OPINION
Andy Twelves (right) lays out just how screwed we are (Image: Andy Twelves/Getty)
After a long, soul-flattening day of work at my email job, the sort of day where Outlook freezes more than it functions, I did what most Brits do when they need an escape: I went to Wetherspoons. I wanted the Large Mixed Grill, two slices of bread and butter, and a pint of Ruddles Best. Meat, charred within an inch of its life. Peas so frozen you could still taste the ice. And that heroic fried egg, clinging on to that plate like that loser Richard Holden does to Basildon.
But it was gone. Not out of stock. Not rebranded. Gone. Axed from the menu because of “rising meat costs”. And that, right there, is all you need to know about the state of the UK economy. Forget GDP figures, fancy treasury graphics, or ONS bulletins. The moment Wetherspoons can’t afford to serve one of it’s most iconic dishes, something has gone deeply wrong. And everyone knows it.
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Andy's last mixed grill before it was axed (Image: Andy Twelves)
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Yet here we are, watching ministers, analysts, and the commentariat clutch their pearls because the economy “shrank” by 0.1% in May. Headlines scream “disappointment”. Pundits dissect decimal points like ancient runes. But outside of SW1 in the real world, people aren’t parsing the latest GDP figures - they’re watching everyday life continue to get quietly downgraded.
Your mortgage just jumped another ￡200 a month. The big shop now costs as much as a weekend away. Your local dentist shut down, your train’s cancelled, your kid’s school is crowd-funding for toilet paper. But sure, please tell us again how the economy is “technically growing.”
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What people feel isn’t a statistic. It’s a tightness in the chest when you’re at the till. It’s the stress of juggling bills. It’s the creeping dread when you get a brown envelope through the letterbox. These are the metrics that really matter to people, and they don’t show up in quarterly reports.
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GDP is a blunt instrument, it doesn’t care who benefits from growth or who gets buried beneath it. You can have GDP growth alongside foodbank queues stretching round the block - we have for years.
The City can boom while our high streets and NHS fall apart. It’s like measuring your health by the number of steps you took last Tuesday - interesting, maybe, but meaningless if you’ve got undetected cancer.
Yet the obsession persists. Chancellor Rachel Reeves called May’s numbers “disappointing” and vowed to “kickstart growth,” as if the economy was my grandmother’s rusty lawnmower.
Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride, somehow managing to keep a straight face, pinned the blame on Labour - yes, Labour - as if the Tories hadn’t spent the fourteen of the last fifteen years turning the economy into a bonfire, and then acting surprised when it started to burn.
Here’s the truth: the economy isn’t a thing that just happens to us. It’s made, shaped, rigged, and rewritten by the decisions of governments. Every tax break, every U-turn, every spending cut has consequences. The public doesn’t need an economics degree to know when they’re getting shafted.
They know because the Mixed Grill is gone. Because their pay hasn’t gone up in years. Because the margin of error in their lives has vanished.
Politicians treat economic jargon like a fog machine, pump out enough acronyms and forecasts, and then maybe no one will notice another bus service has been axed, again. But that fog is clearing - people are angry.
Not about “technical recessions”, but about feeling like they’re working harder for less, and have been for years. They’re angry that they have to watch their communities dissolve one service at a time.
If the Chancellor wants to prove she understands what’s happening, she can’t just throw around the phrase “economic growth” like confetti, she needs to make it mean something. Growth should be a warm home in winter. A secure job with fair pay.
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A health appointment when you need one, not when the system decides you’re worthy. Growth should feel like relief, a release from those fourteen years of Tory austerity, crumbling services, flatlining wages, and the daily grind of watching everything get worse while being told it’s getting better.
Until then, spare us the graphs and the jargon. Just speak like a normal person. Focus on what actually matters - like bringing back the large mixed grill. Because until that returns to its rightful laminated place on the Spoons menu, don’t tell me the economy’s recovering.
Tell me when people can actually feel it. Better yet, when they can taste it.
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