Best placed?

Yet again I recall the words of assorted Labour ministers that the UK was best placed to weather the recession. Today we learn that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has said that whilst the US economy is expected to grow at an annualised rate of 1.6% in the third quarter and the Eurozone to expand by 0.3%, the UK economy would shrink by 4.7% this year.

Best placed?

It is also worth noting that the forecast for the UK is down from the OECD's earlier forecast of a 4.3% contraction and the 3.5% decline that the UK Treasury has predicted.

It is also worth noting when considering Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling's predictions for future growth in the UK economy, growth required to keep a vague control on DEBT, that the forecast for UK GDP growth in 2009 dropped steadily between April 2008 and July 2009 from +1.7% to -4.7%. That's a 6.4 percentage point drop in the forecast in the last 17 months.

The fact that the OECD expects both the US and the Eurozone to follow Germany, France and Japan out of recession in the third quarter of 2009, but not the UK seems not to interest the BBC. The news appears on a Business News page but is not linked from the main UK news page. Apparently the BBC deem news that, amongst other items,

"A mother whose daughter was strangled by her partner says she thought he was her "Prince Charming" - but now hates him. "

to be more important than the state of the UK economy. The way the BBC continually protect this Labour government from criticism of its economic record disgusts me. It contrasts so starkly with the way they reported every piece of negative news during the John Major government. The BBC's bias is now getting to the point where I don't see how any fair minded person could deny it.