When Britain's statistics agency revealed that the economy shrank 0.5 per cent in the fourth quarter, most analysts were shocked. The consensus prediction had been for a gain of 0.5. But they were awfully quick to accept the official version that it was all weather-related.
Even pundits who regularly heap scorn on the coalition government for trying to impose tough austerity measures on an economy too feeble to cope with them seem to have been stunned into silence.
Either that or they too believe it was just about those freak December storms that played havoc with transportation and kept consumers at home, huddling for warmth under blankets of record snow. Why, if it hadn't been for what would pass as a normal December in a large swath of Canada, British consumers would have rushed to the nearest high street with wads of cash to spend.
It's certainly true, as Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne took pains to explain, that the planned public spending cuts won't begin biting until the next fiscal year gets under way April 1. And the value-added tax didn't jump to 20 per cent from 17.5 until January, too late to have had an impact on the last quarter.
But if it was just about the weather, the numbers don't quite add up. Retail sales, for instance, did fall in December. But they were still in positive territory for the whole quarter.
I think a better explanation is that heavy snow storms played only a part in dampening demand. Businesses and consumers were also battening down the hatches ahead of the austerity wave and in the face of an unemployment rate still hovering near 8 per cent.
The planned deep budget cuts are creating plenty of anxiety. People aren't going to deplete their bank accounts to buy non-essential goods when they don't know how or whether they will be affected by the austerity regime.
Businesses, particularly those that derive a chunk of their income from public contracts or provide everyday services to government departments, are also going to be reducing their spending. And they won't wait until the guillotine actually falls.
This is the time for those stimulus-favouring U.S. politicians and assorted Keynesian-style economists to take to their blog posts and point to Britain as a stark warning of what can happen when governments make it their overriding mission to tackle their widening deficits at all costs.
It is certainly important for governments to get their fiscal house in order, but not at the expense of another recession or a chronically underperforming economy, which would only put a further drain on the already tattered public purse.