Recovery?

The provisional estimates of growth for 2013 show that the Tories - after 4 years of trying, almost doing as well as Labour!

However, manufacturing output and construction are both down in the last quarter. Dunno if that is seasonal variation (can't be much fun building things in the rain) but it rather undercuts the 'rebalanced economy' claptrap Osborne is peddling. Its more unbalanced and service dependent that ever.

As for 'Plan B,' a sensible economic policy would have delivered this sort of growth years ago. We're still poorer than we were in 2007 and other economies - which weren't madly flaying themselves with austerity - have recovered more swiftly.

And it did not have to be this way.  Britain had a perfectly good recovery underway in 2010.  From that bastion of rightwing thought and freemarket ideology, the New Statesman:

In 2010, a genuine recovery was underway, with the economy growing 2.4 per cent in the 12 months to Q3 2010, but premature austerity, in the form of the VAT rise and the dramatic cut in infrastructure spending, ensured that growth was snuffed out. To meet the OBR's original 2010 forecasts, the economy would need to grow by 1.6 per cent each quarter between now and the election. But Osborne has been the beneficiary of low expectations. Before the post-2010 downturn, below-trend growth of 1.9 per cent would have been viewed as a dismal failure.

Is Osborne some sort of political genius?  Perform so poorly that the robust growth of 2010 becomes some sort of folk myth, like King Arthur and the Loch Ness monster, and thus even the most mediocre performance is hailed as the works of an economic colossus?