Richard Partington – The Guardian June 12, 2020
Britain’s economy slumped by 20.4% in April in the biggest monthly decline since records began, as the coronavirus lockdown paralysed the country.
Official figures for gross domestic product (GDP), the broadest measure of economic prosperity, from the Office for National Statistics showed the impact of measures that forced businesses across the UK to close and millions of workers to be put on furlough.
Revealing the scale of the economic downturn in the first full month of lockdown, April was a particularly tough month for employees and companies, with vast swathes of the UK economy unable to operate.
Virtually no area of the economy was left unscathed as people were told to stay at home to prevent the spread of Covid-19 and businesses closed. Britain’s dominant services sector shrank by a fifth, fuelled by the closure of the high street, evaporating sales of cars, as well as pubs, restaurants and hotels.
Faced with disruption to international supply chains and the need to protect workers, shutdowns in production at many factories and the running of reduced hours at others led manufacturing output to fall by a quarter. With cranes and diggers across the country falling idle as the virus spread, construction output plunged by 40%.
Jonathan Athow, deputy national statistician for economic statistics at the ONS, said: “April’s fall in GDP is the biggest the UK has ever seen, more than three times larger than last month and almost 10 times larger than the steepest pre-Covid-19 fall.”
Although some lockdown measures are now being eased, the snapshot from the ONS shows Britain’s economy at the onset of the deepest recession in living memory, in a crash far outstripping the worst damage recorded in the 2008 financial crisis.
Over the wider three-month period to the end of April, GDP fell by 10.4%, as government restrictions on movement dramatically reduced economic activity. Alongside the domestic hit to activity as Boris Johnson’s government imposed harsh restrictions on business and social life, the ONS said the UK’s trade with the rest of the world was also badly affected by the pandemic, with large falls in both the import and export of cars, fuels, works of art and clothing.
This week the OECD said the UK economy would shrink by more than any other developed nation as businesses struggled to recover from the pandemic. It predicted that GDP would contract by 11.5% in 2020 or 14% if the virus returned and forced the government into a second lockdown.
What do people expect when your Government Intentionally uses a Wrecking Ball to the Economy and the Fabric of the Country.
Time to hoist nooses over lampposts in Whitehall
As a sceptic of this ludicrous lockdown from the beginning, I just wonder if there is anyone who could believe that this destruction of our economy has been done because of a mild virus with a minuscule death rate. Up to now it is no worse than seasonal flu, with thirty odd thousand (highly exaggerated) deaths blamed on covid19. So when I see people reacting like it is the black death or bubonic plague with a death rate of 30% to 40% of the population I am shocked by the stupidity of it all. If you look the death count of thirty odd thousand as a percentage of the whole UK population, which is 65 million, that works out at about one person dead in every two thousand. Hardly what could be called a pandemic by any stretch of the imagination. There must be some other reason, and that’s what is really scary.
Margaret Thatcher was Rothschilds pet as was pervert Edward Heath
Thatcher closed the mines shipbuilding cars and lorries motorbikes steel all heavy industry and then put a heavy VAT tax on small industry closing much of that in a year
People thought it was just another incompetent politician, but no it was a deliberate attempt to smash our industrial base.
How much money does Rothschilds actually have
Jesus Chris said show me a penny ”
when i was a boy in the 1960s many penny coins in use were victorian and had been in circulation 100 years
If that penny is spent one a day each year thats 365 times
multiply that by 100 and you can see that penny had been spent 565,000 times assuming that of that penny one third is tax this means
that penny earnt for rothschild £18111500
what about if it had been a half crown ?
Rothschild according to a whistleblowr butler sold his soul for all the money in the world, looks to me like thats not far off
The realist I am glad you said Whitehall the far left cesspit of the unelected far left everyone of them nedds to hang for their crimes and if they could hunt down a certain carl Jones he should be hung alongside them for sheer hypocrissy