Although the spin doctors have been hard at work - for them anyway - trying to convince people that the 'green shoots' of recovery are starting to appear, the reality is still grim for the UK economy. Company liquidations have gone up by 40% this year according to the Insolvency Service.

According to an article by Adam Hooker published this week on the printweek.com site - an industry website for print companies - things are still pretty bad:

The number of companies in England and Wales going into liquidation has gone up 40% in 2009, according to the latest figures released by the Insolvency Service.

The statistics revealed that there were 5,055 liquidations in the second quarter of 2009, up from 3,635 in the same period last year. It is the eighth consecutive quarter in which liquidations have increased.

It appears that liquidations are now the closure method of choice, with the number of administrations on the way down since reaching a plateau in the final quarter of last year.

Q2 figures showed 1,027 administrations, compared to 1,311 in the first quarter of the year and 2,018 in the last quarter of last year. The figure is still up 10% on the same period in 2008.

Receiverships also continued to increase, jumping 95% to 345, while Company Volutary Agreements (CVAs) were up 20% to 157.

As employers struggle to stay in business, things are not looking any better for employees either, according to the British Chamber of Commerce (BCC).

A recent survey of 450 companies across the UK found that 51% were considering making redundancies in the next six months. More than 10% said that redundancies were a certainty.

Needless to say none of this has stopped the banksters from returning to their old habits of refusing credit and raising bank charges on the one hand and paying themseves huge bonuses on the other. Ditto for the whiz-kids of the City Of London.  Meanwhile the state continues to pump billions of pounds into the economy to prop things up - at our expense of course. One thing is clear - there has never been a stronger case for socialism as the way forward for the working class.