So much detail, so little clarity. George Osborne, the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer, did on Tuesday what his predecessors have been doing for centuries. He drowned the nation in a blizzard of pernickety policy measures to cut here, trim there, and tweak somewhere else. The aim of his autumn statement was to get the UK economy back to growth again. But the whole is so much less than the sum of its parts that it is unlikely to work. The risk for the UK is that an already long recession turns into a depression.
Real economic output remains about 4 per cent below its peak before the global financial crisis. It is unlikely to move above it until at least 2015. It is about time the scales fell from the government’s eyes about the dire implications of that scenario. Despite its comparatively better position in certain areas relative to its eurozone counterparts – notably in public debt and borrowing costs – the UK’s fiscal position is deteriorating alarmingly.
Mr Osborne predicted in March that the government’s fiscal position would be modestly in surplus in 2014-15. But because growth forecasts have been drastically reduced, the fiscal deficit is actually widening. Real economic growth next year is forecast at 0.7 per cent. That brings the official forecast into line with the gloomy 0.5 per cent assessment of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which also thinks that the fiscal deficit is 7.5 per cent of GDP – the worst in Europe.