For France and Germany, the recession is over. It must be galling for Gordon Brown that the big European economies, with whose leaders he has repeatedly clashed over how to beat the recession, are returning to growth more quickly than Britain.
For a decade, we listened to Mr Brown's triumphalist Budget speeches, banging on (literally) about how well the UK was doing compared to her rivals across the Channel. Was it not Mr Brown's own successor as Chancellor, Alistair Darling, who declared not so very long ago that Britain was "better placed than other economies to withstand the slowdown in the global economy"?
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