Last week Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, warned that inflation was seeping back. The unemployment rate is now 5.3%, up over 1/2% on the year. The number of unemployed has increased by 199,000 this year, to reach 1.61 million, vacancies are down and redundancies are up. This all despite paying teenagers to go to school and bloating the public sector by half-a-million employees or so since 1997. Even the cheating revised Golden Rule looks in danger.
With Labour now at polling levels not seen since Michael Foot and him having to pretend to support England in the World Cup, the future looks increasingly bleak for Brown.