"Billions", as he keeps reminding us, have been spent on a programme of upgrading the nation's basic infrastructure, but in reality it has barely moved the country up the performance league tables.

We have a working population so short of skills that the Clyde and Rosyth shipyards will have to import foreign workers to build the Ministry of Defence's two aircraft carriers. College teaching staff are so stretched for resources they have become virtual social workers to cope with the intake of ill-informed, ill-disciplined youth that the schools have been unable to educate. In Scotland, these may be devolved issues and now under Nationalist control, but the current state of affairs is Labour's legacy and is umbilically linked to Westminster through monetary and fiscal policy.

New Labour ministers have taken to hiding behind global issues, such as the US sub-prime crisis and the rising oil price, as matters beyond their control. Well, to a point. Unfortunately, the voters believe it is incumbent on their Government to mitigate the impact of wider problems.

Brown's demeanour tells us everything. He looks increasingly like a man who's just realised he's left the gas on. He's lost and floundering while his increasingly frantic colleagues are pleading with him to provide leadership.

His self-denying ordinance of removing interest rates from ministerial control has left him without recourse to one means of satisfying the baying wolves of the electorate that his predecessors had at their disposal. It means the Prime Minister has to find some other ways out of the mess.

He could begin with a few tax concessions to business and to hard-pressed individuals who now include the middle classes as well as the poor and elderly.

He should ease a burdensome legislative programme – more green and environmental requirements, for instance – that threatens to sink some industries. Such measures as these would help to counter the rising cost of living for householders and rising costs for business leaders who have been talking themselves out of a recession but must now be wondering if the Government is leading them into one.

Airlines flying on a wing and a prayer

THE suspension of shares in business-only airline Silverjet is the latest symptom of a bigger crisis looming for the airline industry.

Two other Transatlantic services in this niche market – Eos and Maxjet Airways – have been grounded and, while Silverjet continues to operate its scheduled services, its future remains uncertain as it searches for new funds.

But bigger questions are being asked of the mainstream airlines as the twin problems of tighter finance and rising fuel prices threaten to put some of them out of business or at least lead to another round of mergers as they seek to trim costs.

With fuel accounting for about a third of an airline's outgoings, the continuation of oil prices at current levels will cause untold pain for the industry and more companies are being admitted to intensive care.

Willie Walsh, chief executive of British Airways, warned last Monday of further consolidation and bankruptcies. The biggest European carrier, Air France-KLM, now expects a re-shaping of the industry. Chief executive Jean-Cyril Spinetta said things were moving quickly and that the industry faced an "awesome challenge".

The low-cost airlines are also facing a dilemma that could change the way they operate and the rest of us travel. Simply raising fares undermines their business model and Michael O'Leary, the normally belligerent boss of Ryanair, has admitted the fuel price hike is "really hurting". All this could impact on a decade of cheap travel to the European continent and beyond. It implies profound changes to weekend breaks, long-distance commuting, stag parties and the second home industry.

As for Silverjet, its lively boss Lawrence Hunt, interviewed in these pages earlier this month, remains hopeful of finding a new backer with some of his advisers hinting at an announcement this week. But who wants to buy into the airline industry right now?