London Paris (Rome?) Berlin

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has been asked to go to Paris, at short notice, to speak to the President of the European Union Sarkozy later today. Mr Sarkozy will see the Prime Minister at his private residence, not at the official residence of the French Presidency.

Yesterday the pound fell to its lowest level in six years and the New Labour regime was forced to abandon its fiscal rules restricting debt, centrepiece of Brown's decade as chancellor of the Exchequer under Mr Blair. An emergency cut in UK interest rates by the pseudo-independent Bank of England, another victim of Brown's chancellor years when his tripartite deregulation of finance and banking stripped it of its powers to regulate financial behaviour, is imminent.

Over the last weekend Mr Brown has spoken several times by phone to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the International Monetary Fund managing director. He has now to meet German Chancellor Merkel the day after tomorrow.

Replacing the UK government’s fiscal rules and substituting public borrowing (much of which is wholly governed by European Union regulation) to accommodate the financial crisis and economic recession will cause debt to balloon to £120 billion in three years.

The credit insurance group Coface today downgraded Britain's ratings from ’A1’ to ’A2’. The collapse of sterling makes it abundantly clear that the United Kingdom is one of the worst-placed economies in the advanced capitalist world to cope with this major recession. Although Brown led the opposition to any transparency or reasonable regulation of financial behaviour to the point of intransigence, hectoring and berating our more prudent European partners throughout his far too many years in office, it seems they are willing at least to listen to any proposals for what is to be done about the UK economy and its currency.