There was a fine symmetry to the whole career. Early Broon triumphed, not by prudence, but by flogging third generation phone bandwidth at ridiculous prices in 2000, getting over £20 billion for something valued realistically at about £3 billion. This scam was revenged by Northern Rock, which has hit the Treasury for £40 billion and counting.

Brown started by doing what no-one had expected – least of all Ken Clarke – and sticking to the limits that the Tories in pre-election mode had let themselves in for. This showed up in inadequate infrastructural investment and the collapse of Labour’s transport strategy. Dotcoms, however, enabled him to present himself as a sound financier and debt-reducer. This sleight-of-hand enabled him counter-cyclically to inject investment into the public sector to combat the post-2002 downturn. He couldn’t have done this within the Eurozone. But he couldn’t invest in technology either, because the R&D hadn’t been done. Broonite job-creation, while it didn’t add much to net public expenditure, didn’t add to productivity either. Where cash flow was necessary to achieve innovation, notably in hospital equipment or industrial training, this absence of resources, planning and direction could be expensive and disastrous.

The primitive technology of retailing was a different matter, and made up the Brown ‘renaissance’: the dominance of fashion, advertisement, marketing, and persuasion over rational appraisal. What would happen when this retail saturnalia didn’t get through to those in real need? Ironically, this made survival easier for Blair, and for David Cameron, the first Conservative leader from adland; the black arts of Saatchi were now in the driving seat. Under New Labour there had been no continuity with the mixed economy as preached by Tony Crosland, or even with the somewhat Gaullist version of it that persisted in the Thatcher years: ‘All power is marvellous. Absolute power is absolutely marvellous,’ as some wag had put it in these plummy vowels. What Broon had gone for was the American Business Model, oblivious of the warnings of a fellow-Scot, the economist John Kay: “The countries where systems most resemble the prescriptions of the American Business Model – unbridled individualism under weak government – are Nigeria and Haiti, which are among the poorest on the planet.” Broon had ticked all the boxes of regulation, so what was in place looked strong. Its effectiveness was another matter.

In New Labour’s Britain, the rot started at the top. ‘Self-regulation’ under the Tories had been a farce, but Labour’s ‘policemen’, ostentatious in intention, were ineffective. The difference in power between few and poorly-paid regulators and immensely wealthy, PR-minded corporations and wealthy and unscrupulous incomers from the USA, the Middle East and the ex-USSR was simply too great.

Inadequate regulation is worse than ‘self-regulation’: a cartel means a single head, which can be carpeted or even chopped off. But corrupt officials, or those who simply give up, can survive indefinitely. This regulatory paralysis had, according to Nick Kochan, pervaded the ‘offshore island’ of the City of London. The European road haulage industry showed a similar systematic failure through the abuse of the regulatory system, not by marginal operators, but by giant international firms such as Betz, the biggest haulier in Europe, who relied on powerlessness in Eastern Europe, systematic political pressure from the likes of Daimler-Chrysler and straightforward corruption, backed up by the best legal brains. Such behaviour was not regarded as culpable – first by a management culture which was a stranger to ethical values; second by a Whitehall incapable of stemming manufacturing decline and desperate to attract global finance to the City; third by an interlinked growth of international PR, media and legal consultants, again London-based, which ‘wasted’ challenges by consumers, the press and media. A New Labour party cut off from its former trade union members proved a pushover.

Yet the carcase was still capable of a ‘great deal of ruin’. The Chancellor seemed to have taken on the staying-power of the old industrial barons, though the Blair-Brown dyarchy aggravated governmental weakness by sapping Cabinet control. Corruption needed a long run to take effect. Brown’s true forerunner, Henry Dundas ‘Harry the Ninth’, bought and sold Scotland for decades in the 18th century. He could use imperial patronage as collateral; Brown had to pay with the institutions of the state itself.

Systemic failure becomes even more chronic on the civic front. Voluntary associations and the British ‘public culture’ – the trade unions, the universities, the BBC, the political elite – once formed a dense civil society which patrolled the operations of the British social market. Brown celebrated this fulsomely once it was on the skids. Now, coincident with the weakening of regulation, there occurred both a collapse of civic virtù, and a pervasive rise in ‘illegalism’. Could you have virtù, with a decline was in public participation? Voting in national elections was down to around 60 per cent in general, together with flaws on an American scale in registration and voting, and no British reform in sight. Surveys showed the public, and in particular yoof, as the most ill-informed in Europe. Devolution within the UK, in which so much confidence was invested by organisations like Charter 88, hit the buffers in North East England in November 2004. As a possible future, federalism was dead in the water. The accumulating weight of evidence, uncoordinated but cumulative, is damning. Seen when moving around the provinces of Britain by train and bus, sampling the local press and broadcasting, walking the towns themselves, things got worse. The collapse of social norms gripped liberal Tory commentators such as Ferdy Mount in Mind the Gap, or Nick Davies’ reports in the Guardian on education, drug addiction, and ultimately the quality press itself.

But ‘illegalism’ can be calculated quite precisely in Brown’s own Scotland: the drink culture of youth in cities and provincial towns, the impact of drugs on the country’s hidden unemployed and the emergence of a tough and resilient criminal culture which the police (even if competent or willing) are incapable of putting under restraint, which draws particular sustenance from one of the New Labour’s ‘successes’: terrorist diversification in the ghettos of Belfast.

In the 1970s Margaret Drabble, Paul Theroux and Jonathan Raban made similar enquiries into the Condition of Britain, anticipating some of my conclusions. But the deliberate destruction of the civic membrane and its replacement by ‘shopping and f*cking’ was new in imposing a consumption-based economics: waving goodbye to rational decision-making in the style of Adam Smith’s citizenry. Dumbing-down, tarted up as ‘post-modern irony’ had a very important place in the ‘real’ politics of New Labour. Winners? They were already abroad, in villas and yachts, enjoying a life-style impossibly remote from the sink estates around old industrial cities, little market towns made hellish by booze and drugs, desolate, gang-run schemes. Yet such life-styles were linked umbilically connected to one another.

The ‘matter of Britain’ was difficult to focus, as Britain itself, once held together by a powerful industry and adaptive, often Celtic, politicians, dissolved. In Floating Commonwealth I had charted the rise and fall of the institutions that held it together in the steam age, and the constellations of civics and goodwill which had reinforced this. The combination of MetroBrit and provincial hardmen that Brown, represented wrecked what remained of this. A regional mittelstand gave way to the bawling of the bourgeois, using football mania to play at being proletarian, while Englisnness presented itself as the saloon-bar-saloon-car psychosis of Jeremy Clarkson. Looked at more analytically, the poverty of property became apparent: an obsession fed by sacrificing culture and pride, and then by desperate strategies to get away from the mess: daft, booze-freighted weekends abroad, crazy, four-wheel drives to weekend ‘retreats’. What impends is akin to the implosion of the Christian Democrat and Socialist Parties in Italy in 1993. Worse, in fact: Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work found civic virtue continuing in an urban civility that went back to the Middle Ages. Consider the Italian cities’ wretched British twins.

Brown’s fortunes were unravelling long before Blair withdrew. There was a cultural context. The foot-soldiers of the Labour party in the provinces had been the public-sector middle class, what Dahrendorf called Bildungsbürgertum: Coleridge’s ‘clerisy’, if you like: teachers, social workers, academics, public sector trade unionists. Spurned by Blair, they had turned to Brown only to discover a dedicated neo-con, autistically incapable of exercising any sort of European intellect. Faith in him ebbed even faster than his economic plausibility, leaving Labour with a future as dire as that of the Tories after 1992.

‘Tony succeeds by consoling the people Gordon annoys’ had been Peter Hennessy’s explanation in 2002 for the government’s survival. The dyarchy forged by the famous Granita compact of 1994 worked on Brown’s side like Thatcher’s government after her first disastrous months in office: putting ‘dries’ in the supply ministries and seeing the ‘wets’ in the spending ministries tear lumps out of each other. In this Brown had oversight over all of the supply and spending departments, Tony did diplomacy and spin. Initially successful, particularly in Northern Ireland, Blair’s portion began to fall apart after 2003 with the Iraq war. By 2005 it was Brown’s turn. Not only was his economic policy exposed as narrowly based on an essentially frivolous demand-management, its social implications – the destruction of working-class autonomy in favour of a multiplying bureaucracy on one hand and an underclass on the other – made New Labour seem to lose all elements of progressivism and become a narrow, marketised dogma. What had vanished, in the course of this development, was the resilience of civil society. Brown attempted to revive it, but it seemed to crumble apart, starting with the Labour party and proceeding through the progressive decoupling of English, Scots and Welsh politics, and the flowing tide of ‘illegalism’.

The Euroneurosis of the English press was the result of an increasing realisation that beneath the trapeze of Brownite economics and the relentless takeover activity of the City, there was no safety net. Globalisation had been as both inevitable and essentially American, yet in accountancy terms the future was already European by 2005. The selling-off of British assets to European, American or Middle Eastern interests left an ever-narrower industrial base, so that when the housing-retailing current weakened its grip, what the Germans call an Umwälzung was inevitable. A cash-rich though growth-poor Europe will use an overturning of the whole structure, with the contraction of retailing spreading out into the sub-prime housing morass. Their investors will extend through bargain-basement takeovers the sort of hegemony exerted by the same European firms which had already largely taken over the power and postal services. Under the rhetoric of Whitehall nationalism, some sort of Vichyite accommodation will take place on in the City. Soon this will extend to managing the debt culture created by real estate and finance.

The pinch-point will be Scotland, once Brown’s own fortress. The Scottish Parliament general election in May 2007 defeated Labour. Brown had ‘taken a baseball bat to the SNP’ in 1999, and sulked in 2003. If in 2007 he was discredited, the SNP got the overall leadership of an ‘independence’ ticket because Labour’s Bildungsbürgertum jumped ship. More important, the SNP has been moving towards its own European goal. Renewable energy beckons along the Atlantic coast. Scotland needs European participation in this. What it doesn’t need is the burnt-out case that the British economy had now become. Moreover ‘Scotland’ doesn’t mean the predictable knee-jerking of Middle England, but a clever social-democrat well to Brown’s left: Alex Salmond is as experimental and as alarming as Lloyd George a century ago. Westminster should wake up to this. But there is no sign that it has, or ever will.

Christopher Harvie is an SNP MSP for mid-Scotland and Fife.