Ther's plenty of it if you want to look, and it isn't limited to this government. The answer you get to whether the economy is growing or shrinking depends on the metric or group of metrics you use as indicators of growth. Most governments will, strangely enough, choose ones that provide the news they want to provide.

A conservative estimate of the national debt is £5 trillion. I'd suggest this debt is unpayable as it is equivalent to over 3 years' GDP. I can't see a time when the whole of the UK would or could elect to work for nothing for that long. The UK private sector is in no position to help given the unprecedented, horrendous levels of corporate and personal debt.

We don't know if anybody would buy our bonds because the biggest buyer of UK bonds is .... the UK treasury. The snake is eating its own tail.

I agree it is unlikely the UK will go bankrupt. But the only remaining option is inflating away the debt which will bankrupt a lot of its citizens instead.

Spot on

But the debt doesn't have to be paid back at all at once and much of it is secured on assets.

There were still plenty of free tickets as all children playing at half time and the cheerleading club all get free tickets,
Its all so they bring a paying parent / parents too or crowd would be lower.

Quite correct,if anybody started a printing press at home printing money you would be jailed. This because it increases inflation, any government highly in debt secretly ls happy with a reasonable amount of inflation as it inflates away some of the debt.
For the last few months all targets for inflation set by the government have not being met. The downside of this tactic is the erosion and values of people's savings. The major weapon to fight inflation is to increase interest rates ,to do that would increase people's mortgages . This will not happen hence we are just postponing real debt repayment for another generation .

The timing and manner of repayment is determined by creditors. Greece, Ireland and Cyprus all provide examples of how uncomfortable this process can be.

OMG - when did SouthStander get so high-brow?

What started out as a point regarding slipping SL attendances has turned into a lesson in social economics.

Gotta love this site.

Still think there looked to be more than 12k last night

I had must admitt I had a chuckle when I saw the thread unfolding .
Just confirms my suspicion that our site has the smartest scribes ol all the sites!!. In the interests of peace and harmony I will not nominate the dumbest sites in the rugby league. Others may care to do so.

Early 80s when I started too?

There was only really bigger crowds when hull came to visit.

I started in the late sixties -early seventies , the big advantage with lessor crowds in the south stand was you could have a few beers in the bar. Then ten minutes before kick off casually walk up and find a good spot.
Ps. Drummers not thought of those days.

I was there and it was bloody cold!!

The problem with the growth statistics coming out of the OBR is that they're based upon the first round of data you have, and there's a problem of inherent optimism bias within that data. That's why the growth figures for every quarter other than Autumn 2012 (Olympics) have been downgraded after their initial release. The likelihood is that the 0.3% growth (which is a truly pitiful amount) will be revised down, to 0.1% or even zero.

In any case, whether the UK is technically growing or not is irrelevant. The way labour have banged on about 'wanting growth' has allowed the Tories to present any growth, however small, as a victory for them. This is false. The UK is hugely less productive than we were in 2007-8, and it's going to take a very long time to close that productivity gap. We have rising unemployed, LT unemployed and NEETS with 'employment' figures that are massaged by taking certain people out of the definition of 'economically active', which effectively consigns them to the scrapheap.

We don't need a little bit of growth, we need a hell of a lot of growth so that we can avoid the social costs of the current economic policies and so we can raise enough revenue to actually pay off the debts the Tories so worry about. The fact is that any attempt to compare the UK to Greece is utterly fatuous. Our national debt is lower than it has been for most of the preceding 300 years, a debt-to-GDP ratio is better than many other countries, and unlike them, we have a good record of paying off our debts in the long run, meaning people will stick with us. It's also no good blaming the banks for not lending, as they're currently in hock to two contradictory demands. Firstly, to recapitalise themselves against failure to a much greater degree as part of Basel II, and second to make lots of medium-risk loans to small businesses. They can't do both.

The current slash & burn policies are throwing thousands of people out of work and increasing the welfare bill, meaning we get less in tax and spend more on the previously productive. That becomes a vicious cycle when the spending of the previously-employed goes away, and businesses have to make job cuts to offset the loss of customers. This creates exactly the kind of contraction & stagnation we've seen, with QE barely managing to keep our head above water by acting as a fairly ineffectual stimulus.

The only way out is to get people back to work, get them spending money and get money moving around the system again. Invest in projects that will be long-term economically beneficial and that will adjust the economic balance of the country. Transport, Social Housing, Communications, Energy and Schools are all good avenues. At the same time, cut non-economically beneficial spending. This means huge cuts in the military, specifically the Trident replacement.

Once the economy is growing again and tax revenues are rising, you can start paying down the deficit. This will mean 'borrowing to pay off' and it is counterintuitive. It does, however, work. The result of cuts is not that we cut services & spending during the bad times, but that we don't invest in them during the good. The job of the next government will be to rein in peoples expectations, as huge amounts of public money go to paying off the debt rather than being invested.

It appears you're referring to the quarterly GDP (Gross Domestic Product) figures in this context. The OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) isn't charged with reporting these - I think the acronym you were searching for is the ONS (Office for National Statistics)

Not the greatest of starts but I would agree in principal with the tone of the rest.

When the Tories say things like 'you can't borrow your way out of a financial crisis' I wonder if they've noticed the effects their policies are having on revenue and the increased borrowing requirements over their independent OBR forecasts from 2010.