The UK economy is "turning a corner", Chancellor George Osborne has said in a speech in London.

Mr Osborne cited "tentative signs of a balanced, broad based and sustainable recovery", but stressed it was still the "early stages" and "plenty of risks" remained.

Mr Osborne said that recent months - which have seen more upbeat reports on the economy - had "decisively ended" questions about his economic policy.

woo the sacrifice of 95% of the people in this country has given him and his mates a bit of a boost so they can buy the extra yacht they absolutely must have for this season darling.

our lot will never ever improve with this bunch of tory toffs in charge, they don't care about us and they never will, all that's important is placating corporations enough to get those juicy board positions.

That'll be why the small market town where I live, population aprox 3000, has just oppened its second food bank collection point.

We've never had it so bad, and that idiot Osborne's main aim is to tell us the Earth is flat.

And in the meantime the net debt of £700m he inherited in 2010 is projected to double to £1.4 trillion by 2015. Once the interest on this pile of debt starts going up, the UK will find itself bankrupt.

Osbourne's austerity has been a complete disaster.

Bosses are shaking the country down for more than ever and telling the rest of us to accept zero hours, higher prices, wage freezes...
Give us break George, we are not all mugs.

Wages dropped, living standards dropped, zero-hour contracts the norm, NHS in dire straights, Police only investigating 40% of crimes, national debt actually higher, taxes increased for the poorest along with tax-avoidance by the richest, cost of food & utility bills ever-increasing way above inflation.

I don't think that you actually believe it yourself Gideon.

UK economic output rose by 0.8% between July and September, official GDP figures show.

The Office for National Statistics said there had been a "fairly strong" performance across all sectors.

The data builds on a 0.7% GDP rise in the April-June period and is the best quarterly performance since 2010.

UK debt woe ‘made worse by Mark Carney’

FORMER Bank of England economist Danny Gabay is this week expected to accuse governor Mark Carney of fuelling Britain’s addiction to debt and warn that efforts to lift the economy could do more harm than good.

Gabay, who will address an audience at the David Hume Institute in Edinburgh, will say UK government stimulus measures aimed at easing the flow of credit could push up house prices by almost 20 per cent within the next two to three years, raising the prospects of another property crash when the taps are turned off.

Speaking to Scotland on Sunday ahead of the address, he said: “If you’ve ever tried to give up smoking, it’s painful, tedious and puts you in a bad mood. The simplest thing you can do to stop the cravings is have another fag. That’s what we’ve done – we’ve given up the rebalancing and we’re back on the fags, and we’re borrowing to pay for them.”

According to financial charity Credit Action, average household debt, including mortgages, grew to £54,110 in July, from £54,014 the previous month, and there are growing fears that the housing market recovery, driven by the Help to Buy scheme, could fuel further rises in borrowing. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors last week urged the Bank of England to impose limits on the amounts banks were able to lend to prevent property prices rising more than 5 per cent a year.

Gabay’s speech on Wednesday will come on the same day as minutes from the central bank’s latest monetary policy committee meeting are published. GDP growth is expected to have accelerated to 1 per cent in the third quarter, from 0.7 per cent in the previous three months, and while Gabay said he agreed with George ­Osborne’s assertion that the UK economy has “turned a ­corner”, he doubted whether the recovery is sustainable.

He said initiatives such as the Funding for Lending Scheme, which aims to encourage banks to make more credit available to households and businesses, has made the debt problem worse, whereas US authorities have used measures such as QE to shore up banks’ balance sheets instead. The US Treasury’s troubled ­asset relief programme (Tarp), launched in 2008 to buy toxic loans from banks, faced bitter opposition across the political spectrum but had recovered $272.7bn by the end of August, a profit of almost $28bn on the $245bn originally invested.

Carney has pledged to keep rates on hold at 0.5 per cent until unemployment falls to 7 per cent – which is expected to take at least three years – unless there is a risk of inflation running out of control.

The Bank governor told the treasury select committee on Thursday that he has “tremendous sympathy” for savers whose nest eggs are being eroded by inflation, which stood at 2.8 per cent in July, but his job was to make sure the economy “reaches a form of sustained velocity”.

But Gabay, a former government economic adviser and JP Morgan economist, who is now a director of economic consultancy Fathom, described the policy as “financial repression” of hard-pressed savers at the expense of those willing to borrow more. “You’re being subsidised to take on more debt and heavily penalised for trying to save,” he said.

“These short-term fixes on the demand side might flatter growth and might well help to win an election, but they won’t do anything to solve the long-term problems – if anything they’ll exacerbate them.”

money saved in the benefits system will be used to fund UK infrastructure.

The UK is now £54,921,167,123 (dollar value $91,284,471,875) further in debt than it was six months ago. That’s fifty-four billion, nine-hundred and twenty-one million, one-hundred and sixty-seven thousand, one-hundred and twenty-three.

In April, 2013, George Osborne claimed that...

www.cnplus.co.uk/news/sectors/infrastruc...article#.Uwt49uPlaa8

But after five years of savage cuts, the British government is still £10,000,000,000 (dollar value approx $16,500,000,000) in the red per month.

Oh, and this doesn’t include...



Which amount to several trillion, plus there are other unfunded liabilities as well.

Britain has racked up its fifth largest budget deficit on record despite years of austerity, official figures will show tomorrow.

The Office for National Statistics is expected to report that the Government borrowed around £110billion in 2013-14 as spending outstripped tax revenues.

But the deficit was still more than £100billion for only the fifth time in history.

The national debt also looks set to have topped £1.25trillion – nearly 75 per cent of national income and £50,000 per household.

It's all just insane numbers, isn't it. A completely hopeless situation.

Maybe if we stand in the street with placards...nah, forget it!

It's all just insane numbers, isn't it. A completely hopeless situation.

Maybe if we stand in the street with placards...nah, forget it!

Gilly wrote:
Bit snide Gilly, never mind.

It's all just insane numbers, isn't it. A completely hopeless situation.

Maybe if we stand in the street with placards...nah, forget it!