End of Recession?

The UK economy is officially out of recession but only just. While any improvement is welcome an increase in output of 0.1% is nothing to shout about especially as there is a risk this figure maybe revised downwards. Despite the Government pumping billions into the economy in an attempt to quickly exit the recession and increase output before the general election, the result hasn’t been great as the UK economy crawls out of recession and is the last of the major economies to do so.

Nick Griffin & Question Time

I was unfortunately very disappointed with last nights Question Time and especially the way David Dimbleby chaired the discussion. Everyone knows that the BNP is a racist and vile party. Nick Griffin’s views are equally well known especially those relating to race, immigration and Islam i.e BNP topics. Yet more than three quarters of the show was devoted to these issues with quotes of what Griffin has stated in the past being thrown at him from all sides. Griffin despite being hated by almost all in the audience must have been delighted to have had the chance to say that immigration had been and was still out of control and that Islam was incompatible with western democracy. His message wasn’t to the studio audience but to those living in run down council estates and other deprived areas where such messages are so well received. He had several more open goals and had he not been so nervous and overwhelmed he could have made more of this opportunity to put forward his ideology and get his message across.

The panel discussions should have focused more on current concerns of the population on matters such as the economy, housing, education etc which would have exposed the shallowness of the BNP ideology. The BNP does well when it is criticizing others, highlighting or exposing populist concerns and being entirely negative and blaming a particular group for all society’s ills. Yet it doesn’t do well or win when it has to put forward policies to tackle these concerns or explain them in any detail.

Griffin would have looked even more out of his depth on discussions on education or crime or managing the economy out of the recession. In the end the BBC got its ratings and we didn’t learn anymore than we already knew about the BNP and Nick Griffin, who could have made much more of the oppurtunity afforded to him by the BBC to get his message out but failed to do so.

Brown Cuts

Shrinking Economy

The UK economy shrunk by 2.4% in the first quarter of this year which is the fastest rate of decline in over 50 years and is a damning indictment of the way the Government has managed the economy over the past 12 years.

All those comments by Gordon Brown that we were as a country better placed than others to weather the economic storm sound foolish to say the least. But what is even more worrying is the continued talk by Brown of trying to spend his way out of recession at a rate which will burden the country and taxpayers for decades to come. How will any future Government pay back a national debt to £1.4 trillion which is what we are likely to be left with if Gordon Brown has his way?

Unemployment Up Again

The number of people out of work increased by 232 000 in the three months to April 2009 with unemployment now at at 12 year high of 2.36 million.

At this rate of increase, Labour will leave office with more people out of work than when it came into power!

Sarkozy’s Attack on Brown

First the Germans and now the French. There seems to be a queue of politician’s abroad wanting to attack Gordon Brown’s economic policies. No doubt we’ll see Downing Street twist this story to try and explain that this wasn’t aimed at Brown and he is still regarded everywhere as the saviour of the world economy!

Labour’s Sums Don’t Add Up

Brown’s Recession

The UK economy is now officially in recession after the release of growth figures this morning which show a 1.5% decline in GDP in the last quarter. This follows a drop in GDP in the previous quarter of 0.6% which means the official definition of two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth has been met.

The 1.5% fall is the largest since 1980 and shows what a perilous state the economy is now in. Gordon Brown refuses to accept that he has put an end to boom and bust but these figures make him look even more foolish when he continues to make claims that this recession is different to previous ones and that he is not to blame. The public won’t buy these feeble excuses. He was very keen to take credit for the ‘unprecedented growth’ as he put it of the UK economy during the first ten years of a Labour Government but is even keener to distance himself from the negative growth in the UK economy.  When thousands of people are losing their jobs and their homes each week, it’s embarassing for the PM of this country to give interviews to the press and media and blame the United States and anyone else he can think of at the time and completely try and absolve himself of any blame for the current economic crisis. He should have the decency to be a little honest – but I suppose if he could he wouldn’t be Gordon Brown.

Just to make matters worse, the pound is trading at $1.35 this morning which is the lowest its been for about 25 years.

Labour Minister Sees Green Shoots

7000 job losses have been announced this week but Business minister Baroness Vadera can quite incredibly see ‘a few green shoots’ of economic recovery. You have to wonder what planet some of these ministers are living on and whether they have any contact with the real world.

What a Waste!

Despite billions of pounds having been pumped into the health and education systems during the past 12 years by the Labour Government, the quality of service in both areas remains unsatisfactory. Two stories which show the wastefulness of the Labour era have been highlighted this week. The first is the failure of 340 000 children to attain 5 GCSE grades A-C including English and maths with one in seven schools, a total of 440 failing to ensure that at least 30% of their pupils got five A*-C GCSEs. The education education education mantra has been assigned to the dustbin as far too many children continue to receive an inadequate education.

The second is the news that Britain has fewer hospital beds per head of population than almost any other European country, with half as many as Lithuania and Hungary. This is a terrible indictment on Labour’s wasteful spending. Most people didn’t need to see official statistics to know that hospitals are always short of beds – their personal experience will have confirmed this. But it is a deeply worrying and depressing statistic that shows how reckless this Government has been in dealing with the health service.

Value for money isn’t something this Government has understood. It has spent like an addict without ensuring the appropriate increases in the delivery of services. Bureaucracy has been bloated and we are now left with so much Government debt that it will take this and the next generation to pay it off without having the high quality services that the borrowed money should have delivered.