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”.
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.