Welcome to my blog. I am a former local journalist who now works in PR and a Conservative and community activist in Woking and Horsell. This blog will keep updated on local issues as well as my interests and quirky news stories.
It’s a mixed day for the economic forecasts at the moment. Gordon Brown, for obvious reasons, is keen to claim credit for a few signs that the recession misery is easing. More likely, the dire straits of the first few months of 2009 are calming and the economy is being stimulated by production starting up again and the billions of extra pounds that the Bank of England has been forced to print.
Elsewhere, economists aren’t as optimistic as Gordon. Ann Pettifor thinks the worst is yet to come and the FT reports that even after a recovery is in full swing, there will be parts of the economy that have been permanently damaged and that will not return to pre-recession levels.
On a political level, Gordon’s front-page splash in the FT (complete with exclusive picture of Blairite hand gestures) is designed to keep City relations on an admittedly delicate even keel by trying to convince bankers that controlling their bonuses is vital to re-establishing the City’s reputation abroad.
He also knows that the FT is the newspaper that journalists read and that a front page there will get picked up everywhere else (notably the BBC, although they are obviously annoyed the story was fed to the FT as they only run it in the business news) for more populist purposes.
The point is this – that Gordon and his gang are going to try and claim that far from wrecking the UK’s once vibrant financial services and manufacturing economy with ruinous debts, strangling regulation and non-existent oversight, the government has actually saved it from destruction and navigated the financial storm. Really?
DC writes today in the Times about the Lockerbie decision and that’s fair enough because clearly some pretty underhand stuff has gone on there. But he needs to be ready to maintain pressure on Gordon over his economy-wrecking and head off Labour attempts to create a competence myth around the embryonic recovery.
Labour governments always end up out of office with the country bankrupt and 2010 will be no exception. DC needs to bring his communications skills to bear on this fact if Labour are not to slip out of the electoral noose.
