DAVID CAMERON has issued a plea to Chinese tourists to help save the UK economy.


Popular on LondonNet


Many experts fear a double dip recession and a second wave of big job losses thanks to government spending cuts, so Cameron is on the look out for some good news on the economic front.

It looks like he’s found future prosperity in the shape of plane loads of wallet-bulging Chinese visitors.

“Currently we only have 0.5% of the market share of Chinese tourists,” said the Prime Minister in a speech at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park today.

“If we could increase that to just 2.5% this could add over half a billion pounds of spending to our economy and this could mean as many as 10,000 new jobs.”

While unemployment in the UK as a whole went down in the latest figures, London shed yet more jobs.

Luckily the PM has a plan to help get the capital out of the mire: as long as we don’t mind hanging on for a couple of years, Cameron reckons the Olympics will see us right.

He says he wants to ensure that “London 2012 provides the best economic and tourism legacy that any Olympic host city has ever done and that sets us on a path to break into the top five tourist destinations in the world.”

Nice plan, but the PM’s might want to have a word with his chum, London Mayor Boris Johnson, before getting too excited. Johnson was called “rude, arrogant and disrespectful” by the Chinese when at the Beijing Olympics.