By Hinoki
Just a day after a typical Telegraph puff-piece on George Osbourne admitted
“If next week’s GDP figures confirm that the UK has gone back into recession, Keynesians and their Labour supporters will claim full vindication”, the same rag lets slip Petrol Panic… may have kept UK out of Recession.
This was flagged up last month when over at Liberal Conspiracy Sunny Hundal asked:
So could the government prevent a recession in such a way? I suppose that will require finding out how much extra money people have spent in panic-buying, and determining whether it will be significant enough to make a significant difference.
Drawing on diverse resources, he went on to conclude probably not.
Yet now the Tele and ONS are claiming that it woz the panic wot might well have swung it.
Cognitive dissonance tends to mitigate against the belief that the government would actually manufacture a crisis to keep the country out of the red.
On the other hand, the PM is a former top-flight PR man who came to power on “read my lips, no more top down reforms of the NHS” and his deputy with a pledge on student fees which he promptly declined to honour.
It’s still hard to believe they would actually precipitate a crisis to keep their economic policy afloat, but if they would say anything to get power in the first place, what wouldn’t they say to keep it?
