UK economy at 60-year low… or is it?
I was reading a Guardian interview with Alistair Darling, the UK chancellor of the exchequer (the dude that holds the public purse-strings in Britain) today. It’s a gloomy read, talking about a downturn in the British economy that’ll be the worst in sixty years and be more profound and long-lasting than people had expected, according to Darling.
Normally, economies going south are compared to what happened in the thirties or late eighties/nineties, so I was curious to see Darling talk about the forties, or 1948 to be exact. I didn’t know that the bottom fell out of the UK economy then, so I did a bit of googling… and found Britain in Transition by Alfred F Havighurst.
1947 seems to have been a year of ballooning deficits, but Havighurst quotes The Economist, which in 1948 wrote:
“1948 will stand as an example of what can be achieved by economic planning which is based on clarity of thought and backed by political courage.”
According to the Economist, 1948 was the year when the UK economy floored the accelerator and took off. Curious stuff. Maybe Darling meant some earlier or later era, but he’s certainly correct that British voters are left “pissed off” by the present miserable economic climate and Labour not really offering any way out of it.
August 31st, 2008 at 2:00 pm
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