S is for sluggish, U for unemployment and C for credit. Where are the wage rises, exports and business investment?
Reasons to be cheerful – one, two, three. The heatwave (at least, until the moaning kicks in). Sporting victories, from the Lions to Murray to (maybe) the Ashes. Oh, and the recovering economy. Yes, you read that last item correctly. Because it's official: Britain's rubbish economy is no longer quite so terrible. Over the past few weeks, George Osborne has talked again and again of how the UK is "leaving intensive care", "recovering" and other figures of speech aimed at luring the public out from behind their sofas.
You can expect a lot more of this, especially when the GDP figures come out a week on Thursday. Not only will they have a plus sign in front (rather than the minus we're used to), they're likely to show reasonably strong growth – and so provoke a veritable chorus of told-you-sos from coalition ministers.
And where the government goes, so go the press. The Economist occasionally runs an R-index, measuring the number of times newspapers use the word "recession". Self-confessedly rough and ready, it's nonetheless a not-bad gauge of public pessimism. Well, the Guardian's librarians have helped me assemble an alternative R-index, the R this time standing for recovery.
We combed the Times, the Mail and the Guardian for stories using the words "recovery" and "economy" (I omitted the FT, since it's as likely to be talking about a turnaround in Kazakhstan's mining industry as for shops in Kettering) in each month of the year so far.
Our Recovery Index indicated a strong increase in media optimism: the number of articles about economic recovery jumped from 57 in January to 122 in June. And although we undertook the exercise as a bit of a jape, something else about the results stood out: the greatest talking up of a turnaround was in the rightwing papers. Over six months, the Times has seen a 55% increase in economically buoyant articles, as compared to a 43% rise in the Guardian. Perhaps the editors and commentators at the paper of record are dutifully fulfilling their obligations as the broadsheet closest to David Cameron.
Put all this together and you get an idea of what the contours of the next election campaign look like. The coalition, aided by their friends in the press, are going to claim their cuts have worked. Despite all the naysaying from the Two Eds, Cameron will say: "I made the tough decisions and they have largely paid off. Britain is growing again and our overdraft is coming down. Of course, we're not going as fast as hoped – those pesky Greeks saw to that – but seven out of 10 ain't bad."
But a simple fact-check would pull that case to pieces: Britain has had the weakest recovery in decades, worse than the US and than Europe. Borrowing has far overshot Osborne's initial projections, so that the chancellor has broken the only meaningful budgetary target he set himself. Yet the coalition has begun the work of defining down what economic success looks like.
And the worrying part of this thought experiment is that, without drastic changes, Labour will struggle to muster a decent reply. Led by Ed Balls, the opposition has adopted a scorecard approach to judging the coalition's economic policies: is GDP up or down? Does Britain still have its triple-A rating? What's happened to public debt? The criticism of austerity has been bang on but – in focusing on Red Book statistics and market indicators – it has also been narrow and technocratic. That always posed a problem of what Labour would say when the sad music stopped; and that problem is upon the shadow cabinet now.
But if one steps away from whether the quarterly GDP stats come with a plus or a minus, there is plenty to worry about in this half-hearted recovery. Take yesterday's analysis from the TUC picking apart the coalition's claims to have overseen the creation of a million net new jobs and showing that four out of five of them are in low-paid industries: retail, hotel services, social care. The march of the makers has turned into Britons being forced to take up minimum-wage positions staffing cafes and supermarkets. And since 2011, half of all new jobs have come from people going self-employed, where median wages are even lower: under £6 an hour. Far from a Britain of startups and entrepreneurs, Osborne has created what City economist Dhaval Joshi refers to as "an army of underpaid freelancers".
Or look at the Resolution Foundation's research from last week, which takes the official projections for where Britain will be in 2017 and shows that – where interest rates even start heading towards their long-term average – 1.2m households would be in serious "debt peril" spending more than half their income on credit repayments.
If this is a recovery, it's a recovery that SUCs. The S in that acronym stands for sluggish. The U for underemployed, where, as research has shown, half a million people want extra work as their wages aren't covering their outgoings. And the C is for credit, since households with falling real wages are relying on cheap credit carrying on for ever.
There's plenty here for Labour to go at, but it should be generating its own benchmarks for what economic success looks like, drawn from the coalition's own promises. For my money, those criteria would include wage rises, exports and business investment. But it's time to refine the critique of what the coalition is doing; and to point out that while the economy may be out of crisis, it still SUCs.
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