Official figures confirmed Britain’s economy entered a shallow recession last year, leaving Prime Minister Rishi Sunak with a challenge to reassure voters that the economy is safe with him before an election expected later this year.
Gross domestic product shrank by 0.1% in the third quarter and by 0.3% in the fourth quarter, unchanged from preliminary estimates, the Office for National Statistics said on Thursday.
The figures will be disappointing for Sunak who has been accused by the opposition Labour Party - which is far ahead in opinion polls - of overseeing “Rishi’s recession”.
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The economy is safe with him? It just went into recession. How in any way is that safe?
Because small recessions are not a bad thing contrary to what people would have you think. A recession takes people out of unproductive industries such as think tanks and makes them hotel staff etc. The problem with recessions is like forest fires. The longer you prevent them from occurring naturally, the worse they are going to be for everybody when they do, because instead of just getting rid of a little excess, it’s going to have to purge a lot and burn everything in its path.
For comparison, the EU was also down 0.1% in the third quarter, but then rebounded to 0.1% growth in Q4, while the UK continued downward. I’m just a dumb American, but I would think that with Brexit, every single quarter with GDP numbers worse than the EU will be an albatross around the Tories’ neck, even if/when Labour is back in power.
