The Wardman Wire

So the nice decade is over and it’s getting nasty. What is this nastiness? inflation up to nearly 4% and growth down to just 1%. After this, growth will recover and inflation will slow again.

Hang on a minute, missus…

Inflation up to 4%? Anyone born before 1975 has been through whole decades when inflation was never below that figure, and was frequently more than double. Contrast with the Zimbabwean inflation rate of 165,000% , and maybe we doth protest too much.

Annual growth down to 1% this year, before recovering. So the UK economy will only be worth £318,000,000,000 by December 31st instead of £321,000,000,000. Compared to £308,390,243,902.23p at the start of 2007. Give or take a few quid for the black market and several hundred thousand Bulgarian fruit pickers.

AM I MISSING SOMETHING?

I’m no economist (though I did get a ‘B’ at A level), but as the stock market trundles slowly upwards, I wonder about Wee Willie Winkie. Wee Willie (or Wii Willie, in his latest incarnation), as you’ll recall, wanders the streets checking if kids are in bed by 8.00, or whether they’re up watching Saw 2 on DVD whilst Dad’s down the pub and Mum is on Ebay. Our eldest was sufficiently frightened by this idea that if we were ever out after 8pm she insisted we ring WWW up on the mobile to explain that she had a good reason for not being in bed. For wee Willie (stop sniggering at the back), read recession: a bogeyman we use to scare our children.

Here is the news: we’re rich, we’re going to stay rich, we just won’t get richer quite as fast as we did last year. Stuff will get more expensive, but not much more: 1 year in a caravan instead of the Canaries and you’ll save more than enough to muddle through.

Twas Grim Up North

Only old people say ‘I remember when’: here’s my membership fee. 1980’s Sheffield saw the furnaces go out across the steel making East side of the city. As a spotty teenager on the other side of town I was dimly aware of what was going on, but that was a recession. Unemployment more than trebling to 3 million, entire communities devastated, inflation topping 20%, companies going bust left right and centre. Ever wondered what was there before that bright shiny new shopping centre (Sheffield) football stadium (Manchester), office complex (London)? Urban wasteland, that’s what.

Thursdays Jeremy Vine show had a series of contributors asking whether the coming ‘recession’ was a good thing. Online commenters seem unanimous in saying ‘yes’. Recession will reduce our carbon footprint, make houses affordable, teach us the real value of things, and strip us of the soul-destroying materialism which robs us of real contentment and happiness.

Recession? Bring It On

Here’s a few things I wouldn’t mind seeing the back of:

1 - Mortgage Weddings

: whilst the plain old church still costs less than £400, there’s a hotel somewhere which will cost you 20 times that, and do individually wrapped gifts for all the guests (huh? I thought we gave them presents?). When the average wedding costs £25,000, more than double the figure 10 years ago, there’s clearly a few leeches which need to be pulled off those bright-eyed engaged couples. How we laughed when the desperate Apprentices failed to sell any wedding cakes to win Alan Sugars approval. But where they fail there is a queue of photographers, wedding organisers, stag venues, dressmakers, hire firms, and ‘wedding accessory’ marketers waiting to latch on and suck blood. Debt is one of the biggest marriage killers at large, so if a recession brings us a bonfire of the nuptial vanities that can only be a good thing.

2 - Salaries of Shame

: maybe it’s because we’re collectively rolling in it that we’re prepared to wink at footballers on £6m a year. That’s £10 per minute, or to put it another way, Michael Ballack could pay someone a fiver to pick his nose and still make a profit. Michael Owen wakes up every morning after a good nights sleep knowing that since he closed his eyes he’s earned enough to buy a small car. Or pay off 1/5 of his wedding debt. This all pales into nothingness beside city bonuses, which last year totalled more than the income of the entire 77m population of Ethiopia. Do they know it’s Christmas? Shameless should be set in the Square Mile, not a council estate. If a recession opens our eyes to the obscenity of this kind of economics, bring it on. These are not the values of a civilised society.

3 - Wasted Talent

: one of the indulgences of the ‘nice’ decade has been the boom in vanity surgery. Men and women trained for years in medical and surgical skills put potentially life-saving talents, training and skill to use by…. giving breast implants to teenagers and trout pouts to ‘celebrities’. This is one market which is crying out for a recession; mass lay-offs will give the surgically trained a chance to recover their vocation: for healing and saving lives. Advocates of the free market: watch Michael Jackson and weep. If the free market places a higher financial value on a pop singers face than the lives of a hundred children then the argument is over. Burn your Friedman books and take the Adam Smith Institute off your favourites list, free market capitalism is dead, suffocated by its own surgically enhanced cleavage.

Unfortunately, it may take more than a mild economic slowdown to deliver us from this legion of demons. But whatever’s coming, it’s got to be nicer than this.

David Keen blogs at St. Aidan to Abbey Manor