GM Europe had earlier announced it was looking to cut up to 400,000 units of capacity a year from its European operations from 2014 (when its current deal with unions expires), with the firm suggesting that Ellesmere Port and Bochum in Germany were the most vulnerable.

That enabled the firm to kick off a fresh round of its well-honed divide-and-rule strategy, pitting plants and governments against each other in a bidding war to offer the most concessions to the firm. It's a typical feature of the auto industry, controlled as it is a in a top-down way by giant, mobile 'original equipment manufacturers' (OEMs) keen to screw down costs by playing off sites against each other.

Deputy PM Nick Clegg had previously claimed the fund could generate up to half a million jobs. I'd still like to see the calculations behind his claim as that figure is wildly out-of-line with the NAO's estimates. While the RGF may create 328,000 jobs in total, these are of various durations and the NAO estimates that only 41,000 extra full-time equivalent jobs could be created over the next seven years as a result of the RGF, at an average cost of £33,000 per net additional job (which is "broadly similar" to past programmes with comparable objectives).

Of course, the first quarter GDP growth figures carry a big health warning as they cover only 40% of the data and are a first estimate. They may be revised back upwards, as indeed they were in late 2009, but for now at least, it's official; we're back into double dip for the first time since the 1970s.

Nevertheless, some analysts see the recent slight fall in unemployment as the first sign that the economy has returned to modest growth. Let's hope they are right.

Youth unemployment also declined slightly, by 9,000 in the three months to February, leaving 1.03 million 16 to 24 year-olds looking for work. The unemployment rate for this age group is still over one-in-five, the worst in 25 years, and what's especially concerning is that there was another increase in the number of young people who are long-term unemployed.

In fact, over the last year, the number of young people claiming jobseeker's allowance for 12 months or more has tripled.

Over a hundred people attended and the discussion ranged from what business wanted from a mayor, through jobs, transport and education, and to how a mayor could help the inner city and other deprived areas in sharing in the wealth that the city generates.

Much of the discussion through the two panels was about power: what extra powers would a mayor have as compared with the current set up?

Those elements are: 1. capacity reduction (closing plants to you and me); 2. shifting production outside of western Europe; and 3. playing plants and workers off against each other to secure cost reductions even in those plants remaining open.

Indeed, while the UK may not (yet) have met the technical definition of double dip recession, basically there has been no at all growth in the UK economy since September 2010. Since then we have seen three quarters of falling output and just two quarters of economic expansion. The economy is at best flatlining, and this is a slower recovery than even that seen after the Great Depression of the 1930s.

To try to do this, the government is redistributing some 20,000 undergrad places from universities to institutions that provide courses costing £7,500 or less a year.

Figures from the Higher Education Funding Council recently showed that some 9,643 places will be reallocated to other universities, with another 10,354 places reallocated away from universities to FE colleges.

What seems clear is that GM Europe is looking to take out around a third of its 1.5 million units of capacity in Europe, and that may well involve the closure of two assembly plants - although CEO Karl-Friedrich Stracke recently stated that he would honour a two-year old agreement not to shut any plans before the end of 2014.

He also stated that the firm's plants were operating at only 80 percent capacity (some would say even lower). Such spare capacity is a killer for the industry as it means a failure to achieve economies of scale in assembly, meaning higher costs.

Despite much talk of the UK economy avoiding a double dip recession and having 'turned the corner', forecasts for the UK economy over the next few years still look pretty grim.

The (supposedly) independent Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecasts that with current economic policies, economic output won't get back to the pre-recession level until 2014; that's six years of output being below the level reached in 2008. That makes the recovery much slower than that after the depression of the 1930s.

Today a letter from him to the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister was leaked which made clear Cable's view that the Government does not have a "clear and confident message about how we will earn our living in the future".

He went on to say that the UK lacks a "compelling vision of where the country is heading beyond sorting out the fiscal mess", and that the government has missed "valuable opportunities" for growth. He added that the government's industrial strategy is "piecemeal", "not followed through systematically" and shows "no connected approach across government."

He's right. Some of us have been on about this for ages, and I'm delighted Cable has got the message at least.

JLR, remember, contributed a whopping 95% of the overall profit of Tata Motors in the last quarter. The reports suggest that a minority listing for JLR would enable Tata to bank a decent profit on the $2.3 billion purchase price that Tata paid for JLR back in 2008.

With no replacement yet found for the CEO of Tata Motors, who stepped down last September, the view in such pieces is that instead of searching for synergies, Tata could split JLR out and sell off a minority of its shares through an initial public offering (IPO). That could raise cash and help Tata pare down its $4 billion debt.

In addition, a stock market listing would not mean JLR severing its Indian links as Tata would remain the majority owner, and JLR could still look to expand sales and assembly in India.

A new management team at GM Europe was parachuted in by GM head office last Autumn, led by GM Vice President Steve Girsky. Girsky is very much GM CEO Dan Akerson's man, brought in by Akerson to sort out its ailing European arm.

Interestingly, Girsky was one of the GM directors who voted to reverse the previously planned GM Europe sell-off and keep it back in 2009, but has also referred to the need to reduce GM Europe's break-even point (meaning, effectively big capacity cuts).

And GM is indeed looking at the possibility of capacity and job cuts. Dan Ammann, GM's chief financial officer, said the latest losses at GM Europe were unacceptable and that GM was working "rapidly and decisively" to reduce the break-even rate. "We expect to have something to say soon," he stated this week ominously.

There's been a clutch of forecasts out of late on the economy. One by BDO says we're heading for double dip, another, by the CBI, says we'll avoid it. And while the forward looking PMI figures on manufacturing and services started the year in better-than-expected shape, and may indeed hold out the hope that the UK could narrowly avoid an 'official' double-dip recession, at best all we can say is that the economy is still flatlining. Sadly, employers seem to be increasingly taking this on board in their hiring and firing decisions.

So much so that the UK's labour market faces its most difficult quarter since the recession, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) in its recent 'Labour Market Outlook'. Despite the government's hopes of a rebalancing from the public to private sector, the CPID in fact suggests that the private sector is shifting from a "wait and see" mode to one in which more employers lay off workers given anemic growth in the economy.

On the same day it was announced that RDAs would be scrapped and replaced by Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). The RGF was, in fact, an attempt by the government to show that it was responding to criticisms of the policy to scrap RDAs and that it had a plan for growth in England's regions outside London (the latter kept its RDA of course).