“We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.” These words of Cecil Rhodes, founder of the famed De Beers Mining Company and the nation of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), embodied the colonial vision which lifted Britain out its first economic crises since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Listening to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown unfolding a bank bailout package worth hundreds of billions of dollars yesterday, it was apparent that the colonial vision had finally folded.

“The UK is finished,” Jim Rogers, Chairman of Singapore-based Rogers Holding told Bloomberg this morning, while advocating aggressive selling of the sterling and UK shares. Mr. Rogers did not elaborate on what exactly he meant by “finished”; but the empirical evidence does indicate that the British economy has lost virtually all its competitive constituents in recent years. In fact, without the wealth and income generated from tourism and financial services, London would be in dire states today. Tourism accounts for 12% of London’s Gross Added Value and for 15% of its workforce. One quarter of the Europes 500 largest companies are headquartered in London; by last count, 185 international banks and 225 global securities companies were based in the City, along with 60 major hedge funds.

Given the ongoing global recession, the tourism and financial sectors are both undergoing a substantive and painful contraction. London’s “buy-to-let” and “bed-and-breakfast” markets have deteriorated beyond repair. And the transactions to rent or purchase luxury properties have ground to a standstill, as rich Russians, for example, scramble to save the value of their assets back home.

Jim Rogers predicts that the cable (sterling/dollar) rate over the next few months will fall below 1.0520, last seen in February 1985. That prediction, of course, will depend upon how the US economy fares. But the short case for cable (EGB, FXB, GBB) is compelling indeed; in Asian trading today, the sterling fell to its lowest level (127.50) against the yen since 1971. And its future against the Euro is deemed uncertain only because currency traders doubt that more bad news from Germany, France, Italy, Greece and Spain is due to enter the public domain during the first and second quarters in this year.

Cecil Rhodes died without fulfilling his dream, and the dream of other proponents of the Empire, of a “red line” on the map from Cape Town to Cairo. But he must be turning in his grave wondering why, after the Second World War, Britain began granting independence to its colonies since, by his calculations, Britain did not possess the internal resources to keep its rising population in good cheer. Besides, the late Mr. Rhodes did not want British novelists to have any further cause to write another Bleak House or a Little Dorrit, or for ideologues like Karl Marx to state that Victorian novelists “issued to the world more political and social truths that have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together.”

If Jim Rogers’ “get-out-of-UK” call was meant to imply that another state-of-the-nation novel (Hard Times, 1854) was imminent, then he was not too far off the mark. The official unemployment figure is expected to surge to 8.2% in 2009, from 5.3% at present, amounting to a total of 2.55 million people out of work. The real measure of unemployment (to include acute underemployment) paints an even more dismal picture. With the economy on the verge of the most vicous slump since 1946, Britain’s equivalent of Line U-6 (in Table A-12 of the US employment report) is closer to 9.5%. If SGS-type alternative methodologies are applied, that figure rises to 14%.

In excess of five million workers (roughly 22% of all employees in the UK) earn less than $10 a day. There are 1.7 million British children living in poor housholds. Seventy percent of “workless” households suffer poverty. Forty-two percent of women work on a part-time basis. And, due to the influx of “underground” workers from around the world, wages at the lower end of the British job spectrum are now under severe pressue.

Regardless of the sharp declines in equity prices since mid-2008, the continuing case for short UK bets via Exchange-traded Funds (EWU, ISF-LSE, MIDD-LSE) was enhanced yesterday by Prime Minister Brown himself. The UK Treasury has effectively entered the credit default swap business by its decision to insure a wide range of balance sheet risks. CDS dealers are expected to begin pricing that decision into UK government default spreads very shortly.