2023. What a year. Maybe not quite as exciting as 2022, of course. Remember the mini budget and all of that. But let's just look at some of the charts telling the story of quite an extraordinary year. It's worth just starting with growth, GDP. This is the level of growth in the UK economy. The Prime Minister said that he wanted to grow the economy. That was one of his much vaunted pledges. Let's look at what actually happened. See that line, let's continue on. It is growth, but not all that much growth. Basically, only a few points of a percentage point. That's not necessarily a recession, but it's not quite as good as what we were seeing before. Before the pandemic, that's where the trend growth line was. We were heading in that direction. Instead, we've gone there and there's a big gap. Worse off, as a country than we would have been potentially had that trend continued. Part of the explanation for that is the cost of living, inflation. This is showing you inflation going back a few years. You can see the big rise in inflation that we saw in 2022, up to double-digits levels.

That's where it started the year. The Prime Minister said, again, in this case, another pledge, he wants to half inflation. Did he half inflation? Well, look, it did come down to 3.9%. So more than half. Whether he had anything to do with that is another question, because really, it's the Bank of England's job to deal with inflation. But nonetheless, that is some good news. However, the cost of living crisis didn't go away. We are still paying 15% more than we were back then. That's the rate of change. But the absolute level of how much we're paying for things, that's gone up an awful lot and it's not coming down. Bank rate as well is another thing that's gone up quite a lot. Most people think actually it's going to come down. It's a 5.25%. Economists think it will start to come down in the year partly because of inflation coming down. You can see that in this. This is the five-year mortgage rate. The rate you're actually paying for five-year fixed rate mortgages, just look at that red line. It is starting to get lower, and that's starting to improve things, but so much higher than it was just a few years ago.

The tax burden. Now, this is something that the Chancellor talked an awful lot about, in particular, saying that he wanted to cut taxes. Did he do that? Well, he did cut a few tax. But look at this. This is the overall level of taxation in the UK, going back a long way. That line there, if we actually just draw a line going back, that's the highest since 1948. We are living in a higher tax economy under this government. That's going to be interesting to see how that pans out. Now, finally, in a sense, perhaps the most important thing of all, there was another one of those pledges, wasn't there? About illegal migration, so stop the boat. This is probably significant. This is legal migration. The picture here, we got updated numbers. I'll update those, which showed that in 2022, net migration, so the number of people coming in minus those going out was 745,000. That's an extraordinary number. Just to put it in historical perspective, because this only goes back a few years. Just have a look at this, okay? This is going back to 1855. Same thing. Net migration has a percentage of the population, so we're adjusting for that.

It is comparable. That line, I mean, blimey, we have never seen anything quite like that. The highest net migration we've ever seen after a few years of really high net migration. Probably that is the chart that we're still going to be talking about for many years to come.