WE can argue and re-argue over the causes, consequences and repercussions of the current economic crisis until the cows come home. However, it would help if that is left until the future and for the present it would be better to concentrate upon remedies to get the local, national and international economies back on track.

With that in mind I recently attended a question-time in Minchinhampton. As readers will imagine I am fully involved with all manner of local companies that are currently facing difficulties as I believe the MP has a key role to play in giving advice and taking forward representations on their behalf to get help from government and where necessary to get policies changed.

What annoys me more than anything against this background is the obsession with poor explanation of the myriad of reports on what has been happening with the economy. The fact is that it is very difficult to get anyone to read reports any more despite them being much more widely available on the net. Rather we have to rely upon the intermediation of business correspondents and political journalists to pretend that they are giving us an appreciation of what is contained within. We might now sloganise as ‘Prestonitis’ named after Robert Peston the BBC’s business editor who prides himself on scoops, instant reaction and pre-empting big economic stories. It was Peston of course who broke the Northern Rock story. He has attracted praise and criticism in equal measure for his sensationalisation of reporting both in terms of style and substance.

There were two examples of this last week which occurred on the same day. First, the International Monetary Fund released its report of the recent G20 meeting. In it there was one line about the UK possibly facing the deepest and possible longest recession. Now this was against the fact that other members of the EU are currently facing many more problems in the steepness of their decline let alone the well known problems in the US and Japan. However none of this was reported – instead the financial experts fixated on the UK’s situation and gave vent to a totally distorted picture of the report.

Likewise in the National Audit Office’s report on the takeover by the government of the afore-mentioned Northern Rock there was limited criticism of two aspects of the Government’s performance – the fact that the regulatory authorities did not run a full-scale exercise on how to deal with a bank failing and secondly that some of the riskier mortgages were still being issued even after the government’s intervention. What was missed was that the NAO was largely supportive of what the Government did and how it did it. To finish with I thought I would furnish one statistic. It is absolutely true that the UK now has the highest borrowing as a percentage of the G7 (world’s richest) countries Gross Domestic Product. What is not added to this is the equally important statistic that the UK has the lowest government debt as a percentage of GDP, 61.0 per cent here compared to 81.2 per cent in the US, 109.4 per cent in Italy and 217.0 per cent in Japan. The UK economy has underlying strengths and the Government has much more room for manoeuvre here though you would not think so to read all the distorted coverage.

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