This is good growth – but it’s unbalanced growth too

So the economy grew by 1.9% in the last year. Normally that’d be nothing to write home about, but we don’t live in normal times, so 1.9% is very much real growth. However Labour responds to today’s GDP growth, what must come first and foremost much be an acknowledgement that growth is genuinely returning to the economy and thats a very good thing.

However, there’s no way in hell Ed Balls is just going to go on TV and say that everything is fine. Both because it isn’t, and because that’d be political hari-kari. There’ll obviously be plenty of mentions for the “cost of living crisis”, which is all well and good, but somewhat predictable.

So what should Balls be saying today? Well perhaps he should ask about that balanced recovery we were promised?

Of the 0.7% growth achieved in the final quarter of 2013, a whopping 0.6% was from the service sector. To put that into perspective, that means 86% of the growth in the last quarter was from the service sector. Lets see how that look:

An unbalanced recovery risks an increasingly unbalanced economy. That’s already a structural weakness of UK plc, and if it’s not adjusted soon, we could be back in trouble sooner than any of us would like…