This is the Daily Mail’s reaction to Britain’s acceptance of Chinese security men on the streets of London this week during Olympic-torch protests in the city.

According to the paper, Chinese officials were ordering British police about and fighting running battles with British protesters. This, says columnist Anthony Browne, was “a brazen display of how confident China has become of its new place in the world, just as the British Government’s failure to take a firm stand on Chinese abuses of human rights shows how craven we have become.”

The West is also losing ground economically, says Browne:

The dire warnings from the International Monetary Fund this week that the West now faces the largest financial shock since the Great Depression, while the Asian economies are still powering ahead, simply underlines our vulnerability in this new world order.

The desperately weakened American dollar appears to be on the verge of losing its global dominance, in the same way as sterling lost it a lifetime ago.

The credit crunch has brought home to all of us in Britain how over-reliant our country has become on financial services. Meanwhile, the loss of our manufacturing industries to Asia continues unabated.