Raise your glass of cut-price cava before it's too late

We're out of recession, hey, hey, hey! Pop the fizz and get out the Twiglets. Yes, but steady on — we're only there by the thinnest of margins.

Point one of a percent, to be precise. You can almost imagine officials at the Office for National Statistics straining every sinew to produce a positive result, whipped on by a frenzied Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling desperate to proclaim good news.

Of course it's not like that and the number-crunchers guard their independence jealously.

So we're there, back growing again. It feels great, doesn't it?

These figures are based on past performance so the sense of not dropping any further and actually beginning to pick up again has been with us for a while.

A stream of positive noises from retailers and others in the last few weeks had already pointed to something stirring. Today's announcement merely confirms what was already suspected.

But alas, it's not as good as was wanted. The City was looking for 0.4 per cent, instead it got 0.1 per cent.

That's the thinnest of margins and does little to assuage fears of what may lie ahead. There's already speculation that this quarter may not be positive, as VAT goes back up.

After that, the general election looms and with it talk of the need to reduce the public finance deficit which, while politicians won't go into detail, can only mean cuts in spending and further increases in taxes.

We've been down, we're up but we may be lurching down again — goodness, even writing about the double-dip can induce a sense of nausea.

Strip away some of the underpinning and the UK's weakness is obvious. We got here with a car scrappage scheme.

But for that, manufacturing would have been shot. We've also had the Bank of England's quantitative easing programme.

Unemployment would have been far worse but for the decision of many employers to introduce flexible working arrangements and implement pay cuts, rather than lay people off.

What the ONS reveals is the extent of the recession: the longest in the UK on record, from the second quarter of 2008 until the final three months of last year — an economy that shrank in those 18 months by six per cent.

That last is a number that really does hurt.
It's hard to see too, how in the short term, the UK is going to get back to where it was.

Are employers going to rush to create jobs or merely return their staff to their previous working hours? What happens when the scrappage and quantitative easing programmes end?

Have we experienced a private sector squeeze to date and once the election is out of the way, the public sector is going to undergo its own pain?

But enough. For now, we're up and that is a lot better than down. It may only be 0.1 per cent, but 0.1 per cent is not minus 0.1 per cent or worse.

We can keep staring into the bottom of the glass and talking ourselves into despond.

Or we can at least have a bit of a celebration. Yes please, fill up the glass, before it's too late.