The UK is continuing down the slippery slope as a trading nation…and the cracks are already beginning to show among the voters. Raw materials are costing us more, young and poor people are borrowing more, manufacturing output is flat, and our trading balance with the EU remains stubbornly high. Were such a situation to be found in a private business, the directors would be looking for a white Knight. But it’s doubtful if Nick Clegg could be that rescuer.

The topline key points (keeping the misery to a minimum) are:

1. The price of commodities we import for manufacture has increased by 25% since this time last year.
2. Not surprisingly therefore, pre-retail ex-factory price inflation is accelerating.
3. But manufacturing output has been flatlining since October 2008.
4. The knock-on effect in terms of retail prices is a whopping increase from 3.7 to 4.4% month on month. (And given pts 1-3 above, there will be worse in the pipeline.
5. In terms of coping with this, younger and poorer citizens are increasing their debt levels: 11% of all households spending twice as much as they earn are now headed by people under 25 – a staggering figure. Older and more upmarket households are cutting expenditure and debt – but still having to increasingly dig into capital.

I’d love to see the Mandelson-Darling-Balls-Brown axis try and spin their way out of this one. I’d also love to know what Nick and Vince think they can do about it.

But most of all, I’m hoping Jeremy Paxman asks Gordon Brown where exactly he sees a recovery in these data – fragile or otherwise.

To use Gordon’s favourite evasion, ‘let’s be clear about this’:
Britain’s commercial problem is nothing to do with so-called ‘economic recovery’ over a matter of months.
It is to do with our lousy trading performance over the decade, and how this is building upon a debt that has remained out of control for the last five years.
It is to do with over-dependence on service exports which will be less (not more) demanded over the next decade.
It is to do with the neglect of manufacturing by everyone from Thatcher to Brown.
It is to do with the Westminster bubble’s disdain for British farming.
It is to do with greedy business leaders lining their pockets rather than investing.
It is to do with amoral bankers awarding themselves huge bonuses while the country goes bust as a direct result of their madness.
It is to do with brainless opposition to control of all this by those who can’t tell regulation of madmen from needless bureaucracy.
It is to do with civil servants awarding themselves plush offices and index-linked pensions at the expense of long-suffering taxpayers and brave soldiers.
It is to do with Labour sacred cows about means testing.
And it is to do with the man who was in charge of the nation’s finances for most of this period.

Vote Gordon for more of this. Vote Clegg for even more of this.

The figures quoted above are available at the ONS release hub webpage.