I am not particularly clubbable. As a kid I lasted half a day in the Boy Scouts, expelled for refusing to wear that ridiculous Canadian Mountie Hat. It's for people with sharp, pointed heads, I protested, and was told: wear it or walk. I walked. I've never worn a red tie even when my politics were deepest red. Nor a badge of any description. During my National Service in the RAF I was never seen outside camp in uniform.

If you live your beliefs you don't have to wear them on your sleeve. I'm a collectivist and believe that the homo sapiens is essentially a social being. The gene is fundamental to the evolution of the species, but genetics do not explain everything. What would be the outcome if a newborn babe from a remarkably good, intelligent gene pool, was excluded from all contact with other human beings, and yet somehow physically sustained? The babe would become in later life a gibbering idiot. The social/cultural pool is as vital to the development of the human being as the genetic pool, and more important for the flowering of the human personality.

We are individuals who need space for ourselves, and at the same time social beings who cannot live without others. That is why loneliness is deadly. To provide an old person with a flat in no way adequately discharges society's responsibility to the aged. An old person marooned in some dwelling, waiting for death, on his or her own, is a kind of social cruelty. We are morally duty bound to make provisions to help them integrate as and when it pleases them. This applies to the disabled, the mentally handicapped, the chronically ill, the demoralised unemployed, the mentally disturbed. The poor. The inadequate poor. We must tend the sick and injured whatever the cost. The only alternative is to cast them out to die. It's in the provision of such resources that a society proves whether it's good or bad. More or less civilised.

In the past 20 years Britain has become less good and less civilised. Not by accident but by design. We had a Prime Minister who said there is no such thing as society. If there is no such thing as society there is no such thing as collective social responsibility. If there is no such thing as society then it's every man for himself and the weak can go to hell. This is the language of domination and subordination. Some academics graced this neanderthalism with terms such as Social Darwinism. The survival of the fittest. If only the fit are worthy of survival, then why not kill off the unfit? Or why bother to prolong their lives when for them the gemme's a bogey. Let the elderly die off, too. Sooner rather than later. Could save us a fortune on pensions. Should the sickly and elderly of the rich be similarly put down? No. To Thatcherites the fit among human beings are the rich, the unfit are

the unrich. Human fitness is thus defined by wealth. Darwin's theory was really about genetic characteristics that helped an organism adapt to changes in the surrounding environment.

This is no longer a theory but an abundantly proven fact. Take just one example. In Yorkshire before the industrial revolution there was a species of moth with a colouration that ranged from nearly black to a whitish grey. The trees in parts of the county had light greyish barks. The moths that were nearly black stood out like a sore thumb against the lightish bark and were easily picked off by the birds. Then came the dark satanic mills belching out smoke and gases. The bark of the trees soon became black. The white moths then stood out and were feasted on by the birds. In a few years the white moths virtually disappeared and the black moths flourished. Sod-all to do with fit moths or unfit moths but all down to a natural yet genetic fluke. The whole concept of the origin and evolution of species is riddled with flukes and I love it. This inspires in me an affection not just for my own species

but for all other forms of life on this planet. We are with and of them. Yet we are different. Man hasn't adapted to the environment

but has tried to modify the effects of

the environment on himself. Man

didn't acquire his own fur coat to survive in the Arctic but took the fur

of other animals who had adapted to that environment.

Man has sought to make nature bend to his will. The danger is that nature pressed too much may not bend but break. But that's an argument for another day.

All the talk of liberating the movers and shakers and encouraging them to go and grab as much as they can for themselves, as if this were some natural law applicable to human society, is an obscurantist load of psuedo-scientific codswallop. Under this banner the Tories deregulated the City of London. The big bang. The hooray Henrys. No new wealth was being made just new millionaires on a daily basis. Then came the reckoning. The scandals, the rackets, the criminals. The City's reputation plummeted.

I rather like the term deregulation. It's got a nice ring to it. I would tear like a wolf at a lot of regulations. But the regulation of markets was to protect the wider public interest from the subversive tendencies of unbridled greed. Deregulation was to help the subversive tendencies of unbridled greed to rule the roost. It spawned a pernicious culture.

Here is a summation of that culture from a book called Airframe by Michael Crichton, the man who wrote Jurassic Park. ''Government deregulates airlines, and everybody cheers. We got cheaper fares: everybody cheers. But the carriers have to cut costs. So the food is awful. That's okay. There are fewer direct flights. That's okay. But still the carriers have to cut more costs. So they run the planes longer, buy fewer new ones. The fleet ages. That'll be okay - for a while. Eventually it won't be . . . cost pressures increase . . . where else do they cut? Maintenance?

''Congress is helping them out by cutting appropriations for the Federal Airport Authority. Carriers can ease up on maintenance because nobody's watching . . . I'll bet a hundred bucks they'll reregulate within 10 years. There'll be a string of crashes, and they'll do it. The free marketeers will scream, but the fact is, free markets don't provide safety. Only regulation does that. You want safe food, you better have inspectors. You want safe water, you better have an EPA. You want a safe stock market, you better have the SEC. And safe airlines, you better regulate them too. Believe me they will.'' Hope he's right.

I've been reading the reports of the inquiry into mad cow disease and its prevalence in Britain. Letters written by civil servant doctors and vets were acknowledging the possibility that it might enter the human food chain. Yet nobody did anything about it. The tendency is to find individual scapegoats. That would be dishonest. The Thatcherite culture created an atmosphere wherein any intervention in the process of business was deemed a socialist intrusion by the nannie state. Those that would not eat meat were fearties and a Cabinet Minister publicly fed hamburgers to his little daughter. Ugh. It would make you spew, even on reflection. There is no significant problem anywhere else in the EU where tough intervention nipped the disease in the bud.

My basic disappointment with New Labour is that it follows the same philosophy. It's Thatcherite in all but name. New Labour's problems in Scotland have a moral base and the appointment of a host of spin doctors won't change that. We bitterly disliked Thatcherism because it was cruel and believed that we act only for the worst of reasons. It's a demeaning philosophy. We are much better than that, as New Labour might find to its cost.