For the benefit of my friends across the Pond who may still be reading reviews of last night’s presidential “debate”, here is the news from Europe: we have had a bailout too. In some ways it is very similar to yours, and in some ways it is very different.

To start with, this is just a UK bailout. The French, Germans, Spanish and so on may be doing their own things, or they may not. Our governments talk, but they don’t necessarily all operate in unison, and the EU doesn’t have the power to do this sort of thing.

Believe it or not, our bailout is also worth about $700bn, and our economy is much smaller than yours. Does that mean we had a bigger problem, or that the US bailout is too small and is doomed to failure? Possibly neither. The UK sum is made up of a package of items. $500bn of it is in the form of guarantees for inter-bank lending: it is money in the piggy bank, not money spent, and will only get called upon if a bank really does collapse. But at least Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have a plan. They didn’t just ask for a very large sum of money and for permission to do whatever they wanted with it.

Part of that plan is that the bailout has strings attached. The government will be buying shares in major banks. In return it will demand a say in how those banks are run. That includes having a say in how much the top executives get paid.

The UK bailout has no pork attached. No MPs had to be bribed to vote for it. That’s partly because we don’t have an election coming up, but also because our government has much more power than a US one, which can be good and can be bad. Also there is very little political disagreement on the issue. The only substantial complaint that the Tories have made was that there wasn’t a firm promise that no bank executives would get any bonuses at all, which is a very un-Tory-like complaint for them to have made. Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats said something along the lines of, “When the ship is sinking you put out the lifeboats, you don’t stand around arguing about who is going to steer them.”

Which is not to say that there are not objectors. I’m sure that there will be someone writing it The Guardian that the banks should all be fully nationalized and all of their senior management sacked. Equally there was a Tory idiot on the TV yesterday whining about how we shouldn’t cooperate with Europe, but should look out for own own best interests. Well, that’s the sort of thing that Iceland appears to have done. As a result their currency has gone through the floor, the UK government is suing them for stealing the savings of some 300,000 British citizens, and they have Mr. Putin banging on their door promising rescue. No prizes for guessing what he’ll want in return. Interesting strategic location, Iceland. Hopefully a bit of European cooperation can help sort them out.

There are also a lot of confused people. Much of the public comment I have seen has been of the form of “if they can find all this money now, how come there is never any money for the NHS?” There are two answers to that. The first one is that this money isn’t being spent, it is being invested. The government is hoping to get some, if not all, of it back. They may even make a profit on the deal long-term. I was surprised to learn from the BBC’s Nick Robinson that the Swedish government did a bank rescue of this type in 1994, and it worked, though they were not doing it in the midst of an international financial crisis. And secondly Gordon, is his stereotypically dour Scottish way, has long been against borrowing too much. Look at it this way, if money is tight you might decide not to eat out, buy books, or go to conventions, because you can’t afford it. But if your car breaks down and have no other means of getting to work then you buy a new one, and worry about the credit card bills later.

All in all, it has been an interesting day, in the sense of that mythical Chinese proverb. The FTSE is still going south at a rate of knots, taking everyone’s pension plans with it. That, apparently, is all to do with falls in global commodity prices (a good thing) causing the shares of mining and energy companies to tank (a bad thing). Hopefully tomorrow will be better. In the meantime, I am rather grateful for the BBC, who are managing to provide quite a bit of responsible journalism (Robert Peston is very good.) That’s a great relief in these days of Faux News.