We're climbing rather than crawling

It was back in January that figures from the Office for National Statistics confirmed what many analysts had suspected for sometime: that the UK economy came out of recession in the last three months of 2009 and started growing again.
But the announcement turned into a damp squib when it was revealed that the growth that our mighty economic engine notched up was a splutteringly pathetic 0.1%.
This is the kind of figure which makes you think that, in reality, our battered economy was actually yo-yoing up and down rather than locking on to growth.
My one caveat at the time of the announcement was that this was only an early analysis of all the data that the economy spews out as it goes about its work. Indeed, it was based on an examination of only 40% of the total data set.
The ONS has been beavering away since that first-pass figure came out and a new analysis has appeared today which says that, infact, the economy grew by 0.3%.
This is hardly the stuff of a striker back at peak form, but an increase of two percentage points (not two per cent) contains extra production and sales worth a huge amount of money when you consider the size of the UK economy - still one of the biggest in the world.
The ONS said today that the manufacturing and service sectors did better than the figures first suggested. This won't be the last time they revise the figures and it can be months or even years before a final figure is confirmed.
We're clearly some way from solid recovery still. Performance in the first three months of this year may not be brilliant (snow will have taken its toll on retail), and there's an evens chance that the Bank of England will decide shortly to re-start its programme of Quantitative Easing - putting new money into the economy.
This all feeds into the debate about how soon we should start repaying the gargantuan sums of money the Government has borrowed to stop the banks and the wider economy keeling over.
Outside the yah-boo politics of the phoney election campaign, the consensus among financial experts is that while the economy isn't about to slump again, it's not yet well enough for us to take away the medicine.