Blog 6 (UK economy Weakest in 30 years)

UK economy 'weakest in 30 years'
URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8015704.stm
Date: Thursday 30th April, 2009

When looking at BBC’s website this headline caught my attention ‘UK economy weakest in 30 years’. This article has a wide range of information they highlight data information figures, graphs, present position and future forecast. When reading this article you could easily tell that they want the readers to have a good idea how bad the British economy is going before talking about the Optimistic aspect of it. The first headline of the article goes as follows ‘The UK economy shrank 1.9% in the first three months of 2009, according to gross domestic product (GDP) data from the Office for National Statistics’ it gives numerous of figures about the economy so the readers have a better sense of what’s happening, basically there backing up the title of the article. In this article they split the ideas and views into section first they talk about the economy, then the ‘weaknesses to come, ‘Gloomy forecasts’ and then they concluded it with section of ‘Optimistic’. There are many opinions for example when discussing the weaknesses to come- The biggest contributor to the decline was the manufacturing sector, which shrank by 6.2% in the first three months of the year, having decreased by 4.9% in the previous quarter. "The last six months has seen the sharpest fall [in GDP] on record and the manufacturing number... is a record," Jon Beadle from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) told the BBC. You can also view a video and it’s worth viewing when reading this article, the person who speaks seems to be very negative and not too optimistic, they believe not many changes will occur in 2009 but in the long run the outcome should improve- "I very much doubt that GDP is going to contract at these sort of rates for any longer, but I do think it will still contract all throughout 2009," said George Buckley at Deutsche Bank. "So there's still a lot of weakness to come, but not as weak as we're seeing today."
The article concludes with a normal manner after mentioning all the negativity of the UK economy- Conservative leader David Cameron said the figures showed the government had a wildly optimistic view of the state of the UK economy: "The chancellor gave a set of forecasts in the Budget," he said. "Everyone said they were over optimistic, and already, just a few days later, the next lot of official figures coming out shows that he's been over optimistic, shows that what the government's been doing hasn't been working." This quote surprises me because this was supposed to be more positive as it was in the Optimistic section of the article but it seems more negative than positive. In the next week I will closely how articles about the UK economy want to be more positive than negative so they can give the readers a positive attitude when reading the article and maybe more hope for the future.