GDP growth of 1% in the third quarter is obviously good news but yesterday’s figures don’t mean that the crisis is over. Not by a long way.

First, we should consider the special factors that have boosted growth over the summer – as ITV’s Richard Edgar has already pointed out – Olympic ticket sales added 0.2% to growth and the timings of Bank Holidays over the Jubilee may have added around 0.5%.

Strip these out and we have underlying growth around of around 0.3% over the quarter – very close to NIESR’s estimate of 0.2/0.3%. Unless growth accelerates in the next two or three quarters then the OBR’s most recent estimates for growth of 2.0% in 2013 looks unattainable.

Second, we need to look at the longer term picture rather than concentrating on one quarter’s figures. Over the past year GDP has been flat, today’s numbers take us back to where we were last year. There has been almost no growth over the past two years – the longer term picture then is of an economy that is stagnant rather than growing.

Third, we need to consider the makeup of growth. Whilst GDP is flat over the past year that hides a lot of variation at the sector level, over the same period the service sector has grown by 1.3%, the production sector has fallen by 1.3% and construction output has collapsed by 10.8%. This raises serious questions about the extent of ‘rebalancing’ which we are achieving.

Fourth, the UK is well behind where it was expected to be. The economy has grown by just 0.6% since the Spending Review of October 2010, compared to an OBR forecast of 4.6%. During the same period both the US and Germany have grown by over 3.0%. We’re behind our peers and behind where we expected to be.

Finally, we still have a long way to go. GDP remains over 3% below its 2008 peak. On current, possibly optimistic OBR forecasts, it’ll be 2014 before we regain our pre-recession levels of GDP.

So far in 2012, the economy has grown by 0.2%. Even if GDP grew by another 1% in Q4 (very unlikely without the temporary boosts we got over the summer), overall growth would be just 1.2% for the year. By any stretch that would be a pretty abysmal performance.

The figures are good news but they don’t change the fundamental picture – our economy is much weaker than it should be and the government isn’t doing enough to support growth and, as I argued earlier this week, we are set for a weak recovery.

A contradiction lies at the heart of the contemporary political consensus – on the one hand, inequality is increasingly recognised as a serious problem; on the other, Mrs Thatcher’s legacy is seen as a precious inheritance.

She reversed Britain’s decline, the commonly accepted wisdom goes, and nothing must be done to reverse that. The trouble is that the inequality is, in large measure, the result of those policies.

This is highlighted by some new statistics, released yesterday by the Office for National Statistics. One of my favourite annual ONS publications is called the Effect of Taxes and Benefits on Household Income.

This is vital for seeing how the tax/benefit system and public services reduce inequality and which taxes, benefits and services are most effective. As I’ve noted before, original income is much more unequal than “final” income (after taking taxes, benefits and the value of services into account.)

The release presents these figures going back to 1977. There’s a lot to take in, but one of the first points I’ve picked up is how inequality has changed over time.

The table below looks at the ratio of the final income of the richest tenth (“decile”) of the population to that of the poorest tenth, that is, how unequal we are after everything we do to redistribute income is taken into account:

A couple of points jumped out at me. One is that the last government brought down this ratio slightly; the other is that the biggest change was the increase between 1984 and 1991 – it really does look like a ‘step change’.

This is the period when tax and benefit rates and spending on services were changed radically. It’s the period of Geoffrey Howe’s and Nigel Lawson’s Budgets.

If we want to reduce inequality we are going to have to take another look at the ‘achievements’ of Thatcherism.

A couple of days a go, my friend Linn sent me an e-mail, being very frustrated: Amazon just closed her account and wiped her Kindle. Without notice. Without explanation. This is DRM at it’s worst.

I cannot verify whether the e-mail exchange actually happened or whether both parties are being honest, but it is instructive of the trouble with digitally “owning” something.

In digital form, in extremis, you own very little of what you think you own. A lot of the time you are merely leasing the material. So long as nothing goes wrong, and so long as you stay onside with the usually un-burdensome terms and conditions nobody will notice.

For example, most music, films and books bought online are in fact leased. You have full use rights of the material you purchase but you don’t own it, and your use rights can be revoked if you transgress the terms and conditions nobody reads.

Most people don’t know this, and this is why people don’t mind. However, as seen at the link at the top of this page, when you break, or are thought to have broken, the terms and conditions of the lease it can be cancelled and all the content you thought you owned will vanish.

This points to one reason people pirate material. Pirated material is material you own, unlike most of that provided commercially. Paradoxically, it is in the real world that ownership allows anonymity.

In reality, we are all very traceable on the internet. Each click or digital transaction involves electronic data passing between two known, verifiable and unique IP addresses.

When you buy something in a shop in the real world you usually don’t know where the other guy lives, but on the internet you know just where their computer “lives.” That means if you annoy the person from which you bought a game, song, book or movie they can slip in and silently take what you bought.

The internet and tech sector is growing much more quickly than the rest of the economy. That means that digital goods are becoming a bigger part of what we own and these problems are multiplying.

As the digital world expands more and more of the valuable things you own could end up being leased and power will pass from the state and from individuals to private companies.