An English acquaintance, who has lived and worked on the Costa Del Sol in Spain for many years, explained to me the difference between how a Spaniard and a British man react to offence.

“The Spanish man will approach you rapidly with arms waving and voice raised in passion. He will give you a verbal bashing but will rarely strike a blow. The Brit will remain still, with narrowed eyes, you may not even realize you’ve offended him until his fist smashes into your face.”

Gordon Brown is in the latter situation now. The nation has narrowed its eyes and gone quiet, as it surveys the wreckage of its hopes, the trashing of its country, and the depressing fact that “nothing works any more”.

The “great, clunking fist”, as Tony Blair called Brown, is all set to be on the receiving end of an even greater bunch-of-fives.

He may not realize this yet. His recently-acquired maniacal grin of self-satisfaction has only just peaked, beginning a long, slow downturn of the rictus muscles.

After a week of shocking revelations, showing the National Debt set to double in a few short years, matching that of the country’s annual economic output, plus the Nixonian arrest of an Opposition Member of Parliament for effectively doing his job, the mood of the nation is dire and Brown is its focus.

Even his opinion poll gains, after the bank “bailout” that failed, have now retreated, handing a 15 point lead to David Cameron’s Conservatives.

Brown’s great ploy of bringing back arch-enemy, Peter Mandelson as Lord Mandy of Huckleberry and Folly in the Counties of Yorkshirepudding and Heartlessness, has fractured into Victorian melodrama. Mandy’s real opinion of grim, “fatally flawed” Gordon is all over the papers this weekend.

How the Tories must be chortling. Just a week ago Shadow-Chancellor, George Osborne, was lost at sea, and boss Cameron was a shallow novice not fit to black Broonie’s boots.

But the real change is in the demeanour of the electorate, the ultimate arbiter of who shall rule over us. If you look it straight in the eye, the face of Ray Winstone stares back at you. A study in suppressed fury, brittle calm before a storm, narrow-eyed, focused malignity, fists curling, sinews clenching … You get my drift.

Gordon doesn’t stand a chance. The British are seething for an opportunity to take revenge on the man and the government they blame for making such enormous bets on failure with their money.

The reckoning will be harsh, richly-deserved, and probably fatal to the Labour party, which will yet again leave office as the author of national disaster.

John Evans

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Just a few weeks ago the world was wondering if we were about to be pitched into a deadly Black Hole created by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

Relax. The machine has broken down and will not be cranked up again until the spring.

Strange then that another Black Abyss stretches before us today in the shape of a virulent debt deflation of almost unimaginable ferocity.

Take these words by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in today’s UK Telegraph:

We face extreme danger. Unless there is immediate intervention on every front by all the major powers acting in concert, we risk a disintegration of global finance within days. Nobody will be spared, unless they own gold bars.

In case you think that smacks of hysteria, this is a man who has called this crisis correctly ever since the late summer of 2007. He adds:

“During the past week, we have tipped over the edge, into the middle of the abyss. Systemic collapse is in full train. … Central bankers still paralysed by a misplaced fear of inflation – whether in Europe, Britain, or the US – have become a public menace and should be held to severe account by our democracies. The imminent and massive danger is now self-feeding debt deflation.”

What this crisis shows is that world prosperity was built on a giant illusion: that there was real value in other people’s promises to pay at some future date, and that you could pass the parcel at a vast profit.

Time has run out and a bubble the size of an asteroid has landed and exploded in the centre of our civilization — the banking system.

The Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett agrees, “In my adult lifetime, I don’t think I’ve ever seen people as fearful.”

Evans-Pritchard is lacerating about the EU and its Central Bank. It offered no “cover” to the Fed when Ben Bernanke slashed rates to 2 percent. The ECB simply raised its rate to 4.25 percent into a steep downturn, making oil inflation even worse.

As a last resort, it seems, the American authorities will use Bernanke’s famous printing press “to expand the menu of assets that it buys.” In the worst case, that could lead to a massive run on the dollar by foreign creditors and no end of misery for us all. But it may be necessary nonetheless.

At home, I have absolutely no confidence in the British government under Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. They have been woefully slow to act, their policy to hide their heads under a pillow hoping it will all go away.

If Brown had even a small slice of a leader’s courage he would put together a massive package to recapitalize the British banking system; disown the “mark-to-market” accounting agreement, which forces banks into insolvency by estimating their assets on depressed valuations; take immediate control of interest rates by reducing them to 2 percent; begin to prepare for withdrawal from the useless European Union; and work closely with the Americans, who are, at the very least, fully aware of the immense dangers we face.

The Kraken is awake and bearing down on us fast. Over coming months and years we may wish that the Hadron Collider had swallowed us all up when it had the chance.

Update: The British Government has announced a variety of measures to recapitalize the banks and get the inter-bank lending markets working again. It amounts to a $900 billion bailout, eerily identical to the Paulson Plan for a country five times the size of Britain.

John Evans

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Update: The U.S. House of Representatives has rejected the Treasury’s $700 billion rescue package. The Dow is down 770 points as I write.

Around a year ago Syntagma was among the first to use the word “Depression” in relation to the trajectory of Western economies.

Today, Monday 29 September, the word is on everyone’s lips.

Despite the rescue package now going through Congress, U.S. Treasury officials are in wild panic mode as truth finally dawns: there is nothing they can do to halt the steep declines in credit issuance that will deliver the most virulent bout of debt-deflation the world has known since the 1930s’ Great Depression.

We are hearing that officials close to Henry Paulson are privately painting a much bleaker picture of the fragility of the global economy than that of President Bush last week.

A Republican is quoted as saying that the message from government officials is that “the economy is dropping into the john. We could see falls of 3,000 or 4,000 points on the Dow. That could happen in just a couple of days.

“What’s being put around behind the scenes is that we’re looking at 1930s stuff. We’re looking at catastrophe, huge, amazing catastrophe. Everybody is extraordinarily scared. It’s going to be really, really nasty.”

A spokesman for BNP Paribas said, “Money markets are imploding. If no action is taken very soon, there is a significant risk that the global economy will collapse.”

But what action can be taken now? Imagine a palatial building across many acres eaten through by hordes of termites. Builders rush in to replace a pillar or two hoping to stabilize the structure. But architects shake their heads knowing that nothing can save the rotten edifice from collapse.

The U.S. Federal Reserve fears an “adverse feedback loop” with terrifying consequences. The “liquidation” of failed banks policy that led to the Great Depression is alive and well and raising its head in the Republican party. That may give them a short-term bounce among very angry voters, but the result could be catastrophic.

John McCain, who seemed to be coasting to victory just a few weeks ago appears to be undermined by his own side. His chances of the White House get slimmer by the day.

Central banks in Britain and Europe are maintaining their high-interest rate policy, despite the need to loosen up credit. Libor — the rate at which banks lend to each other — rose again this morning, regardless of the $700 billion U.S. package. They need to cut and cut again despite their genteel anxiety over “moral hazard”.

We are witnessing a slow-motion shipwreck, caused partly by panic, by different officials working to rigid, uncoordinated targets, and by the lack of anyone competent enough to take overall charge and impose a coherent escape route on the entire system.

The politicians have imploded, the bankers have failed, and the markets are reflecting that turmoil in the only way they know how.

How very fragile are the pillars of our civilization.

John Evans

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With this Keystone Cops British government I can almost believe anything.

Cartoon of Alistair Darling by Morland.

When the credit crunch first hit and it became obvious Gordon Brown’s Financial Services Authority (FSA) had failed to spot the problems at Northern Rock and in the wider financial sector, what did Gordon do? He pushed for a global version of it to police the planet against similar disasters in the future.

Apart from stable doors and all that, it proved that there’s a disconnection from reality in the Brownian universe.

Today we read that Chancellor Alistair Darling is furious that Brown intends to put up £40 billion ($73bn) of taxpayers’ money to underwrite the flakiest mortgages in Britain.

At a time when the curious American institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which had their origins in the Great Depression and have stuck around ever since — are reported to be insolvent, Brown is intent on a British version.

Fannie Brown and Freddie Darling, perhaps?

The Chancellor reacted with uncharacteristic sharpness in a Guardian interview recorded two weeks ago but published yesterday. This is the worst economic crisis for 60 years, he growled, challenging Brown’s denial-laden narrative of events. He then appeared on the BBC apparently under orders to quote a text prepared by the looming ogre next door in Downing Street.

He did. Five or six times, each repetition virtually identical. At one point I thought I was watching one of those tape loops that plays the same bit of footage over and over again.

Just as I was beginning to get dizzy and drift off into a hypnotic trance, I cottoned on that this was Darling’s way of signalling to us in the real world that this unfortunate man, now trapped in his Treasury nightmare, was speaking to a script. Rather like Middle East hostages trying to show us they don’t really mean what they’re saying and are saying it under duress.

I feel truly sorry for Alistair Darling. He has always been known as “a safe pair of hands.” Now those hands are stangely missing. Chopped off, tied behind his back, maybe? Who knows?

He’s on the way out, his head about to be sliced off on the internet in the manner of recent hostage unfortunates.

His legacy?

Years of loyal service to his master, a reputation as the quiet man of the Cabinet, little else that anyone can remember, oh, and Fannie Brown and Freddie Darling.

Or will Ed Balls take the rap for that?

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.