UK economy: slowdown or meltdown?

The UK economy has been an 'accident waiting to happen' for some time now...

The third-quarter growth figures due out this Friday will give a clearer picture of exactly how much trouble UK plc is now in. But it already looks as if all the "wheels are coming off Gordon Brown's bus" at once, said Roger Bootle in The Sunday Telegraph. Is the chancellor's boast that we've seen "the end of boom and bust" true? "Pull the other one."

First up, the world's leading economic thinktank, Paris-based OECD, produced a survey of the British economy. And while it praises the UK for the exemplary economic stability of the last decade, it says that Britain's prosperity now only ranks mid-table for advanced developed countries - and it slashed its forecast on UK economic growth, raising the spectre of massive tax rises, or spending cuts to the tune of £13bn. The OECD now thinks UK GDP growth will come in at just 1.7% (revised down from 2.4%). The new figure is approximately half Gordon Brown's official Budget forecast (3%-3.5%) and substantially below his recently revised estimates of a shade under 2.5%.

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