On top of rising unemployment is the growth of early retirement, "contracting out" and part-time work, which together have exposed millions to the vagaries of an ever-fluctuating labour market, robbed of pension rights, minimum income, sick pay and social security. There is a pervasive sense of insecurity not felt since the end of the 1940s -- a general feeling that the environment beyond is hostile. Education, hospitals and the welfare system clearly in decline; the enfeebling fear of illness with Aids and the re-emergence of tuberculosis and other scarcely remembered diseases; old age pensions cut; the homeless and the have-nots becoming more conspicuous; the economy cavorting as if in the hands of the sorcerer's apprentice; the state decaying; all adding to uncertainty and the foreboding of doom.