Bye-bye recession, hello hard slog

We'll be told tomorrow - at long last - that the UK economy has finally come out of one of the longest recessions on record.
As I've blogged before, business probably stopped contracting sometime towards the end of September, with the picture being muddied by a series of revisions to the last set of growth figures.
This saw some people mistakenly assume that we were being given a new set of numbers signalling that recession was still lingering.
To repeat, the last set of official figures refer to how the economy was performing in June, July and September last year - not the most recent three months, October, November and December.
Anyway, take as read that UK plc is growing again.
In truth, the big question is not whether we're out of recession but whether we can sustain recovery.
If we can, there's every chance that those businesses which have grimly hung on to staff because they don't want to lose experience will start motoring again.
If we can't, there's every chance that we may see yet more redundancies and business closures as an economy that's on the bottom just bounces along the deck.
On the optimistic side, there are some signs that the cheap pound might give us some growth in exports. An international trade expert I spoke to last week reckons many Notts firms still haven't realised the kind of price advantage they've currently got in some overseas markets.
On the pessimistic side, it can't be long now before the double whammy of higher taxes and lower public spending starts to kick in as the government gradually withdraws the financial life support.
Around here, there is an additional risk posed by the high numbers of people working in the public sector in a city which is the main regional administrative centre. Their numbers look likely to fall.
Business went into this recession financially healthier than it did in the 1980s and 1990s. Neither did they see any point dumping talent they might have to rehire later - especially if it was willing to live with wage cuts or reduced hours.
This is why unemployment doesn't seem to have been the catastrophe some predicted.
When you put indebted consumers together with lower public spending and the likelihood of higher taxes it's very difficult to see the economy growing at anything like the rates it did in the past.
Recession may be over. But 2010 looks like a hard slog.