recovery?????

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

We’ve got to remember that it’s the slowest recovery on record. And one reason is that it was a much bigger shock than we’ve seen for many decades. Another reason is that there was excessive squeezing on the fiscal side. We haven’t yet recovered pre-slump output levels. If you think about what a stable economy looks like, we might well be 10 per cent below that. We should remark how much we’ve lost as a result of all this and ask ourselves whether that loss was necessary and whether the policies that were followed amplified that loss.

The second question is: what are those employed people doing? I suspect that an awful lot of people are scratching around at part-time, low-paid, low-productivity activities because they’re decent people who desperately want to earn something, but the opportunities are so weak.

Nick Stern

er not to mention indebtedness; corporate capture of regulation; low investment; property bubbling again and QE propping up the failed financial system

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

It is this nexus – technology rooted in great universities, innovative start-ups and small firms with loans collateralised against rising house prices, internationalisation via our great airports and all keyed into the buying power of locally sited multinational headquarters that is creating a new economy at a startling pace. This is happening spontaneously, independently of politicians. Indeed, elements of the Tory party and Ukip, wanting EU exit, are undermining one of its key supports – EU membership. Every week, another great company says it will review its commitment to the UK.

Outside the country's hot spots, the picture is of bits-and-pieces jobs, public sector employment in retreat, manufacturing employment stagnating and squeezed living standards. It is a reality that is vividly revealed in Britain's trade statistics: in the most recent three months the current account deficit was more than 5% of GDP – and this despite the devaluation of the pound

Hutton

[amateur51]

Hutton

Slightly self-congratulatory but then it wouldn't be Will Hutton if it weren't.

I think someone should rub every leading politicians' nose, and those of the would-bes, into Hutton's final para & demand their considered responses & practical solutions to be put before the electorate:

"Outside the country's hot spots, the picture is of bits-and-pieces jobs, public sector employment in retreat, manufacturing employment stagnating and squeezed living standards. It is a reality that is vividly revealed in Britain's trade statistics: in the most recent three months the current account deficit was more than 5% of GDP – and this despite the devaluation of the pound. The hot spots are too localised and built on too particular economic advantages. There is no pan-British economic strength, hence the paucity of exports. No country can finance a deficit this large for very long: it is a harbinger of deep economic dysfunction. Mr Osborne and his apologists delude themselves. There is certainly a full-throated economic snap-back, but the British economic model still needs wholesale reform."

You may now start your answers. You have much less than twelve months.

[Serial_Apologist]

Ganesh - one of Andrew Neil's smug little panel of 3 pundits - made a perceptive point about the relevance of home ownership to political fortunes as regards a sustainable economic recovery, bringing up the question of "inside and outside issues" on this morning's end of The Politics Show discussion. Assuming (as I don't as happens) that politicians of whatever hue are not in the game for their own selfish advantage, Thatcherism's Faustian pact with her aspirational electorate, namely the selling of municipal housing and advocacy of home-ownership as Britons' birthright, leaves a situation right across Britain in which many will not support building the extra housing in their backyard necessary to enable people to afford relocating for work. Harking back to times when working people had neither the will nor means to buy their own homes in Tebbit's call to "get on your bike and look for work", they didn't think that far ahead then, the Tories, did they?