Yesterday I heard the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown — speaking from the G8 conference in Japan — make one of the weirdest statements I’ve ever heard from a head of government.

He said, and I paraphrase from memory: “Each family in Britain throws away £8 ($16) worth of food every week. We have to tackle this on a global basis.”

Allowing for possible editing of the clip and the deficiencies of my memory box, it is incomprehensible until you remember that our man Gordon thinks everything has to be dealt with globally. Even, it seems, what to do with curling up sandwiches.

Apart from “long-term solutions”, global and globally are his favourite words, and never very far from his lips.

So let’s take the statement at its face value. Each family … £8 of food. Maybe that has something to do with the sell-by dates added by supermarkets and food manufacturers. Is that a problem for the Galactic Council?

The BBC had an unintentionally hilarious live broadcast from one British city’s rubbish tip. The reporter excitedly told us that behind him was all the food that the good burghers of said city had thrown away that day. The pile was about the size of my compost heap.

What startles me about Brown’s words is firstly his small-minded, nitpicking approach to the current inflation in food prices, which then balloons out to “global solutions”.

My interpretation? He knows he can’t solve the myriad of minor problems at home — he’s had ten years to do it — so he parades himself as a “global player,” an activist on the world stage.

But then that was always the way with the Blair-Brown joint premiership. Their main interests and efforts have always been for Africa or Europe, or sorting out the Middle East. Internationalism precedes nation, global takes precedence over the problems of the homeland.

It’s a classic case of inflatus, brought on by incompetence and lack of empathy with their own country. They have never “batted for Britain”.

The G8 has become a worthless jamboree for performing heads, one eye on the domestic audience, another on their own perceived global importance. It’s yet another failed attempt to develop a “World Government”.

Leaders like Brown should muse on the fact that if national governance is so difficult, how much less worthwhile it is to create regional and global institutions which take on the same tasks — like complaining about folk chucking away a few ancient pizzas.

Is the G8 past its sell-by-date? Gordon Brown certainly is.