Riders on the storm

It is one of the peculiarities of a recession that it cannot officially be acknowledged until, often, it is already history. This week, we learned that the economy shrunk 0.5 per cent in the third quarter of 2008. It will not be until January, however, when two quarters of negative growth have been recorded, that Gordon Brown will finally reach his statistical Stalingrad, and we will officially be in recession.

It is futile for anyone to talk now about ‘avoiding’ recession. We can no more avoid recession than we can avoid the Beijing Olympics, or anything else which started last summer. Yet that hasn’t stopped the Prime Minister this week trying to convince us that he can somehow avoid the statistically inevitable. In doing so, he has destroyed two of the foundation stones upon which his economic policy was built. No more will he try to pay off public debt over the economic cycle: he will borrow in good times and bad.