Our economic recovery is based on......

[Warbler]

Prostitution

Well I could have told them that - albeit perhaps mine definition would be more figure of speech. I should also say that drug sales and tobacco smuggling are significant contributors too.

Anyone, calamity Cameron has absolutely put his foot down on this one and refused to pay anything until the Rochester and Strood by-election is over (something Angela Merkel has very helpfully pointed out for him). I do find it mildly amusing that Eurostat seem to be suggetsing that Germany, Austria and Denmark are getting rebates whilst Greece is being asked to pay more

I also wonder if perhaps the EU has had enough of the UK (you can only threaten to leave so many times) and have perhaps decided to try and push them through the door

Anyway, I wonder what will happen when country's bent school academies and their £200,000 a year salaries start to hit the stats

[Maruco]

Nevertheless we are making a pretty strong recovery when compared to the eurozone, which renders your tongue in cheek post a bit irrelevant.

id rather we continued to play both sides of the EU as long as we can get away with it.

Incidentally the biggest single reason we are seeing the recovery is down to the Bank of England not the Government.

[clivex]

I agree largely with Mauroco but b of e policy is hand in hand with government policy. B of e doesnt determine goverment spending for a start. Recovery is also largely because we are not part of a draining currency union but also because there is more scope for enterprise here. The culture is far more sympathetic ( see world bank stats) as it is across anglophone countries in general .

What difference will it make if we do leave? We are their biggest market and my god they need a market, so trade terms will certainly not change. Wouldn't even if we werent so important to the rest of the eu. We rightly didnt buy into the euro and rightly do not want further integration. Why should we obliged to go along with a project which has been driven by unaccountable bureaucrats who were not capable of seeing that the euro was a calamity under the original terms. By any standards they 'didn't know what they were doing' .

The Eurozone is facing even more trouble. Only have to look at a lot of recent analysis. That's no good for us of course because its not a zero sum game but the difference in growth between the vast majority of heir economies and ours looks like it could accelerate

one thing that isn't often mentioned is that the very fact that these budgets have to be fiddled around with an d negotiated etc etc etc, just indicative that it is a worthless exercise draining resources and employing more and more civil servants.... At our expense of course. I would just about stay in the eu under present terms bu agree entirely with Nigel lawsons article last year that this is as far as it should go

[clivex]

Btw warbler. The increase in budget contribution is down to the fact that the uk economy has improved rapidly. Same actually applies to Greece (from a horrifically low base)

could argue whether that is right or wrong? You get a rebate for lack of performance??

[Warbler]

I can't really be bothered to come out and play tonight, but might make an effort next week if I can clear a few things in between. I've got a feeling that the government has been over indulging in the time honoured tradition of fiddling figures and massaging real performance in order to create the picture that things are better than they are. It's why they're probably so indignant about being aksed to pay up now (which they'll have to) but more tellingly, why Mark Carney hasn't actually altered his own policy when indicators are seemingly being met. He has to make decisions based on what's really happening and that doesn't mean responding to spun figures and Whitehall recounts

It's no secret that 750,000 new jobs have been created in the self-employed sector. This is where your jobs recovery has come from. No other source. No Work Programme, Apprenticeships etc There's no real evidence that I can see of significant hirings into anything other than low paid/ low skilled tertiary sector activity cold calling people at home over PPI claims or solar panels etc.

Now if Eurostat are to be believed the self employed sector is down to a growth of prostitutes, drug dealers, and tobacco smugglers, but even I'm struggling to believe that we've managed to three quarters of a million onto the game. What I think has happened is contained in a separate survey that says wages in the self-employed sector have fallen by 20% in the last 2 years. Basically unemployed people have been chased off the benefits register under the threat of being dumped into a call centre or worse, and recategorised as self-employed if they've tried to do things legitmately or into the black economy if they've gone the illegal route (better than mugging anyway)

The other major giveaway is that the inland revenues figures for tax take simply doesn't correspond with job growth. People are basically being classified as working, and as having regsitered new business, VAT regs etc all the usual indicators, but that these businesses a very often marginal at best and due to start collapsing in the next 12 months

I realise how the EU budget works incidentally Clive, which is why Cameron will pay up, because he was happy to take a reduction last time when Osborne choked off the recovery and pushed us back into 2 years of recession (outside of one quarter when the Olympics came to his rescue). If Greece was coming from a low base, the UK was always likely to be hit hardest as we were open to significant improvement as we too were on a low base but with a capital 'P' to use handicap shorthand. I just think it's highly amusing though that our performance has been enhanced once prostitution, drug dealing, and tobacco smuggling have been included in the GDP figure, and that the commission are managing to put this forward with a straight face to explain the UK's recovery

Well if we're prossies, that makes Cameron our pimp

[clivex]

GDP growth figures are not fiddled . Simple as that. It would be suicidal in the markets to do so.


The smuggling and so on numbers are almost ccertainly a tiny fraction of the overall. Again the markets would know. No one has questioned the overall numbers anywhere. Not even the governments worst enemies

[Maruco]

Absolutely. GDP is the one figure you can rely on.

Clive, what I was referring to, and probably not clear enough, was the continued economic recovery will largely revolve around how the Bank of England Government handle the issue of all new currency that's been printed over the last three years and whether they can hang on to interest rates which remain at an historic low. Their actions over the next year have and will continue to (in consultation with the Governement), have the biggest bearing on the future economic health of the Country.

in terms of other Goverment economic policy, apart from some tinkering, it seems largely stagnant right now. I suspect we won't see any real change until after we've had an election.

[marbler]

Clearly Cameron and Osbourne challenged the principle of excessive government spending at a time when there wasn't the money to spend.

Perhaps such a principle would have been better served and implemented during a more prosperous economic cycle, but then perhaps Gordon Brown didn't need to bust the economy at a time when the rest of the world was busting theirs.

It is an apple and orange recovery. Warbler is far from totally wrong, and this recovery is also based too heavily on the London housing market.

The cycle of prosperity that was booming under New Labour, (which partially caused the crash actually), is under way again.

I do think a profound change needs to happen in the way the country generates wealth, but I'll let others hypothesise about that.

Until the deficit is back at a reasonable level these debates will continue.
Only after it is significantly reduced can we start to see what these politicians want to do with the country's future.

[Warbler]

GDP's are estimates that are routinely revised up or down a few months later, but what is worrying me more is that the government has indulged in the time honoured tactic of stoking up a temporary property bubble to hit the electoral cycle and that this recovery doesn't actually have a great deal of substance behind it.

Only this weekend in Cameron's race to the bottom we discover that 1 in 5 people in work are now on the minimum wage as we roll up our sleeves to compete against the likes of Bangladesh and heaven knows, Mozambique and Botswana coming down the line

On the same day it emerged that the number of firms who've issued profit warnings is now at the highest level since 2008. Amusingly one of those companies is Rolls Royce, who attributed the stalling of contrac ts in Russia brought about by sanctions introduced by 'cold war Cameron' who still can't break out of his 1980's straight jacket. The man is 46 going on 76

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-1...ns-revamp.html

You might recall incidentally that he made great play about how we did more trade with Ireland than we did with the BRIC's when he was in opposition, and that he was going to put this right. So far he's managed to get sanctions imposed on us by the 'R' and our ships refused entry to the 'B'. The 'I' decided that they'd rather buy French or Swedish rather than our "over priced crap that no one wants" which just leaves him with selling Cornish pasties to China

Basically I think there's a lot of a cosmetic recovery about this as the government have concetrated on the headline indicators. Falling unemployment is a news story that registers with the voters. You can't very easily run a story that says 'inland revenue not getting as much as government employment figures suggest they should'. The two indicators don't add up. Something is missing, and right now I'd have my money on the government recategorising unemployed as being employed when in actual fact they're chronically under employed or barely working at all. If the money isn't in circulation, then eventually it grinds to a halt unless you can stoke up a credit bubble based on property

This recovery has all the hallmarks of the so-called Lawson boom, that quickly turned to bust when it transpired that there wasn't that much substance behind it (I actually think the Lawson boom and the so called enterprise culture was better managed in those days then these crap efforts to vaguely mimick it). You can't run an economy on public relations and spin, and that's why Carney isn't reacting I think to conditions that suggest he should be. I think Osborne knows it too, and is already getting his excuse in early

The other thing we've done of course is hand over huge tracts of public service provision to the private sector (they can't win contracts themselves internationally so they're being handed massive subsidies). No where is this more apparent (or scandalous as it happens) then in the mushrooming of school academies. Expect this one to run as some horrific stories of financial mismanagement and abuse are starting to emerge. The FEC have definitely been behind the curve on this one, but this is an emerging scandal that will make the chief executives of local authorities so popular circa 2010 look like chicken feed. Mind you, transferring the staff into a mixture of private academies and trusts does have the affect of cosmetically allowing you to say you've rebalanced the economy - except that you haven't!

[Warbler]

I also wonder if perhaps the EU has had enough of the UK (you can only threaten to leave so many times) and have perhaps decided to try and push them through the door

Merkel seems to be telling Cameron to feck off now.

I can imagine the Daily Mails headline - 'Germans say benefits cheats are more important than UK'

Never have made my mind up about Europe. For all its imperfections, and corrupt largesse, it odes provide us with something of a layer of protection against our own government who seem to think it's their duty to compete against the likes of Bangladesh on price and probably won't rest satisfied until they've reintroduced work houses, chimney sweeps, and child labour

I also feel that having been comprehensively out bluffed by Alex Salmond, that Cameron somehow seems to be labouring under the impression that he can try the same tactics and bluff the Germans. All he's going to do is create a period of massive uncertainty and finally end up making a terrific arse of himself

[clivex]

You are making a lot of assumptions and using very selective examples to somehow prove the growth isnt what it is. The figures can be revised but hardly my much. Again there has to be be absolute credibility for the markets.

Cameron has played the migrant issue very poorly. He comes across as if hes sounding off without having the facts to hand. Even the EU surcharge looked like a joke once it emerged that the treasury knew about it for a week.

[Maruco]

Europe and Merkel need the UK more than we need them. That said there are definitely major benefits to staying in under our own terms which we've largely managed to negotiate over a long period. I suspect that nothing will change despite the posturing.

[montyracing2]

Just reading this thread and just to repeat a note I put up on another, the EU official stated that the UK surcharge was mainly down to charity and 'not-for-profit' economic activity and not for prostition or drugs.

So, trying not to sound churlish, how much of my 20 quid 'Children in Need' donation is going to be clawed back by the EU at some future date?

(In that vein, I have cancelled my wildlife subscriptions so that on hearing the news about last panda, tiger, polar bear or leopard I can legitimately lay blame!)

MR2

[montyracing2]

Sorry - on those bloody Germans. My Grandad told me they're never upto any good.

[montyracing2]

Oh, I am fuming over this surcharge!

One last thing and the obvious question ..... HOW IN THESE TIMES OF AUSTERITY CAN THE CHANCELLOR SUDDENLY FIND £850 MILLION?

F*** em - lets get out of the EU NOW, let the Russian eviscerate Germany and its crony states.

MR2