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The political uproar over the Government’s relationship with News International has deflected attention from a development of far greater significance to most people in this country. The economy’s slide back into negative growth – it shrank by 0.2 per cent in the first quarter, after contracting by 0.3 per cent in the last quarter of 2011 – means that we have experienced the first double-dip recession since 1975. That is not a happy precedent: it led, the following year, to the IMF being called in to bail the country out.