Gordon's friends telling porkies now?

There's another excellent post by Fraser Nelson on the Coffee House blog this morning. Fraser refers to the treatment of George Osborne by Jon Snow on the 7 p.m. news on Channel 4 yesterday. Snow asked him to comment on the IMF statement that even if the UK growth rate is only 1.6% this year, it will still outstrip the USA and every European country. The statement was repeated twice more, once to claim that the UK will come out top and then to claim that 1.6% will be the highest in the developed world.

Two things are strange.

The first is that the statements are bunk. The IMF in fact forecasts in its World Economic Outlook in April 2008, that if the UK grows at 1.6%, the following countries will out-perform it, - Greece 3.5%, Norway 3.1%, Finland 2.4%, Sweden 2%, Austria 1.8%, Spain 1.8% and Ireland 1.8%. In fact of the 31 countries considered developed by the IMF 19 are expected to outperform the UK.

If Snow knew all this, he was either inviting Osborne to demolish the statements or he was promoting the Government. If he did not know, then his back room staff are incompetent.

The other strange thing is that Osborne did not challenge the statements. This suggests that he did not know. Admittedly, the IMF report is very recent, but as the Tories have save decided to attack Brown's economic record, you would expect them to use every opportunity to discredit any statement which actually claims more than Brown has said. Very strange!