If there are green shoots appearing in the economy, then the slugs have started to munch them.
 
A shock fall of 2.4 per cent in the first quarter of 2009 is the worst quarter-on-quarter fall since 1958. The annual fall in the economy of  -4.9 per cent of GDP is the largest since records began in 1948.

In fact, have a look at the historical attempts (Labour Market Trends 2003 with the help of Thelma Leisner) to create annual GDP figures, and that number is the worst peacetime number since 1926 and 1931.

So in the year to March the economy was collapsing at the fastest peacetime rate for 75 years. Alongside those years it is basically the joint worst peacetime figure since 1900. If you are under the age of 77, you have never had it so bad.

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Perhaps the most interesting line in the US homeland security secretary’s interview with me this morning concerns her fears over Somali Americans carrying out terrorist attacks inside the United States.

She concedes that a small number of Somalis have travelled from the US to Somalia to train in jihad.

“Right now we are talking about people going over there,” she says, “but any time you have individuals who are being trained, if they want to return, would have the operational-type skills to carry out an attack.. That is an area you need to pay attention to.”
 
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Iraq is a country I have visited many times since I was first there to report from the front line of the harrowing Iran/iraq war in 1980. Foreign intervention and interference has dogged it for more than a century. No wonder Baghdad is seized with parties and celebration.

For the promised American pull-out from Iraq starts today. US forces start pulling out of urban areas in the country on what the Iraqi government has declared to be National Sovereignty Day.

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Cabinet this morning acknowledged that the “cuts versus spending” line of attack which Gordon Brown has been pounding out at top volume for weeks has been a bit of an own goal and ministers this morning talked about “refining” the message.

The new mantra is supposed to be “more realistic”, I hear, with messages like “the next 10 years are NOT going to be like the last 10 years”.

There will be more talk of “targeted investment” not pure “spending”, more focus on “efficiency savings”.

One Cabinet minister said there had been a feeling that, given where Labour was in the polls, the party needed to “take risks” and hope that when voters heard the “cuts versus investment” chant their thoughts were dominated by images of 1980s Tories, not lines from David Cameron and the commentariat saying that it was a false dilemma and that cuts were coming whoever came into power.

That strategy is now being rethought.

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Running round LA for the last few days covering Michael Jackson’s death, I’ve been amazed about how polite, pleasant and accommodating the LAPD have been.

They might not have told us all the details of their investigation (although they seem to obligingly leak quite a lot of info) but they have been doing their best to let us cover the story.

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So where’s the money coming from for the Building Britain’s Future policies announced today?

The government says that some PFI contracts got cheaper recently… money had been set aside thinking the poor economic climate would stay poor, but it wasn’t needed. There’s also been a raid on some departments’ “underspends”.

But on the biggest spend – the £1.5bn to boost social housing – the biggest loser is the Department of Communities and Local Government itself.

Around £750mn is coming from “reprioritising” its own budget. Within that £750mn around £500mn is coming from the Homes and Communities Agency. read more

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A New York judge has sentenced Bernie Madoff to 150 years – a verdict that will bring joy to many but relief to very few.

He is likely to take the innermost secrets of his Ponzi scheme, in which he defrauded $65bn out of his investors, to the grave.

So how many more will follow Madoff? read more

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So the cross-party crossfire on spending and deficits continues. It is remarkable that the actual underlying figures in this spat are totally unchanged from the figures we first reported on the day of the Budget itself.
 
But there clearly is a problem to be solved, and the political process seems to be shedding more heat than light. So I propose the establishment of a grand committee, a commission no less, on reducing the national debt. In fact we could call it the Commission on the Reduction of the National Debt. I would appoint the Chancellor of the day, the Governor of the Bank of England. Perhaps some of his deputies. The odd politician would be good too, but a non-partisan voice preferably, say, the Speaker of the House?

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Was he as famous as the Duke of Wellington?

There has been some debate about how much time a show like Channel 4 News should devote to a story like the death of Michael Jackson.

Both in the newsroom and, I imagine, among our viewers too. Is it really “our” kind of story? Is it really a lead story – night after night? Can it possibly be right that we currently have a bigger team in LA than we had in Tehran for the election? (But do remember you don’t need to get visas from a repressive government to enter Hollywood.) read more

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