No 10 needs to take a deep breath and grow up – or we’ll wheeze our way into a recession

Great Britain is running out of puff. If it were a runner, it would be the slightly overweight middle-aged bloke hitting a wall in the London marathon.

Growth this year has gone from 0.7 per cent in the first three-month quarter, to 0.3 per cent, to the latest 0.1 per cent, the latter being the Office for National Statistics number crunchers’ first guess. It could yet be revised down. Call me a terrible old pessimist, but if someone offered me odds, I’d be prepared to bet on that happening.

The figure was dragged down by a September in which the economy actually shrank by 0.1 per cent. The City had expected it to flatline at worst. The more important quarterly number also undershot expectations. The economists’ consensus forecast called for growth of 0.2 per cent.

The chancellor Rachel Reeves really doesn’t have much choice but to raise taxes because the alternative is a Liz Truss-style meltdown on the markets, which would obviously make a difficult situation very much worse.

The chink of light at the end of a very long tunnel is that securing their blessing will ultimately come with a payoff in the form of cheaper borrowing costs, with a further boost to come from lower interest rates. A December interest rate cut from the Bank of England is a racing certainty now.

Working against that is the general sense of incompetence that hangs over the government. Put yourself in the position of an investment manager or a CEO looking at recent events in Westminster. With shareholders to answer to, ask yourself how you’d feel about committing the funds at your disposal to a country run by a bunch of numpties who appear to be running around like a bunch of rogue AIs, briefing against each other and merrily creating chaos as the economy gasps for breath.

It is also true that a major cause of the gloomy numbers was the cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover, the effects of which spread through its supply chain like a nasty new Covid variant, badly hitting the manufacturing sector. It contracted by 0.5 per cent, enough to take the gloss off the growth in the dominant services sector (0.2 per cent), topped up (barely) by construction (0.1 per cent).

The hack was a one-off, and the bounce back will help future quarters. Most economists expect the economy to plod along in a vaguely positive direction in the New Year.

At this point someone – most likely the special advisors (Spads) or spin doctors working at No 11 Downing Street – will brief that we’re doing better than our friends in Europe. But that’s simply comparing bad with worse. The fact that Germany and Italy have come to a juddering halt and now have their hands on their knees as they gasp for breath, while the UK is managing a hobbled walk? It’s nothing to celebrate.

Remember, all this comes before a nasty tax-raising Budget, which will impose another fiscal drag on top of the one put in place by Rachel Reeves increasing taxes on jobs in her last Budget. The latter has left us with the highest unemployment rate (5 per cent) since the pandemic.

The chancellor’s latest dose of bitter medicine won’t hit home until the new tax year in April. But we, the people, will hear what she says, see the headlines, and make our decisions accordingly. That will inevitably involve taking a cold, hard look at the household budget before the hammer falls. Consumers will probably decide that they might just as well stay in bed with the Wi-Fi turned off. No Amazon shopping for you!

Needless to say, business investment, key to unlocking the faster growth the chancellor keeps banging on about, has also hit a brick wall.

Reeves admitted that she has “more to do” in response to the figures. Give the woman a gold star. That, at least, is something she’s got right. But what are she and her colleagues doing to “do” to boost growth, given the fiscal problems the nation faces?

I’m afraid I’m reminded of that famous scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off where the droning teacher sought an answer from his apathetic and disinterested students. “Anyone, anyone?”

What’s the plan, Reeves, Keir Starmer and the rest of you? Anyone? Anyone?

What the UK desperately needs is a shot of Red Bull. For it to get that, the people around the PM in No 10 need to start behaving like grown-ups. Ministers and MPs, too.

Their juvenile behaviour comes with a steep price. It risks dragging a struggling economy further into the mud. It needs to stop. Now. Otherwise we’re going to be talking about a recession.