Prime Minister Andy Burnham and his Chancellor John Healey are not having a bad start. Sure, there’s trouble ahead: the Budget is going to be difficult, and Healey is going to have to find a way of making sure all the cheques his boss keeps writing can actually be cashed. But for now, the blitz of 6 a.m. announcements on the cost of living – no matter how trivial they are – appear to have worked and Burnham is experiencing a polling bounce.
Britain’s economy has a terrible habit of performing relatively well in the first half of the year before slumping to a halt
That good news continued this morning in the form of figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which show that the economy grew by 0.4 per cent in the second quarter of the year – having grown 0.6 per cent in the first three months. Crucially for us, that growth works out at 0.4 per cent on a per-head basis too and puts the annualised growth rate at 2 per cent. Crucially for Healey, it means the economy has slightly outperformed the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) spring forecast, giving him a little bit of extra room to fund discounted Scampi Fries in every postcode or whatever Burnham’s latest cost-of-living measure is.
