Thanks to Brown, our short-lived recent prosperity has been built without foundations. The hollow edifice of paper money and inflated property values, so keenly erected by the Labour Government, has collapsed around our ears.

That is why Britain is at risk of suffering a worse recession than any other major country in the West.

And little hope can be invested in his mammoth £500billion bail-out of Britain’s banks, ostentatiously presented at the G8 summit in Washington at the weekend as the solution to the world’s economic woes.

Given the stock market plunge on Friday, there is little sign of this expensive plan actually working, not least because the credibility of the Labour Government has been shot to pieces. And as this scheme fails, Brown will no doubt press ahead with more socialism, nationalisation and subsidies.

But we have an alternative to Brown’s costly folly. Here are 10 steps which a less ideologically fixated government could take to pull Britain out of recession:

1. CUT INCOME TAX
British households are suffering enough through rising bills. A substantial reduction in government taxation, particularly among the lower paid, would provide a welcome injection of cash and boost consumer spending.

2. SLASH SPENDING ON QUANGOS
With the economy in deep trouble, there is no justification for the lavish sums frittered away on uselessbodies such as the £2billion Regional Development Agencies which do nothing except indulge in expensive marketing campaigns to justify their own wasteful existences.

3. REFORM STAMP DUTY
The rigidities of the current stamp duty system are helping to paralyse the housing market. To make it much fairer, the present banding system, with its sudden leaps in demands from the Treasury, should be replaced by a progressive tax which gradually rises in line with the value of the property. It is ludicrous that a home purchase worth £251,000 costs the buyer more than twice the duty of one worth £249,000.

4. FREEZE IMMIGRATION
At a time of rising unemployment, it is madness to bring in at least 4,000 migrants a day, of whom many will become burdens on the state. Contrary to Left-wing mythology, immigrants are far more likely to be unemployed than the indigenous population, and spending on public services for migrants is more than £30billion a year.

5. CHANGE REGULATOR
One of Gordon Brown’s worst errors was to take the regulation of the City away from the Bank of England, which had done the job effectively for centuries, and hand it over to the utterly ineffectual Financial Services Authority. The role should be restored to the Bank of England.

6. BOOST JOB INCENTIVES
It is another example of Labour’s lunacy that, when dole queues are lengthening, the state still provides perverse incentives to mass unemployment through the benefits system. The Government should be doing everything it can to increase competitiveness in the employment market. That means adopting the US system, where no able-bodied person is allowed a life on benefits.

7. SACK BANK DIRECTORS
One of the biggest concerns of the massive bail-out is that it will end up rewarding the architects of the age of irresponsibility in the banks. All guarantees, subsidies and purchases of preference shares in banks should be conditional on the dismissal of the bosses who created the mess in the first place. It is an outrage that so few top figures have lost their jobs as a result of the crisis.

8. END HOME INFORMATION PACKS
The downturn in the property market can be dated virtually to the moment Hips were introduced. An entirely unnecessary layer of bureaucracy has been imposed on home purchases. While the dynamism has evaporated from the market, an army of snoopers has been sanctioned to invade our privacy.

9. FREEZE COUNCIL TAX
As shown by the Iceland fiasco and the case of the Afghan single mother in Ealing rewarded with housing benefits worth £170,000 a year, local authorities are dangerously cavalier with our money. They should learn to live within their means and give us a break from their exorbitant demands.

10. LEAVE THE EU
The European Union has proved hopeless in the present crisis, unable to come up with a cohesive plan. Costing Britain at least £12billion a year, it is another bureaucratic burden on the taxpayer. We should take back control of our own economic destiny.

With these 10 steps, there might still be hope for Britain. Brown’s socialism is the road to nowhere.