Is just a carbon copy of Blair-Brown's isn't it?
Since I started taking a closer interest in these things, i.e. a year or two before I started 'blogging, it must have been clear that the entire 'growth' in the economy since the late 1990s was fueled by two things:
1. A house price/credit bubble incl mortgage equity withdrawal.
2. Government deficit spending.
This is not a sustainable model, of course, so the relative shares of these two in contributing to nominal growth shifted from the fomer to the latter. Blair-Brown managed to keep it going for ten years until the wheels came off in 2007 (Northern Rock) although many consider the official end to be in 2008 (Lehmann Brothers).
Whatever we slagged the Blair-Brown government off for applies in spades to the current lot.
They realize that household borrowing to fund land speculation had reached an upper limit of about £1,200 billion (this total has hardly changed for the last five years) so they are resorting to ever more desperate measures (Help To Sell, interest rate subsidies, inflation, general mood music etc) to squeeeze out the last few drops.
Their cunning plan is only working in London and the South East, in the rest of the country, house prices have been pretty much flat for a decade, if you adjust for inflation.
So they then turn to Blair-Brown's secret weapon #2, government deficit spending. It's a good excuse to nick loads of money for themselves and their kleptocrat chums, but they are running a deficit of at least 7% of GDP and have been doing for four years (or about six years if gloss over the personnel reshuffle at the top of the UK government four years ago).
And all this is only producing nominal growth of 2% a year or something, which is probably not real growth at all. Whatever happened to the lefties' favorite weapon, the multiplier effect? If there were such a thing (there isn't) then surely that 7% deficit would be producing at least 8% growth?
Some recovery, huh?
