Grand follies

The economy’s not looking terribly good, is it? Manufacturing has sunk to a three year low, rather worse than anyone expected — and the Eurozone crisis is only partly to blame. I note that our manufacturing sector now constitutes just ten per cent of the economy. One reason for this is that it has been starved of investment and the quantitative easing, as these monkeys call it, which will now be sprayed lightly in its general direction will do little to affect the overall trend, which is ever downwards.

It seemed unlikely to me that we would ever see a clearer and more self-evident example of a political class being wrong than with the utter collapse of the Eurozone. But the appetite for &”austerity” among our leaders could run it close as a fantastically bad decision, which we knew was fantastically bad right from the start.