A quick question: What is the capital of Iceland? Answer: $74.25.

Because of the financial crisis, I had to make a mercy dash to the UK last week, to help Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, avoid making a series of catastrophic mistakes.

Unfortunately, I got there 40 years too late. I have in the past been unkind about Mr. Brown, but I realise now how wrong I was. He is by no means a fool; he is a dangerous, dogmatic dimwit. For ten long years, he has relentlessly driven the British economy down the drain at full speed, burying his borrowing so that no one would find out just how badly off the British really are.

Mr. Brown has now achieved an even greater feat. Having bankrupted the country over his decade as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he has gone himself one better as Prime Minister and bankrupted it all over again.

Like all the 1960s socialists who clog up Britain, and in some cases Bermuda, Mr. Brown is married to the idea that Government knows best. His heroes are the discredited socialist leaders who drove Britain onto the rocks in the 1960s and 1970s: Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Michael Foot and all the other sad, wet people who blighted the country.

The economic model to which Mr. Brown aspires is that of Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu, the "communist" dictator, in which all power accrued to the Government, and the people were in essence wards of state. Ceausescu was despatched by a firing squad, in part for undermining the economy.

On Monday, Mr. Browncesceau showed us what he was made of when he nationalised the British banks. In a performance that would have been howlingly funny, had it not been tragically sad, Mr. Browncesceau likened himself to Winston Churchill, a proper politician. (A big head seems to be a prerequisite for the job: Mr. Ceausescu referred to himself as the "genius of the Carpathians".)

For a couple of days, Mr. Browncesceau was credited with saving the world, even though the nationalisation idea was not his.

Similar plans have been batted about since the 1960s, when the banks were on Harold Wilson's hit list, but he was too busy nationalising (and destroying) a long list of other industries. The Swedes had a very similar plan early in the 1990s, when their banking sector experienced bumpy conditions.

There are so many reasons why nationalising banks is a bad idea that I hesitate to list them here.

Instead, I'll just mention one: it doesn't work. As we saw by the end of the week, credit lines were once again frozen and nothing good had happened to anyone. Browncesceau to the rescue? My foot.

(Full disclosure: I have a few hundred Pounds in an account with a British bank that merged with another bank after I opened the account.

The merged bank was bought by another bank, which in turn was bought by another bank, which has now been forcibly taken over by Mr. Browncesceau, a man with no banking experience. I'll be transferring the money to a bank operated by actual bankers with banking experience.)

To reach the UK, I flew on British Airways. Remember them? Lord, how everyone hates them. But there was a reason I didn't fly Zoom.

Now, what was it? Let me see. Oh yes, Zoom provided a thoroughly unreliable "service" for a brief period and then went out of business, taking its customers' money with it. British Airways, however, has been serving Bermuda since 1937-ish. Lesson for the week: cheap ain't cheap if you don't receive what you paid for.

Most of the British local councils and hundreds of thousands of British taxpayers apparently had their money in Icelandic banks, because those banks were paying more in interest on deposits. This is the Zoom situation in reverse, but the principle is the same. There are no bargains in this world, only false economies.

While my heart breaks for those dumb enough to have invested in Iceland, my brain remembers that the rest of us have to get by on regular rates of return, because in the long run, it is better to earn a regular rate of interest than to lose your capital.

Here are the facts, kiddies, and you might as well get used to them. We are in for a recession.

The major global economies are going to have a rough time of it for a couple of years.

Bermuda will be somewhat affected, no doubt. There won't be any new hotels; some of the office buildings in Hamilton that have been started won't be finished any time soon; Canadian construction workers will be leaving in large numbers; the insurance industry, in general, looks to be in for an excellent couple of years if the hedge funds survive; retail doesn't look too great; and the Government sector will continue to boom as if nothing had happened, thank goodness.

Having started by lambasting politicians, why would I support a Bermuda Government that will keep hiring and spending, and spending and hiring, as if it were 1966 all over again?

Because in Bermuda, the Government fulfils functions not required in most countries. Start with the basic premise: the Bermuda Government employs thousands of people to produce nothing of value.

If it did not, these people would be in the general workforce, where workers are required to produce, and can be fired if they don't.

The Bermuda model simply wouldn't work unless the people who are content to do nothing were not given money for doing nothing. The Government makes it possible for hard workers to get ahead by taking out of the game all those who don't much feel like contributing.

This, of course, is Browncesceau's dream, a world in which everyone is employed by him, but no one does anything.

Then and only then would the desire of Karl Marx for an egalitarian society be achieved (if you don't count Browncesceau and his colleagues stuffing themselves with caviar).

And in closing I must offer words of encouragement to Dr. Ewart Brown and his colleagues in the Bermuda Government.

Although nominally committed to introducing the ideas of the 1960s in little old Bermuda, they have steadfastly refused to do anything like that, governing instead as if they were the British Tory Party of the 1850s. We can only be deeply grateful for that.