beware. Apart from the fact that there may not be a bed and you might be left lying on a trolley in a corridor, we now learn that you are quite likely to contract an infection over and above the ailment that brought you into hospital in the first place. Hospitals are some of the dirtiest and most disease-ridden establishments in the land. The authorities admitted last week that 5,000 people die each year from infections they picked up in hospitals; and hundreds of thousands of others become ill.

Why is this? We read that surgical instruments which were designed to be used once and then thrown away are being used over and again, and that this is a source of contagion. Of course, "underfunding" is blamed for this incompetence. But the main cause of infection in hospitals is that many doctors and nurses don't wash their hands properly. What sort of filthy ignorance is it when professional medics don't know how to use soap and water? Is this too because of "underfunding"?

Most of you who read this newspaper had it drummed into you from the age of three to wash your hands after a visit to the lavatory and before food. But it's all lost - that decent, commonsense, considerate, polite civilisation which made living in our country something to be proud of.

Not just the roads and hospitals but the whole of public life has become squalid. Doctors who don't wash their hands belong to the same degeneration as teachers who know no grammar. We live in an age when the Secretary of State for Education comes on the wireless and announces: "I was sat". This is the same age in which basic numeracy has to be taught by Tesco. The supermarket chain is spending £1m on a private scheme to remedy the pathetic illiteracy and inability of its sales assistants.

You don't even have to go as far as the disease-ridden hospitals or the sink schools to catch a whiff of what has befallen our country: you hear it every day in the coarse voices on radio and TV. It is all-pervasive, squalid and dumbed-down. What's to be done about it? I know: let's apply for some Development Aid money from the warlords of Sudan