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. . . . . . Hello and welcome to Coffey House Shots and Spectators Daily Politics

podcast I'm Katie balls and I'm joined by Kate Andrews and James Heel.

Kate we have some economic news.

It's quite good news potentially.

It's good news that leads into an even better week, very likely.

For the government and for the country, The International Monetary Fund, the IMF, has upgraded its latest growth forecasts from the UK this year from NOL-5% to NOL-7%.

This upgrade comes less than two weeks after we found out that the UK economy

grew by 0.6% in the first quarter of the year. That defied the consensus. People

expected it to be notably lower and the UK performed really well and

defied predictions left recession in 2023. This upgrade is not spectacular

and the growth forecast has not changed for 2025. The IMF still thinks that'll be around 1.5 percent,

but it's moving in the right direction. It is good news, not least because the IMF has a history of just

downgrading growth projections in the UK, and frankly very often being wrong about that.

Always important to note that these are predictions, their forecasts, they're not crystal balls,

but it does seem like there's this trend now amongst forecasting a changing narrative that the UK economy is

faring better than a lot of people thought even a couple months ago.

And I think this is particularly good news for the government this week because the IMF's

...