NOW we know (or think we do) that the economy grew by a respectable 0.3 per cent in the first three months of this year perhaps we will hear rather less about the 'paradox' of a buoyant labour market and a sluggish or non-existent rate of growth.
There is no paradox - we have large-scale overmanning in both the public and private sectors and this explains both the record numbers in work and the low-voltage output figures.
Take public transport, effectively an employer of last resort, providing undemanding work for thousands of people standing round in fluorescent bibs, 'supervising' automatic ticket barriers, making pointless announcements that echo ones already made by a recorded voice and generally killing time.
Not that this large body of personnel actually makes the trains run on time - or, on occasion, at all. Friday saw a 'fire alert' - not an actually fire, note - in the signal box at Three Bridges on the Brighton line. Utter chaos followed in short order, with no trains at all running into London or down to the coast.
Another triumph for the massed ranks of fluorescent bib-wearers.
1) Guess who's escaped blame (again)?
DON'T you love the way the 'crisis of confidence' in the National Health Service is playing out (as I never say) along fairly predictable class lines?
First off in the pantheon of hate figures are hospital administrators/managers, clearly villainous and parasitic individuals who seem determined to vindicate the eccentric view of American economist Thorstein Veblen that capitalists made money not by managing the economy but by disrupting it (he was thinking of the robber barons, lest you wonder whence he got this extraordinary notion).
Next come what we used to call ancillary staff in the days when they belonged to trade unions such as NUPE and CoHSE and who doubtless have a fancier name today: porters, assistants, clerks, receptionists and so on.
And then there are the nurses, no longer angels, apparently, but slatterns and puffed up graduates who seem to think their qualifications ought to spare them from doing the boring stuff.
But where are the doctors? Pretty much nowhere, in terms of the blame game. Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, rowed back swiftly this week from the mere suggestion that he was blaming the ludicrously-generous contract bestowed on the medical fraternity by the last Labour Government for the huge rise in people going straight to casualty departments rather than consult their GP.
Indeed, senior doctors are still treated with fawning respect when they troop into broadcasting studios and write to the newspapers, demanding higher alcohol prices or taxes on fatty foods or whatever is their latest little wheeze for bossing the rest of us about.
You don't have to be the biggest fan of the police force nor of the new breed of rather weirdo chief constables to grant that at least they are squarely in the line of critical fire. Can you imagine rumbling public discontent with the law-enforcement community that heaped opprobrium on civilian employees, traffic wardens, magistrates' clerks, court ushers and the rest and skirted any criticism of actual police officers?
Neither can I.
2) That old rural hospitality (not)
SOME of us are quietly rather pleased that the massed ranks of objectors to the Durand Academy's planned boarding school for inner-city London children were not around a century or so back. In case you've missed it, the academy wants several hundred London children to board during the week at a proposed school in the West Sussex countryside, returning home for the weekend.
Many of the locals are not keen, to put it mildly.
At the turn of the last century, my own school decamped from a site close by the Old Bailey to...that's right, the West Sussex countryside. Hundreds of children from poor to middle-income families were plonked in what was not then called a greenfield site.
The school remains there to this day and if its own history is anything to go by, the Durand institution will, a few decades hence, be hailed as a centre of excellence, source of great local pride, a wonderful asset for the community and so forth.
The protestors ought to take the long view and the people behind the project ought to keep their nerve.
3) SW1 and all that...
MEANWHILE, what did you make of The Politician's Husband, the first episode of which was screened on BBC2 on Thursday? This Westminster drama features a political couple, the male member of which (David Tennant) has resigned from the Cabinet over a matter of principle (he supports unrestricted immigration - a liberal scriptwriter's idea of a popular cause) and whose wife (Emily Watson) is promoted in his place.
She certainly has the waxy complexion and dead eyes of the quota-filling female minister, but I'm not sure the manic Tennant character would have got that far up the greasy pole
in real life.
Some of us came over all nostalgic as Jack Shepherd rolled up as Tennant's father, being able to remember the great man playing left-wing MP Bill Brand on TV back in the Seventies. And it was a pleasure to see Roger Allam, currently playing the Inspector Barlow-type character in the Morse prequel Endeavour appearing as (I assume) the chief whip. Here is someone who seems to have taken to heart the advice of the late John Le Measurier - always play the same part and, if possible, always wear the same suit.
Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.
Going South: Why Britain Will Have A Third World Economy By 2014, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Palgrave Macmillan