Ministerial pronouncements in the last week or two have made it doubly clear that even if the government does not exactly live on another planet then it certainly lives in a different land – Londonland – to the rest of the country.
Mr Osborne’s boasts about GDP getting up off the floor at long last, government policy notwithstanding, have no real substance.
And that is precisely the worry about GDP itself with declining living standards for all but the rich and worse working conditions – ditto. Growth itself puffs up on the back of consumer spending (much of it on imports) and the start of a housing boom, mostly in London timed, I imagine, to last around two years to the other side of the general election. Where have we seen this before?
We already knew that Business investment was down and we now learn that industrial production also fell in August with the biggest decline for nearly a year. Industrial output fell by over 1%. The major factor in this decline was a substantial fall in manufacturing output, 1.2% down on July - the biggest fall since September last year.
So do we have a re-balanced economy and a broad-based, sustainable recovery? Not outside London and not outside the fantasy world of capital economics.
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