Margaret Thatcher Funeral: Five Other Things Which Should Bring A Tear To Osborne's Eye

Here are five other things that might make our lachrymose chancellor want to shed a few more tears.

 
1) WHERE HAVE ALL THE JOBS GONE?

"The total is the worst since last summer," reported the Press Association, "giving the UK a jobless rate of 7.9%."

 2) FALLING OUT OF LOVE WITH THE IMF

On Tuesday, however, the IMF downgraded its growth forecast for the UK by 0.3%, both for this year and next, and called for a Plan B

3) OOPS. THOSE AUSTERITY SUMS WERE ALL WRONG.

In recent years, one of George Osborne's key advisers on austerity has been Harvard economist and ex-IMF official Kenneth Rogoff. On Tuesday we discovered that Rogoff and Reinhardt are wrong.

It turns out that they selectively excluded years of high debt and average growth from their results, used a questionable method to weigh the economies they evaluated and - I kid you not - failed to update a key row formula in an Excel spreadsheet. 

and more ...