There's Your Double Dip.

The UK economic growth figures for the first quarter of 2012 have just been released. They show that in January, February and March the UK economy shrank by 0.2%. Added to the 0.3% shrinkage in the final quarter of 2011 this means the British economy is technically back in recession - the first double-dip recession since the 1970's apparently.

Later today (25/4/12) the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Head Finance Minister), George Osborne is going to give a statement to the House of Commons in order to explain himself. The opposition Labour Party will leap on an element of the figures that show a shrinking in the construction industry brought about by cuts to government spending. This of course will re-ignite the Europe-wide debate over austerity. However I would much rather hear from the Labour Party's former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and former Chancellor Alistair Darling. After all it is their "Save the banks. Save the world!" nonsense that has got us into this situation.

Back in 2008 the credit crunch hit when some banks that had made bad investments were brought to the brink of collapse. Rather then simply letting these banks collapse Brown and Darling somehow talked national governments across the world into borrowing heavily in order to bail the banks out. Now in 2012 we're in the situation where the national governments that borrowed heavily to invest in the bad banks are being brought to the brink of collapse. So in short if we'd just let the bad banks collapse in 2008 this would all be over by now but thanks to Brown and Darling it looks like we're going to stretching it out until 2015 at the earliest.

Anyway at around 09:35 on 25/4/12 I'm awake, my home Internet connection is working, Rupert Murdoch is on the stand at the Leveson Inquiry and it's raining heavily. So it might just be easier for me to go back to bed. I won't though, I'll have breakfast, go to the gym and generally try to muddle through.