Changing forecasts
Nobody now thinks there will be an economic recovery this year.
Even the Chancellor who confidently forecast only last November that growth would return in the third quarter of 2009 will bin that prediction during , replacing it with vague talk of an upturn around the turn of the year.
Most economists, however, think even that's optimistic, that there will be no growth until 2010 and that it will be anaemic at best - some say only 0.3% for the whole year, which will still seem like recession to most of us.
The political significance of this is clear: the economic and political cycles are now seriously out of kilter for the government and even if it waits to the last possible election day (June, 2010), it will have to fight the next election with recession still uppermost in most folks' minds.
In particular, it will have to fight the next election with unemployment likely over 3 million and maybe even still rising, given that the dole queues are a lagging economic indicator (in other words the fabled green shoots could be sprouting but the jobless total still rises because of decisions taken during the downturn).
This is never good news for Labour governments, especially ones in power for so long, and it will probably matter more than the ugly fallout from the -- though that fallout looks like damaging Labour for sometime because it has triggered off a new and bitter round of internecine warfare within the party.
It has done so because Damian McBride's dark arts were used not just against the Tories -- the target of his leaked e-mails -- but against Labour figures thought to be a threat to , to whom he owed absolute loyalty.
Now that he is banished and powerless, those who suffered at his hands have been briefing anonymously to root out other exponents of McBride's ways. This, naturally enough, has provoked counter-briefing from the Brownites.
Hence the growing image of Labour as a party once again at war with itself and the fear among many Labour activists that recession and civil war are not the best mood music in the run up to an election.
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