Mild-mannered chancellor Alistair Darling is rarely given to violence (as far as we know) but, in his private moments, must wish he could exact his own version of the Glencoe Massacre on the Office of National Statistics.
The ONS has just pronounced that the UK emerged from recession in the last quarter of 2009 with a miserable 0.1 per cent growth, the same for both the manufacturing and service sectors. Furthermore it seems to attribute much of this to the car scrappage scheme, which is about to expire.
Once again the ONS has confounded the vast majority of City analysts and others, many of whom still feel that the UK began to emerge from recession last summer, let alone in the last quarter (when the ONS reported that output fell by 0.4 per cent, later revised to 0.2 per cent).
According to the ONS’s mouthpiece Joe Grice the main lag on the economy in the last quarter came from finance and business services, although just about everyone you talk to would say that these were better in the last quarter of last year than the equivalent period of 2008, when Lehman Brothers fell off a cliff and the world, briefly, stopped.
The ONS only ‘measures’ 40 per cent of the economy and usually revises its figures (it produces them far more rapidly than the equivalent bodies in other countries).
If these figures are revised up substantially or contradicted by other economic indicators Darling and his boss Gordon Brown will be after Mr Grice and his chums with a very sharp Scottish implement.