I have read this morning's GDP release from the ONS. The message is summarised in one chart:
The economy is flatlining, at best.
There is little else to add. The story is of stagnation.
That is unsurprising. The government wishes to squeeze the life out of people's spending power. It is succeeding in doing so. Of course this is the result.
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This chimes with progress in my line of work in social housing. Things are so slow it’s as if we are going backwards. All our financial models are shot to pieces, our workforce depleted, longer housing lists, homeless B&B stays going well over the 42 day limit and the DLHUC not even bothering to check.
We really should be getting into a position where we never vote for the Conservative party ever again.
And yet a whole pile of people did in a by-election yesterday
I cannot understand that
I appreciate this may be a bit simplistic but I do think that there are people who vote for a party because they have always done so and, in some cases, their parents have always done so.
Craig
P.S. No doubt the Tories will ‘celebrate’ the flatlining GDP as some from of great achievement
A lot of people vote against rather than for. So some will vote Labour as they hate Tories and vica versa.
I have had conversations where someone has agreed a party has failed on three or even four measures but won’t vote differently because of what one of the other party said some time ago!!
It is like a family where we know Uncle George will let you down but he is ‘let off’ because he is ‘one of us’. The politics of identification rather than judgement. Also, perhaps, the politics of ‘things used to be better ; the less change the more I like it’.
We can only hope that they stay at home at election time.
For some reason, some people seem to think it matters very much whether the estimate of GDP in one quarter differs from the previous quarter by +0.1% or 0.0% or -0.1%.
What are the error bars?
As that graph shows, for what is worth, we have not got back to where we were in 2019Q4, and show no little progress towards doing so. So much for “growth”. Indeed, that looks like permanent economic scarring. I wonder what happened the subsequent period. Covid? Brexit? War in Ukraine? Combination of all three? Something else?
Recession is still likely