Osborne didn’t mention the most important fact about the budget. While the OBR’s growth forecast for this year has been raised to nearly 2.7% (though their previous four have each been grossly over-optimistic), they recognise that this ‘recovery’, such as it is, will fade after 2015. In other words, this is not a real recovery, […]
Posts Tagged ‘Recovery’
What’s in the box, Gideon? Hand-outs for the rich and a phoney recovery
Mar 20th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.
That Tory recovery in perspective
Mar 19th, 2014 by Michael Burke.This week George Osborne will announce his latest Budget. The specific measures in this Budget were not published at the time of writing. But it is a fairly safe assumption that he will boast that the economy is on track, and that there is a recovery. This is simply an exercise in redefinition. The economy […]
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Is this ‘recovery’ already fading?
Mar 3rd, 2014 by Michael Meacher.There are several signs in the wind that Osborne’s ‘recovery’, which he so relentlessly talks up at every opportunity, is not going anywhere. Carney, Osborne’s man at the BoE, has declared the recovery “neither balance nor sustainable”. It is certainly not balanced, despite all the rhetoric about bringing that about, as the chasm between finance […]
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London’s recovery, Dan Hodges and dumb empiricism
Jan 30th, 2014 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.If you read my articles, or if you don’t, you may know what stupid empiricism is. Stupid empiricism is to take an event or a phenomenon as proof of a general trend, even when associated evidence thoroughly discredits that line of thinking. Examples include snow in the winter = no climate change, or growth of […]
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Four reasons Osborne’s “recovery” is futile
Jan 30th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.The government loves to tell us that in the last year the UK economy grew by 1.9%. Big deal after 6 years of stagnation! And hardly anything to write home about when the regular annual growth of the economy each year, not just 1 year in 6, used to be 2.5%. And, worst of all, […]
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World Bank sees a ‘turning-point’ in world economy
Jan 17th, 2014 by Michael Burke.The World Bank has recently released its updated forecasts for the world economy. Two key features of the forecasts have received the greatest attention. The first is that the World Bank describes the overall trend in the world economy as at a ‘turning-point’ and secondly that this is led by a recovery in the advanced industrialised countries, […]
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Osborne’s Pyrrhic ‘recovery’
Nov 29th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.The Tories suffered a miserable debate yesterday, and I hope my remarks contributed to it: The cost of living crisis has had a fairly good airing in this debate and has been poignantly described in some detail, so I intend to concentrate on the second part of the motion, which concerns the Government’s economic policy […]
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£1.4 trillion personal debt – some recovery!
Nov 23rd, 2013 by Michael Meacher.A genuine recovery has to be built either on a rise in business investment (or of course public investment), a growth in productivity gains, or a sustained expansion of exports. UK business investment, having plummeted by a disastrous 25% at the 2008-9 crash, has still never recovered and as a percentage of GDP it is […]
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Red Cross is right: this ‘recovery’ is a delusion
Oct 11th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.It isn’t only that large swathes of the UK and EU are sinking deeper into poverty, mass unemployment and inequality, as the Red Cross rightly notes; it’s also that the UK economy remains profoundly dysfunctional and incapable in its present form of yielding sustainable growth. Regional imbalance has reached drastic levels, and not just since […]
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Labour is only half-right: we should shout louder on living standards
Aug 26th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.Labour’s at least half right to explode the Tory economy bubble by exclaiming: Recovery? What recovery? OK for bankers’ bonuses, OK for City private equity, OK for investors’ share indices, OK for Treasury austerity enthusiasts. Yes, fine for the top 1% – that’s 300,000 individuals out of the UK’s 40 million adults. But what about […]
