Prime Minister Andy Burnham and his Chancellor John Healey are not having a bad start. Sure, there’s trouble ahead: the Budget is going to be difficult, and Healey is going to have to find a way of making sure all the cheques his boss keeps writing can actually be cashed. But for now, the blitz of 6 a.m. announcements on the cost of living – no matter how trivial they are – appear to have worked and Burnham is experiencing a polling bounce.

Britain’s economy has a terrible habit of performing relatively well in the first half of the year before slumping to a halt

That good news continued this morning in the form of figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which show that the economy grew by 0.4 per cent in the second quarter of the year – having grown 0.6 per cent in the first three months. Crucially for us, that growth works out at 0.4 per cent on a per-head basis too and puts the annualised growth rate at 2 per cent. Crucially for Healey, it means the economy has slightly outperformed the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) spring forecast, giving him a little bit of extra room to fund discounted Scampi Fries in every postcode or whatever Burnham’s latest cost-of-living measure is.

While second-quarter growth slowed slightly, the figures are still unexpectedly positive given everything that’s been going on in the Strait of Hormuz. In fact, economists’ forecasts got the June figure totally wrong, expecting GDP to shrink by 0.1 per cent when in fact it grew by 0.3 per cent, having been flat the month before.

Second-quarter growth was, obviously, driven by services, which in turn were largely driven by what the ONS describes as computer programming and advertising. Production was flat from April to June, while manufacturing grew slightly thanks to the pharmaceutical industry. In June, businesses reported that hot weather and the World Cup had both helped to boost sales.

Here is where any good news ends, though. Britain’s economy has a terrible habit of performing relatively well in the first half of the year before slumping to a halt in the second. There is no evidence this year is going to be any different. Indeed, already the Bank of England expects the economy to grow by 1.1 per cent this year – slower than the 1.3 per cent we managed to eke out last year. Things get even worse if the Strait of Hormuz were to close for the rest of the year, with internal Treasury modelling predicting growth this year of just 0.9 per cent, followed by an utterly bleak 0.3 per cent next year.

Even if the worst does not come to pass, these relatively ‘robust’ figures we’ve seen today do little to distract from the longer-term troubles coming down the road. Inflation and unemployment are likely to rise later in the year and business confidence is likely to falter in the run-up to Burnham’s first budget in October, just as energy prices start to rise again.

What’s more, today’s growth, while of course welcome, is still pretty lacklustre given the AI-fuelled technological change the world is going through. And the growth we’re expected to achieve this year is not enough to offset the fiscal challenges Healey and his successors are going to have to wrestle with. Children born in the next few years are on course to have to spend £1 in every £5 on government debt interest payments, according to a report this morning from the Institute for Public Policy Research. Anyone who thinks a politician will prevent that by reining in our ballooning public spending is certifiable. The kids’ only hope, then, is that we grow our way out of the problem. And that’s going to need much more impressive quarterly figures than 0.4 per cent.

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