Despite all the doom-mongering – the economy looks like it’s on the mend
UK on the up
IT may be best to whisper it — but the economy looks like it’s on the mend.
All the doom-mongering, all those dismally negative UK forecasts gleefully trumpeted by Labour’s opportunists as cast-iron fact, are coming to nothing.
Yes, food bills are still eye-watering and the prospect of £2,000-a-year council tax bills is hard to swallow.
Meanwhile inflation ticked back up last month, meaning interest rates had to rise again yesterday in more bad news for borrowers. But there is every indication both have now peaked.
The Bank of England admits that yet again it was wrong to be so gloomy and to predict a downturn.
It now expects the economy to grow instead in the first half of this year.
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It is confident inflation will fall “rapidly” by summer. It insists our robust banking system will easily withstand the troubles in the US and Switzerland.
Meanwhile London has kept its place as Europe’s No1 financial hub, despite all the guff about it losing business and high-fliers to Paris or Frankfurt.
The Chancellor’s extension of the energy bills bailout should ease pressure on our wallets. The Windsor Framework finally sorting Brexit should give investors more confidence too.
We doubt the BBC and other Tory-hating media will credit Rishi Sunak.
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But his sober judgement is behind the dramatic turnabout since the Truss fiasco.
Boats bilge
THE prime minister of Albania is furious.
It’s outrageous, he says, that his citizens are criticised despite being easily the most dominant nationality landing here illegally on small boats last year.
And despite many doing so to join vicious Albanian drug gangs.
BBC Radio 4 (who else?) gave PM Edi Rama an unchallenged platform yesterday to fillet the Tories and heap praise on Tony Blair’s “New Labour”, which he considers the perfect government and the model for his own.
It is a wonder we couldn’t hear the presenters cheering.
But in 2022 alone up to two per cent of Albania’s entire adult male population came to Britain illegally.
Why, we wonder, do they risk their lives to leave Mr Rama’s safe, socialist paradise?
Electric shock
IT is alarming, if unsurprising, to learn that a nationwide power cut would cause mayhem for which we are woefully unready.
Such outages were bad enough in the 1970s, let alone our connected era.
But there’s a lesson here too for eco warriors still trotting out their lazy delusion that renewables such as wind and solar can alone power Britain.
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Without gas, then a new fleet of nuclear plants, the predicted medieval hardships and shortages caused by power cuts won’t be a scary fantasy.
They will be a regular reality.