Britain waits for boldness, Mr Osborne There have been unmistakable stirrings of the green-shoot syndrome in Westminster over the past few weeks, a growing sense that the economy is through the worst and that light can be spotted at the end of the tunnel. Yesterday's downbeat assessment in the Bank of England's quarterly inflation report will dispel such wishful thinking. The Bank warned that the unexpectedly robust 1 per cent rise in the third quarter GDP figures was a false dawn. In the words of Sir Mervyn King, the Bank's governor, the figures gave an "overly optimistic impression"; the final quarter's figures could show a new contraction. Britain is confronted with what the governor called "an unappealing combination" of slow growth and higher-than-expected inflation, meaning that the economy will not return to its pre-2008 peak for another three years. Even the jobs market, the part of the economy that had recently given greatest cause for economic optimism, is not performing quite as well as it had been. Though unemployment has fallen again, and the number of jobs has increased, this has been at a slower rate than in recent months. Against this gloomy background, the Coalition's policy-making "quad" - David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander - will today discuss the content of the Chancellor's Autumn Statement, to be delivered three weeks from now. Given the way his March Budget unravelled, Mr Osborne will be keen to make amends - yet his scope for action appears severely limited. Few expect him to hit his target of eliminating the structural deficit and reducing debt as a share of GDP by 2015-16, though the acceptance of this is now so widespread that it should have a limited market impact. The Chancellor is reaping the benefit of establishing a credible deficit strategy at an early stage and sticking to it. He still intends to adhere to the size of the overall spending "envelope." This newspaper would have preferred the Government to have shown greater ambition in cutting spending, but Mr Osborne would doubtless argue that the reason the country has avoided the kind of civil and industrial unrest that flared across Europe yesterday is that his austerity package has been well enough balanced to command public support. That should not, however, be an excuse for failing to demonstrate greater urgency in the future. This Parliament is at its half-way point and ministers are already turning their attention to their plans for 2015/16 and beyond. In doing so they must display greater strategic boldness, starting the groundwork for the radical supply-side reforms that can haul the UK economy out of this downturn. A low-growth future is no option at all.