BBC Lifts Brown's Recession Spirits

The BBC is doing its bit to lift Brown's recession depression, kicking off with a toadying Today interview by one of New Labour's luvvies. 

At the stoke of midnight, Brown's downturn turned into a recession pumpkin, so the deluded prime minister gave a party political broadcast, aided and abetted by the Beeb's Evan Davis.

The recession is finally official as GDP fell by 1.5% in the last three months of 2008 after a 0.6% drop in the previous quarter. The biggest quarter-on-quarter decline since 1980.

A time for tough questioning one would have thought. Instead, with no signs of John Humphreys, Brown and the BBC's former economics editor cuddled up for a cosy early morning chat, leaving many to choke on their cornflakes.  

In a well-staged interview, Davis had the gall to say: "I don't want to blame you for these problems ... I am not going to blame you..."

And, reading from his Downing Street briefing paper, Davis continued : "A lot of people credited you with the recovery plan - I think that needs to be recognised - around the world..."

The recession figures were much worse than forecast. Analysts had been expecting a 1.2% decline in GDP which would be the worst performance since the third quarter of 1990 but the fall in GDP was much steeper.

Mistakes? Did Brown have a few? Well if he did they were too few to mention - he blamed it all on the banks:

"But what we didn't see - and nobody saw - was the possibility of complete market failure, that markets seized up across the world".

So that's it then. Blame it on the banks, blame it on global warming, blame it on everything and everybody except the fact that Brown has presided over the UK economy for the last twelve years. One would have thought he could have seen it coming? 

Any growth and the government gets the credit. Recession? That's down to everybody else. Boom and bust? That dear, mere morals was a different sort of boom and bust.

In a week dominated by bad economic news with ministers scrabbling around vainly searching for elusive green shoots, yesterday the Orange Party warned that with a bit of financial fairy dust, the UK has only narrowly avoided the technical recession definition. Now  they cannot continue to bury their heads in the sand.

In Downing Street it's spun as confidence boosting. In the real world it's called vote boosting and for the BBC that should mean political balance. 

But in all the doom and gloom there is some good news. The BBC has been forced to finally removed its cute little downturn logo and replace it with a UK recession (above).