The International Monetary Fund has forecast that the UK economy will shrink this year – putting us once again at the bottom of the G7 and amongst the worse in the G20, including below Russia, which has been flooded with sanctions ever since Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine now over a year ago.
The update was shared by Ian Lavery – Labour Party MP for Wansbeck, on his official Facebook account.
Lavery said, “This is the same old story we have heard for the 13 years since the Tories took the power of low growth, a sluggish economy, and a diminishing reputation on the world stage.”
The fact that people in government and Whitehall are cheering the fact that the United Kingdom has just narrowly avoided a recession shows how far the standards and expectations have slipped.
Ian Lavery added that while ordinary hard-working people are left to pick up the pieces of a failing economy and the cost of living crisis, those with the most wealth are left untouched, and many grow even wealthier.
Throughout the pandemic, the inequality gap in the UK, which was already amongst the largest in the world, was turbocharged. The Resolution Foundation found that the economic benefits of the lockdown were skewed in favour of the richest by a ratio of 500 to 1.
This is not just about slow growth and growing the pie but about who gets what chunk of the pie at the end of the day.
“As it stands, our economy is rigged against hard-working people to funnel money into the pockets of the ultra-rich, and that won’t change until someone is bold enough to call it out for what it is and make the radical changes necessary to make our country work for the many rather than the very few,” concluded the MP.
