UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak, BBC
The United Kingdom has officially entered recession for the first time in 11 years. It is the deepest recession ever recorded and much worse than most other developed nations, sparking huge fears for the future of workers and businesses in the country.
It was shown that the UK economy has shrunk by 20.4% compared with the first three months of the year. To put this into perspective, the UK economy has shrunk by almost the same amount as the Greek economy during the whole of the 2010's economic crisis that lasted years, in just three months.
Economic activity has plummeted due to the CoVid-19 lockdown. The irony being that the UK shut down later than most other countries in a bleak attempt at saving the economy, only to see a higher death toll than any other nation in Europe, a lockdown that therefore had to be extended longer than most other European nations, and now an economic recession deeper than their European neighbours. While the UK has experienced a fall in GDP of around 20% countries such as the United States and Germany have experienced falls of just around 10%.
The UK is still suffering many dozens of deaths each day from CoVid-19, with a daily death count of well over 100 being frequently reported. The country is now only behind Belgium, and the tiny principality of San Marino, in terms of deaths per million from Covid-19, far surpassing Italy, Spain, Brazil and the United States.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak told the BBC that the UK is:
"Grappling with something that is unprecedented".
However, shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds blamed the Conservative government for the scale of the economic decline, saying:
"A downturn was inevitable after lockdown - but Johnson's jobs crisis wasn't. We've already got the worst excess death rate in Europe - now we're on course for the worst recession too. That's a tragedy for the British people and it's happened on Boris Johnson's watch."
Unemployment has risen 126% since the start of the pandemic with 2.8 million UK workers jobless. The fear is that this number is about to skyrocket as the year progresses. This is because the UK government has since March been paying the wages of some 9 million workers via the furlough scheme. This furlough scheme is now to be wound down as workers are urged to return to work, the fear is that many businesses have no ability to restart trading effectively and that they have been keeping on workers only because they were being furloughed. Without furlough, many businesses may impose mass layoffs to the workforce.
A potentially very bleak few years now faces the UK.
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