SOMETHING astonishing emanated from the television screen a week ago this morning, to unsettle the breakfast-time routine.

It was not the General Election result. There had always seemed to be at least a strong outside chance that the Conservatives would win a majority.

Rather it was a Conservative voter explaining to a broadcaster at Glasgow Central Station why he had put the cross where he did on the ballot paper.

Specifically, he declared that the previous Conservative-led Coalition Government had done an incredible job on the economy.

It seemed like the set-up for a punchline: incredibly bad!

But nay, he just meant 'incredible'. And he went on to lavish praise upon Chancellor George Osborne.

Without wishing to heap more pressure on the poor beleaguered Labour Party, surely it must shoulder some blame for the existence of such a view. Not necessarily for the personal opinion of the gentleman at Central Station, but certainly in terms of a seemingly prevalent view among the broader electorate that Prime Minister David Cameron and Mr Osborne have not done a bad job on the economy.

The election result indicates that such a view - that it has not been a bad performance from the Conservatives on the economy - was far more widespread than you might have imagined. Especially given the hard evidence.

We should not underestimate the impact on the electorate in the south of the Conservatives' apparently anti-Scottish sentiment. It seemed a tiny bit like the promotion of the legend of Sawney Bean in English rumour magazines centuries ago, although this time the warning was not about cannibalism but about the SNP possibly having a major say in a future Westminster Government.

However, notwithstanding the presentation of the anti-Scottish card, the economy was also a key political football in the election campaign.

There is plenty in the Conservatives' vital statistics that should have enabled Labour to make the play, hemming Messrs Cameron and Osborne into their own box. But former Labour leader Ed Miliband could not capitalise on the opportunity.

A debate knocks around in the background about whether Labour spent too much in the run-up to the crash. But this is a red herring. If you look at the numbers, in terms of what happened to the UK's budget deficit and debt after recession kicked in big style in 2008, it is clear that virtually all of the impact on the public finances stemmed from the global financial crash, rather than anything that Labour did.

The idea the Conservatives would have regulated the City and financial sector to any greater extent than Labour is just laughable.

Labour should stand its ground when the Conservatives point the finger over the crash and the 2008/09 recession. Why should it be forced into some sort of apology for global events outwith its control? But Labour has seemed sheepish on this front, perhaps lacking the confidence to point out many other countries, not led by Gordon Brown, suffered similarly when the crisis hit.

Much has been made this week, in some quarters, of party leadership candidate Liz Kendall saying she thinks the Labour administration was spending too much before the crash. But was it really, in any significant way?

What did not play as big was her perfectly correct assertion that Labour did not cause the financial crisis.

What is more, the scheme put together in autumn 2008 to rescue the UK banking sector from the brink, by Mr Brown and then Chancellor Alistair Darling, may well be recognised in economic textbooks in decades to come as a fine piece of work.

When Mr Osborne hiked the scale of annual public spending cuts and tax rises to be in place by 2014/15 by £40 billion to £113bn in his first Budget in June 2010, the forecast was the UK would achieve growth of 2.3 per cent in 2011, 2.8 per cent the following year, 2.9 per cent in 2013, and 2.7 per cent in both 2014 and 2015. These forecasts were produced by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

In 2011, the first full year in which Mr Osborne was steering the economy, the UK fell miserably short of the OBR's forecast, recording growth of just 1.6 per cent, with the strength seemingly coming out of the emerging recovery after Labour left office. The UK grew by just 0.7 per cent in 2012. In the following year, gross domestic product increased by 1.7 per cent.

The 2014 growth rate has been revised up by the Office for National Statistics to 2.8 per cent, marginally above the OBR's 2010 projection.

However, the Bank of England revealed on Wednesday that it expected UK growth to decelerate to 2.5 per cent this year, falling back below a long-term average annual rate put by Governor Mark Carney at about 2.75 per cent. And the Bank, which has cut its growth projections sharply, now expects below-trend expansion in the UK until at least 2017.

Meanwhile, the European Commission declared this week that the UK had not taken effective action to correct its excessive deficit.

The Conservatives would point to seemingly good employment numbers. Then again, there are lots of zero-hours contracts. And then there are all the people who are self-employed but are actually under-employed or not really occupied at all. These people may be wary of the stigma attached to benefit claimants by the Conservatives.

Mr Carney this week highlighted the UK's poor productivity. Aberdeen Asset Management chief economist Lucy O'Carroll cited the part under-investment had played in this. Business investment, supposedly a key plank of the previous Coalition Government's economic policy, has proved a huge disappointment.

And Conservative plans to further dismantle employment safeguards, by curbing workers' rights to take industrial action, will reduce people's wage-bargaining power even more, weighing on incomes. Then there is Mr Cameron's hazardous referendum on the UK's continuing membership of the European Union.

The Conservatives' poor economic record should have been an open goal for Labour during the election campaign. But Labour decided to pass the ball backwards and knock it around the box for a bit, before having it taken away by the other side.

Labour should focus on finding a leader able to get the simple messages across: his or her party was not to blame for the global financial crash and deep recession of 2008/09 and the Conservatives' economic record has been weak.

It sounds incredibly simple. And it is.