Talking up the economy is nothing new for the coalition government, of course. How many times have we heard ConDem ministers hailing the advent of a "recovery" which, they claimed, was to be credited to their austerity policies? Except that each time so far, their own official figures have been just as stubborn in calling their bluff, by showing that in fact, the economy wasn't "recovering" at all.
Eventually, however, government statisticians seem to have found a way of tricking their figures into showing something that looks like a small increase in national production (GDP), over the past year. But what this "economic growth", as ministers call it, really means - and, above all, who benefits from it - is an entirely different matter.
What's in a number?
There are facts which they just can't ignore. For instance, while the output of the service sector is said to have increased by 1.3% compared to what it was before the crisis, that of the production sector is still 12% below its 2007 level - as if a "recovery" could be only based on services! But, never mind. This doesn't stop Osborne and Cameron from gloating about the "dynamism" of the British economy compared to the rest of the world. Of course, they would, especially in the run-up to a European election campaign which they clearly intend to stage under the Union Jack!
But the reality is somewhat different. Even the figures published by the OECD, the same international economic body which, we are told, promises the British economy a bright future, tell a very different story - by ranking the British "recovery" somewhere between Portugal's and Spain's, but way behind Germany's and France's. The truth is that the estimated overall 1.9% growth in Britain's GDP is artificially inflated by factors which have nothing to do with economic growth. Among these factors, for instance, there is the huge amount of cash awarded by the ConDems to private businesses, in the form of a vast array of subsidies and tax rebates. And how many governments have dared to cut the rate of corporation tax at a time when the majority of their population is going through hard times? Apart from the ConDems, very few, in fact!
But the main factor in this so-called "recovery" seems to be the housing market. Over the past two years, house prices have been increasing more than 4 times faster than the average wage, with private rents following the same pattern. The fact that last year, almost 4O% of all house buyers paid cash, shows that a large proportion of houses are bought by wealthy buyers as an investment. This means that yet another speculative housing bubble is building up, just as in 2007, with the same risk of financial implosion. Talk about a "recovery"!
Our collective strength will "recover"
Of course, when the Camerons and Osbornes of this world hail their economic record, what they have in mind is how well their capitalist masters are doing. And yes, they are doing very well, thank you. Share prices have more than recovered since the beginning of the crisis and so have company profits. And if they have recovered so well, it is primarily thanks to companies increasing their parasitism on public funds and their exploitation of workers.
Because, for the working class, the only thing that has "recovered" is the level of its indebtedness - which is back to an all-time high. So the reality of this "recovery" is that working class households have to make even higher interest payments to the banks, while their incomes have remained flat for years, when they haven't been cut.
Meanwhile jobs and conditions haven't "recovered". No matter how much the government boasts about getting the jobless back into work, real jobs on which one can make a living, remain few and far between. Casual, part-time, zero-hours non-jobs on the minimum wage - and sometimes below - cannot be a substitute for real employment. And the government's drive to cut benefits in order to force the jobless into these non-jobs will only result in more poverty.
In any case, the working class cannot just rely on the possibility of "times getting better at some point". They may or they may not, no-one can be sure. But the one thing we can be sure about is that, whatever happens, we will be faced with a capitalist class which has now got used to having an easy life during the crisis and will want to keep the screw as tight as it is now. This is why we cannot rely on their economic "recovery" - even a genuine one - to regain the ground lost over the past years, but only on the "recovery" of our collective strength.