You are being very and overly rosy there Howard, unfortunately.....
The double dip is likely, Q1 will suffer because of Q4 retail activity.
Unemployment is set to continue to rise to 3m or more, fresh inflationary pressures are building with the risk of 'stagflation'. House prices may well tumble due to the unemployment situation. Tax rises are likely and we all individually and as a nation have a massive debt hangover that must be dealt with.
The last 10 years have been the worse 10 year period on record for economic growth and the worse for stockmarket returns......
There is good news though so we can be more cheerful.
13 years of Labour misrule are about to come to an end with those who are guilty of creating this mess losing office. A Conservative Government will once again, as they always have had to do, will repair the damage done to the economy by Labour, enabling greater prosperity for all of us, but first the medicine needs taking and that will not be nice....
sounding like harold wilson all those years ago barry, he used that phrase about 13 years of tory misrule.
i was famous then at school for my impression of harold wilson.
back to the point.
you have given your economic indicators, today the head honcho at the CBI gave his "large income growth for UK PLC this coming year".
people in that position do not usually buy socialist worker either.
I do not doubt that growth will resume this year, Howard, but it will be a slow and painful recovery from a low point that is not likely to start until Q2 though Q4 09 figures are likely to show growth. Nice to hear someone sounding bullish though but that does bot mean he is buying Labour's economic mess. Whatever happens anyway this, the worse and longest recession in our history, was on Brown's watch and he was responsible for turning a cyclical recession into an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions. He will not avoid being held to account over it.
thanks for that barry, now on to the speech from DC in oxfordshire today.
i did not see it all but got a general impression that he was doing the "time for change routine" beloved of opposition politicians close to an election.
he is planning visits to medical centres hospitals etc to reassure the staff that there will be no cuts there.
he has already said that education will not suffer, in fact new specialist teachers will be appointed.
where will all these spending cuts be made?
he will be asked this many more times before the election and from clever people too.
There will certainly be a huge reduction in the functions of Government. It will simply do a lot less and what it does will be done differently.
Cuts need not be applied to the front lines essential services such as hospital medical staff for instance. I have written before about the approach I would take in a fair bit of detail.
One thing is absolutely certain, cuts are needed whoever wins the election. I have said 20% before (when 9% was spoken about) and its interesting to see the 20% figure being now bandied about by economists. Time they caught up.
Its Darling who has been promising more and more uncosted spending today. No-one believes it is affordable and he can only do it because he knows he will not be called upon to deliver. Plainly dishonest.
Of course what you are talking about is Labour's dodgy dossier of fictional Conservative spending pledges and highly dubious figures. Darling really has to do better than that and start trying to justify his own claims first rather make up Conservative ones.
Howard how on earth do you equate that. Utter nonsense, its about correcting the 'single parent' bias in the tax/benefit system and to stop making it pay for parents to part. Sensible stuff, recognising the social benefit of families sticking together through the tax system, just as every other European nation does and we did up until 13 years ago.
Unmarried parents are not to be penalised, it is correcting the 'couples penalty' by which it is the married couple, staying together who are being penalised. It merely recognised the superiority of stable relationships and the overall benefit of them to society, particularly when children are involved. Figures show that married couples are more stable than unmarried couples due to the commitment they make, despite the increase in divorce.
Tax and benefits are interweaved since Brown introduced tax credits, a plainly daft and expensive system.
Civil partnerships are also to be recognised in the same way.
No backtracking at all Howard, incidentaly. This will be done in the first Parliament, not the first year as previously hoped for, thanks to Brown's economic mess.
