The UK notched up a record global goods trade deficit last year, casting fresh doubt on the Bank of England’sforecast for a turnaround in exports. Britain imported £65.5bn more goods than she exported, which was equivalent of 5.4 per cent of GDP – making it the worst deficit in real terms since 1974, the Office for National Statistics said yesterday.
There was little relief from December’s figures, which showed the deficit widened unexpectedly by £100m to £6.1bn – another all-time record – compared with forecasts of £5.6bn. The monthly downturn was caused by an underlying deterioration in trading, rather than one-off hits from oil or erratic items, which analysts said should worry the bank.”The economy is unlikely to rebalance away from the consumer sector and towards the external sector any time soon,” said Paul Dales, UK economist at Capital Economics.”These data are a stark reminder to the Monetary Policy Committee that the economy is still dangerously reliant on the consumer sector, which still has problems of its own.”Both imports and exports hit record levels, but even a 9 per cent surge in overseas sales was not enough to offset a surge in import prices.Export prices rose by just 1.5 per cent over 2005, less than half the 3.5 per cent jump in the price of imported goods.The figures inflamed concerns that the UK is unable to capitalise on the rebound in global growth, especially in the eurozone.The deficit with the European Union hit a record of its own of £34bn despite a narrowing in December’s deficit to £2.9bn from £3.0bn.”It looks like the UK economy is not able to take advantage of the eurozone expansion and global growth at the moment,” said Lorenzo Codogno, co-head of European economics at Bank of America.”This might be an indication of more fundamental problems in the UK economy that are not related to the exchange rate or the strength of external demand.”The Treasury said there was “positive” news from a 14 per cent surge in exports to non-EU states, with sales to China posting a 19 per cent increase, albeit from a small base.A spokesman said last year saw a “significant slowdown” in the EU, the UK’s main export market, alongside an oil price shock.”Despite this, UK export volumes grew 7.5 per cent in 2005 as the economy continued to grow in every quarter. Clean lines, fanatical attention to detail, smartness bordering on obsession – Weller’s Mod look was one we all aspired to.

While his fellow-Scousers preferred the ballbreaking scally look, he turned instead to Paul Weller for inspiration. I had a boyfriend who had the scarf (paisley with maroon tassels), the crisp white shirt, the skinny trousers, the stolen bowling shoes and, of course, the three-button Italian-cut jacket. Putting the coin into the machine, the protagonist pulls out not a slab of chocolate, but a plum.. But also on display amid the rain of boots is a kind of nursery-rhyme playfulness.

“Fumbling for change” in front of a slot machine, our man “pulls out the Queen…smiling, beguiling”, a direct link to the line about “in his pocket is a portrait of the Queen” in “Penny Lane”. And suddenly there he was – a tall, rodent-faced boy in a mohair suit with a scarlet Rickenbacker guitar clutched to his chest wailing that he didn’t wanna go down in the tube station at midnight, whoa hoh ho I bought the record the very next day. It was the start of an intense and, even now, not fully extinguished love affair. To ears that had first been alerted the year before by “All Around The World”, “Down In The Tube Station At Midnight”, a No 15 hit for The Jam, was Weller’s first real statement of lyrical intent. A taut three-minuter about a man being kicked to pieces by a gang of right-wing thugs, it harbours most of the main elements of his song-writing attack: on the one hand a visceral immediacy (“I glanced back on my life, I thought about my wife, cos they took the keys and she’ll think it’s me”), on the other a series of nods to a pop tradition that went back to the Beatles. Instead, The Jam looked back to when rock’n'roll was a more pure and innocent form. Their focus was Sixties Mod groups, seen in the trio’s suits, but more importantly heard in tight arrangements and punchy riffs..