Remember the old song that begins: “Happy days are here again, The skies above are clear again, So let’s sing a song of cheer again, Happy days are here again.”?

You don’t need to be a grumpy old puritan to be thankful that a decade of overindulgence, bubble following bubble, and preening egos fed by Cheshire cat politicians whose every error is concealed by good economic tidings, is finally and emphatically over. But can we really squeeze some happy juice from the remaining husks of our collapsing economies and even Western civilization itself?

You bet we can. We’ll start small — just to get you in the mood.

Andy Wood, chief executive of Adnams, a brewing and hotels business, is quoted thus in today’s UK Telegraph : “… throughout East Anglia we are seeing fewer cars on the roads … That’s just one example. There are fewer people going to pubs and they are also spending on different things.”

Isn’t that what almost everyone has been working towards for years — fewer cars on the roads? And is he hinting at a curtailment of binge drinking, which has become a serious social problem in Britain? Coming from a brewer, that must carry weight.

In England, we were recently informed that unregulated immigration from Eastern Europe, thanks to the EU, and the same from the rest of the world, thanks to the Newish Labour government, would double our population in 30-40 years. Considering our population density is already ten times that of the United States, four times France’s and three times Germany’s, that would be a disaster and leave the country unrecognizable even to its own.

Now the word on the street is that half the East Europeans have left as employment dries up and the exchange rate becomes less favourable for them to send money home. The same is beginning to happen with all immigration as the government tightens up on benefits and entry restrictions, mainly, one surmises, to save money.

Better still, the twin projects of a government lacking coherence and competence, while simultaneously pursuing programmes of social engineering unparalleled outside the old communist world, are now exposed as lethal and highly unrewarding. Gordon Brown, a shambling, frightened figure these days, embodies the imminent death of this unhealthy movement. And it took the collapse of the economy to do it. We may regard that as a small price to pay.

I’m guessing that similar scenarios can be found in most other Western countries. In America, for example, where a liberal-left Presidential candidate has a real chance of victory, will a hard-pressed people vote for an untried, although worthy, man whose sketchy manifesto to date closely resembles Blair’s and Brown’s of a decade ago? Won’t they prefer the experience of an older man offering more of a hair shirt approach to the nation’s finances?

The greatest benefit of recessions is that they shake out the incompetent and the wasteful. Companies that should never have received the support of banks or private equity firms fall apart under the weight of highly-leveraged debt. It causes much hardship, of course, but it brings us collectively back to earth and to honest and careful accounting.

Foolhardy projects, like the euro-currency zone and the EU constitution, are revealed for what they are: the expensive fantasies of puffed-up politicians. They may just survive, unfortunately, but they will not be taken seriously in future, and the likelihood is that they won’t exist in ten years.

And what of all those little luxuries we’ve got used to during the past decade of higher disposable incomes? I always did prefer a measure of ebony tea in a cracked mug to a latte in a supercool coffee shop.

We may have had access to all manner of entertainments across a dizzying array of platforms, but in our exuberance we just didn’t notice that most of it was not very good.

Let’s face it, the good times are only really great in retrospect. As one who lived through the 1980s boomtimes in London, I recall them with some relish. On closer inspection, though, I can dimly remember the frustrations and problems too. What on earth did I do with all that money?

As a certain French general used to say, every weakness in your position can be turned to your advantage. That’s the spirit in which I approach the coming era of austerity.

How about you?

Have you noticed how the word “quantum” is everywhere now? It’s hard to find an intelligent publication these days which isn’t going quantum in a big way — if that isn’t a contradiction of terminology.

Copywriters could have a lot of fun with slogans like : “Go large, go quantum.” However, it’s not easy to see how quantums have a part to play in the real world, apart from the trendiness of the word itself.

Quantum mechanics is the newest fad in science, with its magical mystery tour of the universe that must owe a lot to Dr Who.

Upcoming computers will be quantum machines that run 1000 times faster than the trendiest current Mac or Vista PC. We’re persuaded that teleportation will at last be possible with them.

Okay, you go first. I may try it when you return with all your organs intact.

Nanotechnology, which uses quantum techniques, is invading every part of us from our clothing to our bodies. Why doesn’t anybody tell us that?

No learned discussion of the latest science is complete without a deep dive into the sub-atomic world of quantum fantasy.

And, to ram home my point, the latest James Bond flick — far distant from the world of Ian Fleming — is called Quantum Of Solace, a title clearly chosen more for its resonances than its meaning. It would be a better description of the atmosphere in 10 Downing Street right now. Although Gordon Brown requires more than a mere quantum of solace.

It’s as if the big, solid cosmos of the universe is now less interesting than the smallest of the small where the laws of physics are very different and weirdly unfamiliar.

I’m tempted to change the name of this site to Quantum of Syntagma, just to get into the flow, of course. I’ve decided against it because the word is just too small to do us justice.

The European Union could certainly find a use for it though.

On this Bank Holiday Monday, as the present UK Labour Government crashes and burns before our eyes — no comet was ever so spectacular or so portentous — it’s good to see they have not lost a sense of the ridiculous.

Just when the United Nations admits its “carbon trading” scheme has been systematically looted by rascals in Asia and elsewhere, losing billions of our dollars, our ruling politicians declare that soon we may all be granted “carbon allowances” which we can trade among ourselves if we don’t use them all up.

The UN program — strongly promoted by Brown and his colleagues — was doomed from the start, partly by the impossibility of policing it, but mainly by the eagerness of developing countries to gobble up largesse from the rich West. “Money for nothing, chicks for free”, as the Dire Straits song went.

The individual carbon dole scheme carries the same death-knell flaw as the UN program: it’s over-engineered by people who are not engineers.

The problem with the European Left is that it attracts converts who are completely bonkers. Tunnel-visioned intellectuals with a poor grasp of reality who have been sheltered in universities and public sector jobs from the trials and squalls of the real world. They have always had a soft spot for semi-mythical creatures called “the poor” who are said to be gentle, meek and mild and are preyed upon by those who stand over them, principally the Left’s political opponents.

Thus, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau — doyen of the Marxist Left ever since — invented “the noble savage “. The trouble was, the only savage Rousseau had ever known was himself. He it was who gave away at birth all five of his children, conveniently produced by his live-in washerwoman. The Foundlings Hospital where he deposited them was run by the state. Almost every child there died before the age of one. Rousseau’s brood was no exception.

Later, as a famous salon philosopher, he excused these brutal acts by concocting the principle that all children must be raised and educated by the state. The doctrine became an act of faith for the Marxist Left. Even today, in the British Parliament, there are MPs who demand that private education must be outlawed. Presumably they have no idea where the principle they hold so dear originated.

Now they have another stick to herd us with: carbon emissions. Our civilization is being shriven in pursuit of yet another utopian ideal, this time a carbon-free world — never mind the awkward fact that all life on Earth is carbon-based. History tells us that in their hands utopia soon tips over into dystopia.

The new Nasty Party even in its death throes still has the power to amuse us with its earnest proposal of carbon allowances for all. Happily we can safely laugh at them in the knowledge it will never come to pass.

Carbon allowances, of course, mean carbon limits, something we don’t have now. Wrapping up a diminishment as a must-have product is the Marxist Left’s idea of good business practice.

As Jane Austen might say to Gordon Brown, were she alive now, “Mr Brown, you have entertained us long enough.”

I keep repeating that this site is non-political. And so it is.

You can hear a “but” coming, though, can’t you? Well, you’re wrong, it’s a “however”.

However, Syntagma has 90 American readers for every Brit, so, conscious as we are that politics is big news in the States right now, we have a small announcement to make:

Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, is coming to visit you this week.

Ignoring the deafening silence, I just want to bring you up to date on Broonie’s progress. Frankly it’s a regression of unparalleled proportions.

Leaving aside my own psychological assessment of him when he first came to office last year, yesterday we were treated to the most devastating political assassination by a journalist that I’ve ever read.

Even if you’re not interested in politics, read it as a master class in the art of personal destruction, much as you might tackle Machiavelli’s The Prince.

It’s all the more calamitous for Brown because the first half gives him his due, albeit in back-handed fashion. It’s what comes next that hits home. Matthew Parris, a journalist at The Times (London) and a broadcaster of great wit, provides us with a forensic deconstruction of Gordon Brown which overflows with such penetrating psychological insight that Brown must have shrivelled up when he read it.

Already far behind in the polls and with ratings only ever matched by Neville Chamberlain, Brown is practically dead in the water politically. Now read this extraordinary coup de grace.

Here it is.

The cartoon is by the brilliant Peter Brooke, also of The Times. It features Gordon Brown after a painting of a gruesome nude woman by Lucien Freud which sold for countless millions recently.

Imagine Barack Obama becoming President of the U.S. and announcing he will use the Democrat-dominated Congress to pass a bill partially outlawing white men from getting jobs.

You can’t really, can you? It’s unthinkable. It would be political — and possibly physical — suicide.

Yet that is precisely what the British nasty party, Newish Labour, is considering doing. Its latest wheeze is to ban the indigenous population — minus women, of course — from getting jobs just when the icy winds of economic recession, and possibly worse, are blowing in from America.

Let’s just remind ourselves of what it’s like now out there in the real world :

The Bank of England is right now being deluged with demands by British banks to borrow £23.6 billion ($50bn) as lenders scramble to prop up their capital amid plunging global stock markets and asset values.

The Bank had offered just £5 billion ($10.4bn) to banks over a three-day period in an attempt to increase the flow of money between lenders.

Banks are running scared after the overnight news that the U.S. Federal Reserve has cut the discount rate by 0.25 percent and facilitated the fire sale of Bear Stearns to J.P. Morgan Chase at a fraction of its value.

Meanwhile, our government socially engineers while the City burns.

As subprime politicians in a subprime government, they should be sliced and diced and bundled into political instruments for sale to any institution that wants them.

Don’t hold your breath.

Postscript Our apologies for yet another political and economic article in this studiously non-political site. The news is getting so alarming now that it’s proving impossible to ignore the elephant in the broom cupboard — which is what the global financial situation now is.

How is your knowledge of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression that followed it in the 1930s?

Not so good? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. But this is likely to be one of the world’s biggest talking points in coming months and years.

I was reminded of the Depression yesterday by the appearance of one of the legendary names from that distant era in the rescue of U.S. bank Bear Stearns.

J.P. Morgan was the renowned banker called on by the President to sort out the financial mess during one of the slumps of the period. Morgan set about systematically weeding out the companies that should be allowed to go to the wall, and those that were too important to allow to fail.

Yesterday the old feller’s bank, JP Morgan Chase and the New York Federal Reserve combined to stuff funds back into failing giant Bear Stearns, brought low by the gathering credit crunch.

The problem this time around is one of leverage and its effects on banks’ lending ratios — the multiple of lending to capital reserves a financial institution is allowed to build up by the authorities. The Geneva standard is that a bank’s capital must not fall below 8 percent of its lending. That number has been around a long time — I remember it from Alfred Marshall’s ancient classic textbook on economics during my university days.

Eight percent represents a ratio of 12.5 of lending to capital. These days it’s the norm for private equity companies to leverage many times more than that — supported by banks, of course, which then calculate their capital on a hugely inflated valuation for partly subprime debt. When the bubble bursts — as is now happening — both sides of the deal collapse.

Recently-bust Carlyle Capital Corporation (CCC) leveraged its equity 32 times to finance a $21.7bn portfolio of residential mortgage-backed securities issued by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. These instruments were financed by some of the biggest names in world banking.

With the housing market going south with a vengeance, it’s said that many banks’ capital reserves to lending ratios have slipped close to zero. The global financial system is floating on a cushion of fresh air.

There are always the consolations of philosophy for us to fall back on. Not the nitpicking academic variety which parses the meaning of words to death, but the active philosophy of Socrates whose adage, “The unexamined life is not worth living” should be a talisman of the financial sector.

In Britain, Gordon Brown’s Financial Services Authority (FSA), set up by him ten years ago to police the financial markets and the banks, completely missed the Northern Rock collapse, which was due to the bank raising money solely on the money markets and bundling the debts — many subprime — into packages and selling the risk on. When the money markets dried up, the bank had nowhere to go but to the Government to bail it out and eventually to nationalize it.

“The unexamined life is not worth living”. It seems the FSA did not examine the fifth largest bank in the UK, or spot the snake oil splashing around its floors.

Now consider what happened next as an example of both hubris and the reverse of Socrates’s dictum. Brown is calling for a “global financial watchdog” to perform for the entire planet what his FSA did for Britain.

Self-knowledge where art thou? The man has the richest fantasy life since Walt Disney.

Since we can’t have financial stability, or even politicians who examine their actions carefully, we must fall back on the real consolations of philosophy — everything changes and nothing remains the same.

Except death and taxes, of course.

A man turns up at a small hotel for a night’s stay. He speaks urgently to the landlady and says he’s allergic to apples. “Please don’t serve me apples,” he asks.

“I promise you’ll get no apples here,” she replies.

That evening the man is tucking into dessert which is described as fruit pie. To his horror he suddenly feels very ill.

“You promised me no apples,” he cries out to the landlady.

“It’s not apples,” she says, as his head doubles in size, his lips turn blue and he goes into acute anaphylactic shock. “It’s apple pie.”

Now consider the ongoing saga of the European Constitution — newly renamed an “Amending Treaty” despite being 98 percent the same as the constitution. British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, made a manifesto promise that the British people would get a referendum on it. He has reneged on that promise because he knows he would lose by a very big margin.

The promise referred to a constitution, he says, and the treaty is no longer a constitution.

The original document has been shuffled around a bit, as you would a deck of cards, some cosmetic stuff has been removed, and the name changed.

It’s not a constitution, claims Brown. Sure, it’s constitution pie.

It’s Boxing Day here in England, a day traditionally reserved for giving presents (Christmas boxes) to the extended family and friends. I was going to take a rest from posting on Syntagma and other sites until January 2, but something is jangling away at me : the upcoming downturn/recession/depression/crash, depending on which view you take. The nasty end of that spectrum is now a real and menacing possibility.

The optimistic view says that Sovereign Wealth Funds — vast reserves of cash held by Gulf oil sheiks and “new economy” developing countries like China — will save world stock markets from collapse. Indeed such funds are buying up wagonloads of equity in some of the biggest Western corporations, Citicorp and Merrill Lynch, for example, and great chunks of Britain’s FTSE 100 companies.

Quite how allowing our biggest companies to be owned and run by a small group of Oriental potentates will look in 10 years time is anyone’s guess. I doubt we will think it such a smart move.

The pessimistic view — which I confess I’m now leaning strongly toward, despite my normally sunny nature — comes from the banks. Never mind the stock markets, look at how the bankers are reacting on the ground.

All banks are now hoarding cash like Ebeneezer Scrooge and virtually ceasing to lend. With house price indices slithering down a slope like novice ice skaters, and inter-bank rates running at around 8 percent, this has become a total banking crisis worldwide, and that has the potential for real evil in our economies.

Japan’s decade-long woes in the 1990s were caused by crises in its overprotected banking system, as were the Far-Eastern “Tiger” economies that collapsed at around the same time.

So how are we all reacting to this worldwide financial mess, now a “perfect storm” according to another banking pundit? Are we hoarding cash like the banks, or are we spend, spend, spending in the post-Christmas sales?

The real crunch comes if we all stop spending, as the Japanese did in 1990. Our economies will then spiral out of control as the High Street suffers and all kinds of businesses lay off staff in droves. Do we protect ourselves first by reining in, or do we support the wider economy? Since there will be little money to spend, the economy will suffer whatever anyone does. It’s a no-win situation from whatever angle you view it.

In retrospect it’s now clear that Alan Greenspan left rates too low for too long and spawned the mad rush to lend to the sub-prime market (Ninja mortgages : no income, no job, no assets). But on top of that, it is also now normal to be permanently in debt and to service it by moving it continuously between lenders engaged in a bitter battle for market share and a bigger slice of the easy action. These lenders are no longer willing to cough up, even if they were in a position to do so.

In Britain, the situation is getting dire. From the UK’s Telegraph : “Tim Congdon, a banking historian at the London School of Economics, said the rot had seeped through the foundations of British lending. … ‘How on earth did the Financial Services Authority let this happen?’ he asks. Worse, changes pushed through by Gordon Brown in 1998 have caused the de facto cash and liquid assets ratio to collapse from post-war levels above 30 per cent to near zero. ‘Brown hadn’t got a clue what he was doing,’ he says.”

And European treaties, like Maastricht, will make matters worse not better, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard : “Maastricht rules may force the Government to raise taxes or slash spending into a recession. This way lies crucifixion. … Brown has disarmed us on every front.”

Crucifixion is a powerful word, especially at this time of year. “Brown has disarmed us on every front” is a damning indictment of the UK’s new Prime Minister, more particularly because he has just signed us up to another Euro treaty.

I wish Syntagma could bring you a better box on Boxing Day, but I fear it may be much worse than even the news we’re now getting suggests.

Maybe I should have continued with my holiday. See you on January 2.

Have you noticed how the world appears to be overflowing with Greek and Shakespearean tragedies right now? From the never-ending Diana Inquest to stuttering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the slow-motion unwinding of the world economy, the planet has become a tangled network of crumbling dreams and broken promises.

Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister

None more so than applies to Gordon Brown, Britain’s newly appointed Prime Minister.

Regular readers may recall that, back in March, one of Syntagma’s resolutions was to give up politics. I chose the wrong moment. From the fall of Blair to the rise and precipitate decline of Brown, it’s been a fascinating rollercoaster of insights into the political psyche.

Brown, who as recently as the summer was basking in a Churchillian glow, amid a welter of crises during the holidays, is now a quivering wreck, shot through by one disaster after another. After waiting and plotting for ten years to get the job, he must now be musing on the old saw, “Be careful what you wish for … you may get it.”

First he reneged on a promised referendum on the EU constitution; then he promoted and backed off an early general election when the polls ran against him. Next, an obscure northern mortgage bank, Northern Rock — which just happens to be the fifth largest in the UK, after the big four — got caught in the worldwide credit crunch. Brown’s own regulatory system didn’t even splutter into action while all this was going on. Now taxpayers are bailing out the bank to the tune of £30 billion ($62bn), which, according to Anatole Kaletsky in The Times (London), is “the biggest financial support operation ever offered to any private company by any government anywhere in the world”.

That was followed by HM Revenue and Customs — a department created by G. Brown himself — losing half the nation’s personal details, including bank account data, in the post. As if that wasn’t bad enough, all this week Brown has been submerged by yet more scandals over unlawful Labour party funding, which is now in the hands of the police at Scotland Yard.

Success in the top political job demands two qualities : leadership, and competence as an administrator. Brown has neither. He hasn’t the charisma to be PM, and lacks administrative abilities. In other words, he has been promoted two or three notches above his level of competence. Moreover, his Cabinet is stuffed full of third-raters and hopeless middle managers who would never make the board in a decent private company.

I fear this Labour government will hang on until mid-2010 — the latest date for the next election — unless the police finally nail them for money-laundering of political donations.

Brown is a clever and highly educated man, someone I would normally admire, but he’s a philosopher not a politician. His fatal flaw is a vanity that delivers an overwhelming desire to be the top dog, although he is conspicuously unqualified for the task.

Even as a philosopher he lacks the wisdom and objectivity to recognize his own deficiencies. Psychologically he’s an observer, not a doer. A backroom wallah, not the front man for a nation.

Self-knowledge requires a degree of personal honesty which the dour Scot has yet to achieve.