It’s natural in a crisis to blame the leader. With their fevered talk of decapitation, Labour politicians are only doing what all rational people do when disaster strikes – panic. But I wonder whether all this speculation about the inadequacies of the Prime Minister is not missing a slightly larger point about the present circumstances. I have no doubt that Gordon Brown has his political weaknesses, but even a casual observer cannot help but notice that Labour’s real problems are rooted in something much deeper than who lives at 10 Downing Street.

In fact, for all the fashionable chatter in economic circles about how the world has decoupled from America in the past few years, the crisis unfolding in Britain is proceeding along remarkably similar lines to the one that has engulfed the US.

Nothing better illustrates the point than the bleak state of the incumbent party’s political prospects.

In Britain the governing party toils below 30 per cent in the opinion polls, the Opposition wins control of London and takes its first parliamentary by-election in 30 years. In the US the approval rating of the President barely touches 30 per cent and his party has lost three “safe” congressional seats in special elections in the past three months.

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This may be the first time that anyone has placed Crewe, the trainspotters’ Mecca, and Tupelo, Mississippi, the birthplace of Elvis Presley, in the same sentence. But the week before Labour crashed to defeat on a 17 per cent swing in Crewe & Nantwich, the Republicans lost Tupelo on a – yes – 17 per cent swing to the Democrats from the 2004 presidential election.

Meanwhile, two young, almost completely untested leaders David Cameron and Barack Obama, are riding high with comfortingly vapid messages of hope amid the gloom. These conditions are so strikingly similar that it is unlikely in fact that they are not connected. And of course, they are. Iraq won’t do as a reason because it has largely fallen out of the public debate in Britain. A better explanation is the state of both economies.

The UK’s economic woes are rooted in the same twin shocks that befell the US, of course – a financial market crunch and a sudden acceleration of global commodity prices. If the causes are similar, the symptoms on opposite sides of the Atlantic are nearly identical: banks are tightening credit and house prices are falling; the price of every other good and service is increasing; and, having risen against the dollar consistently over the past six years, the pound has more or less tracked the dollar since the crisis hit last summer.

Given the nature of the challenges, and especially given the importance of the financial sector in both countries, you would expect them to be on similar cycles, in roughly similar ways. In fact, the US seems be moving on a downward curve about six months to a year ahead of Britain. So for Mr Brown and the rest of the British public, the key question may be: what can we learn from America about what might happen in the UK in the next year or so?

The good news for Britain is that the betting is that the US might avoid the most fearful consequences of the crisis and escape with only a mild recession and a sluggish recovery. That may not sound wonderful but with two years to go to a general election, it might yet save Mr Brown. But, on closer inspection, the news is not so good. In the US the financial crisis has entered a new phase. The immediate problems in the interbank market seem to have ebbed. But there are troubling signs that the financial retrenchment we have seen so far in the mortgage sector may be spreading to the rest of the system.

Corporate lending standards have tightened. More worrying, consumer loans are under pressure. Car loans have all but dried up and student loans have dropped sharply – next in line seems certain to be credit card lending and the home equity business.

If this pattern of widening financial distress is replicated in the UK, the chances of an unpleasant new crunch on consumer loans and credit seem considerable.

The direction of the US housing market also holds clues to how bad it might get in the UK. According to the widely watched Case-Shiller index, American house prices are down by about 11 per cent in the past year. But barometers of housing demand and supply, such as inventories of unsold homes, suggest that we are not nearly close to the bottom yet – it may well reach 25 per cent.

The British housing market is not an exact simulacrum of the US, but anything even close to a 25 per cent fall would be devastating. The UK is slightly better placed than the US in terms of household debt, with a somewhat positive savings rate.

But the big differences both point to bigger problems for the UK than the US has experienced – and both are related to policy.

The US Federal Reserve has cut short-term interest rates aggressively since last summer, a factor that surely has eased the pain. For a long while there has been an assumption that the Bank of England will be similarly aggressive.

However, the Bank faces constraints that the Fed does not. Its remit is different, being inflation-focused. More important, the US central bank simply has to take account of much broader economic circumstances in setting policy. It knows that failure to deliver a short-term recovery would have much larger consequences for the world. The Bank has to focus on getting its inflation fighting strategy in the UK right and so cannot risk rate cuts on the same scale.

The other big difference is the fiscal picture. When the crisis hit last summer the US Government’s deficit was a little more than 1 per cent of gross domestic product – too high at that point of the cycle but manageable. The UK deficit at this cyclical peak is closer to 3 per cent. A serious downturn in the British economy risks a ballooning of that deficit – with potentially dire consequences for the pound and domestic financial markets. This month’s desperate U-turn on the lower income tax rate was not a positive step in that regard.

It is hard to resist a rather obvious conclusion. Every Labour government since 1929 has been undone by one or more types of economic crisis – financial, fiscal, currency, inflation. The great achievement of new Labour is that it has avoided that fate. Until now.

Now, as if to make up for lost time, it looks like Britain is going to have all four of them together. Changing the leader isn’t going to change that.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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