Cast your mind back to the last year of Tony Blair's premiership. Growth is strong. The City is booming. House prices are rising. Boom and bust has been abolished. The shops are full to bursting. Yet something is not right. The economy depends far too heavily on private and, to a lesser extent, public borrowing. Growth is heavily concentrated in certain sectors and in the south-east corner of the country, the manufacturing base is shrinking and the trade deficit is growing. A book published just before Blair left Downing Street described Britain as Fantasy Island. Its thesis was that the economy was ... (Read the full story)
