Yeah, that's right everything bad is because of the bad weather recently.

NOT. This is a pathetic line that is wheeled out lately for everything.

The weather isn't stopping people from shopping. I would argue that people go to the shopping mall more when the weather is bad, because they can't really go and walk in the forest, or take the kids to the play-park, or anything else they might ordinarily do outside. The weather wasn't bad enough to physically prevent people leaving their homes. I have been to the mall and seen plenty of people milling around during the bad weather (although you may also have noticed that the lines at the pay desks were not long, and most people walking around are not exactly dragging a heavy load of carrier bags choc-ful-o-goodies around with them). Shopping is still the national passtime, but buying is no longer such a big part of the experience as before.

The weather isn't stopping people from buying houses. They just aren't because of the economic circumstances that surround them. Stop looking for some outside factor that you can blame it on, people simply no longer believe houses are going to make them rich, and nor do banks which is why they have been rationing mortgage credit.

The weather isn't stopping our country's exports. To say that exporters are hampered because they are unable to get their goods to port is ludicrous. If there is a trade deficit, that means that the imports are getting from the ports to consumers, so how come the trucks can't run in the opposite direction on the same roads? Is the snow and ice only on one side of all those roads then? It's simply preposterous.

The reasons we have a trade deficit are twofold: firstly we no longer make anything for export that people in other countries wish to purchase; secondly our currency is being intentionally devalued by our government, which is having the effect that everything we purchase from abroad, which are almost entirely priced in dollars or euros, is automatically that much more expensive when paid for with Pounds. It's very very simple isn't it?

Devaluing Sterling is the very worst solution to the problem of stimulating our moribund economy, but it is what is being done anyway. The truth behind the desire of our government to devalue the Pound is not that it believes this will stimulate our economy by increasing exports. Far from it. The reason they are doing this is because they wish to reduce the real cost of the massive debts they are racking up, via the magic elixir of monetary inflation. The ultimate stealth tax. This is again a great theory in Academicland, but in the real world investors will only buy those government bonds as long as they don't think they will be repaid with money that is worth less in future. Which they do because they are not stupid. The government have for the last year sold their bonds almost exclusively to the Bank of England, who have bought them with freshly-created money (Quantitative Easing), because real investors do not want them at the rate of interest that is on offer -- it is not worth the risk involved.

If our government does not cease this money printing and debt monetisation rapidly, and stop trying to rack up more and more crushing taxpayer debts, we are headed for a major disaster.

You'd better hope that Labour are voted out at this election, because bond investors are not going to like a Labour win.