As any A-level economics teacher will tell you, the key to explaining the concept of falling inflation is that while prices are still rising, they are doing so at a slower rate.
There is a similar phenomenon at play with today’s GDP figures. The Office for National Statistics has found that the UK narrowly avoided a recession at the end of last year. But with the Bank of England forecasting a contraction in 2023, one could say we are still getting poorer, but at a slower rate.
I don’t wish to be a curmudgeon. Not being in recession is better than the alternative. Except, look around at Britain’s peer nations and you’ll see that the alternative to the economic flatlining we’re experiencing is not contraction, but growth.
There are two G20 economies still below their pre-Covid output levels. The first is Russia, the second is Britain. Everyone else has at least recovered. The US economy is 5 per cent larger than it was before the pandemic. Now, it may not be fair to compare ourselves with Americans, but why should we be poorer than the Germans, French, Australians and Canadians, countries that Britons still (wrongly) consider our equals?
What is most damning about Britain’s economy is not one set of GDP figures, but where we are headed. The UK is not set to return to pre-Covid levels until 2026. Even if the combined brains of the Bank of England and International Monetary Fund are wrong, and we avoid a recession this year, the British economy is still going absolutely nowhere.
It’s risky to place too much importance on one data point, but the decision by AstraZeneca to build a new site in Dublin rather than north-west England is instructive. Sir Pascal Soriot, chief executive of the pharmaceutical giant, headquartered in Cambridge, said he wanted to build the new £320m site in Cheshire, but that “discouraging” taxes meant he chose Ireland. “You need an environment that gives you good returns and incentive to invest,” he stressed.
Taxes no doubt played an important part, but Sir Pascal also said that Britain needed regulatory experts and access to green energy. For context, the UK has left the European Medicines Agency (formerly located in London) and last year just two onshore wind turbines (not farms, turbines) were installed in England due to planning restrictions.
Life sciences is a sector where the UK has been a world leader, and there is no good reason why we should not continue to be so. But the warning signs are flashing red. Dame Kate Bingham, the former Vaccines Taskforce chair, warned in the Financial Times last month that Britain is losing its chance to be a life sciences superpower and that despite the “astonishing successes of our life sciences companies, the sector is still the object of suspicion and incomprehension within parts of government.”
We don’t need a domestic steel sector, according to the Business Secretary. We’re missing out on hyper-mobile life science investments. And we’re still in the early stages of getting to grips with our exit from the largest free trading bloc in the world. It is not entirely clear where the government expects growth to come from in the 2020s.
Elsewhere in the paper, a bondage-obsessed Metropolitan Police officer tied up his female housemate with duct tape during “ten minutes of terror” in a bid to satisfy his sexual urges, a court heard. When she threatened to report him, Sam Grigg told her: “Who are you going to tell? I’m the police”.
In the comment pages, Emily Sheffield warns it’s decision time for Europe — we must back President Zelensky to the hilt. She also has a thing or two to say about Madonna’s face and Leonardo DiCaprio’s dating choices.
Meanwhile, what does it mean if the median Twitter user posts a couple of times a month and a typical Coca-Cola consumer buys it once a year? Basically, I try to prove that as soon as you’re ‘into’ something, you’re statistically a bit weird.
And finally, what to get up to in the capital this weekend.
Have a good one.
