Journalists in the Westminster bubble like to point out on Big Speech Days like this that the public couldn’t care a jot about whether Ed Miliband is having a Clause IV moment. They’re right, but that doesn’t stop everyone in the bubble getting rather overexcited about a speech in a sweaty room off Fleet Street as they did today. Miliband might be wiping his brow with relief this afternoon given his unions speech has gone down rather well with a surprising range of grandees, but he’ll know only too well that the more awkward news has nothing to do with Len McCluskey. The International Monetary Fund announced this afternoon that, as expected, it was raising the UK’s 2013 growth forecast from 0.7 per cent to 0.9 per cent.
This isn’t a stunning result, of course, partly because it was only in April that the IMF cut its forecast from 1 per cent to 0.7 per cent. But it does remind the Opposition that attacking the government will get a lot harder if the current trajectory of fewer cock-ups and more green shoots continues. That the economy is becoming more difficult to spin from a Labour point of view was underlined by Ed Balls’ response:
‘These forecasts confirm that, after three years of flailing, the IMF believes Britain’s economic recovery will remain weak. While this year’s figure has been revised up, it is disappointing that this is still a lower forecast than the IMF was making at the start of this year.’
He added that ‘If George Osborne refuses to act to boost the economy this year and next year then Labour will face a difficult situation in 2015. We will have an iron discipline on spending and we will need to turn the economy round so we can boost living standards and get the deficit down in a fairer way.’
It is much easier to be in Opposition when the government is going through a hard time than it is when the economy is slowly getting better, no matter how gentle that recovery.
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