Recession Only Just 'Ends' With Whimper

Recession has run for cover with a piddling 0.1 percent growth. After 18 months slogging and jogging, the struggling Supreme Leader had been spinning and pinning hopes on recovery as part of the cunning election ploy. The depression may be 'officially' over for Borrowing Brown and everything hunky-dory in La-La-Land but limping out of long recession leaves a whopping bill.

Call that a recovery? Saint Vince doesn't think so nor does the Orange Party nor the public. But Daft Darling does. How can anyone in their right mind take any shred of comfort from today's shaky 'recession over' figures for the longest recession on record?

The only sure sign of the end of recession is when the final bill lands on the No 11 Downing Street doormat, swiftly passed on to taxpayers for generations to come.

And what a bill. The Bank's printed 200 billion spanking new notes and the government's borrowed £178 billion to dig the country of the mess of it's own making. Printing money brings with it the bogeyman of inflation. Borrowing billions brings down the wrath of the international moneymen.

No doubt 'recession ends' groundhog day has been fixed on the pre-election grid as part of another 'good news week' and the BBC will do its bit with cute graphics and skewed economic waffle.

Today's ONS report may well show recession 'officially' ended in the last three months of 2009 as Beleaguered Brown tries to rest on his laurels but no one gives a monkeys.

All that matters is the growth in GDP - coming in at a weedy but round 0.1 per cent. Whatever happened to 0.096?

The Orange Party's eyes will be on the next set of figures due out on April 23. So what happens if growth figures for the first quarter of 2010 show the country slipping back into recession. A quick glance at the ONS graph and it's tottering on the brink, looking decidedly delicate.

And that could put the cat among the pigeons of the election date strategists as a fag-end government put its money on a last roll of the 'recovery' dice, playing the mythical false hope game.

Honest Osborne, setting out his stall on how to stop the country going bust again, put it well: "Like an exhausted runner at the very back of a marathon race, Britain ... should finally stagger across the line that marks the end of the Great Recession.”

Every other major economy started recovering months ago. As Wat Tyler over at burningourmoney has already pointed out: "It's better that we're no longer heading down, but apart from that, there won't be much to shout about."

"We will still have lost around 6% of our GDP since the peak, and we'll be 10% below where Clown Brown predicted we'd be by now."

Red-faced economists and the media were left with egg on their faces in October as 'surprise' figures showed the recession depression hadn't ended. It was the worst ever.

Headlines and copy were hastily changed as a duped media had fallen over itself, buying into false hope and optimism, until the government statistics office (ONS) released the grim news. Today's 'growth' has been dubbed "weaker than expected" - but who'd built up the expectation?

Shame-faced Brown's deceitful promise that the UK “would lead the world out of recession” has come back to haunt him. We were one of the first in and last out. Now no one trusts New Labour's election pledges.

Voters don't believe 'good news' that the economy has turned a corner. Borrowing is still hitting record highs, inflation is lurking round the corner. A straw poll for Channel 4 News showed only 20 percent of people thought the government was responsible for the economy’s recovery.

The public has seen through the spin of the green-shoots of recovery. What do they want - debt reduction. When do they want it - now.

Borrowing Brown's flawed economics have a lot to answer for. New Labour set off on a spending spree with gay abandon in the naïve belief that borrowed cash could prop up the false feel good factor. Now the country is paying the price.

Banks are still sailing off into Galbraith's 'wild blue yonder' after trousering taxpayer's cash in the trillion pound bank bail-out con. The mountain of national debt keeps piling up. A dire economy is disappearing down a black hole.

In the real world of a real fragile economy with real people, the Deluded One has escaped by the skin of his teeth. Now he's set to take the country down a rocky road to rack and ruin and into the election with only a pathetic and shaky 0.1 percent growth for a comfort blanket.

Top picture: Scarfe, Sunday Times