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Thought I'd post this Guardian front page, not because of the disgraceful headline about Boris – standing up for the leader who saved the world from fascism does not constitute "stoking fear and division" – but because of the red line showing the fall in Britain's output in April. The worst recession in 300 years! How instrumental was the lockdown in causing this economic woe? We can't blame it entirely on the Government's decision to place us all under virtual house arrest on March 23rd since the more modest containment measures introduced on March 16th would have had a negative impact on the economy absent a lockdown and, even if they hadn't been imposed, people would have naturally adapted to the presence of the virus in ways that would have harmed the economy. But the lockdown increased that harm by an order of magnitude. Sweden's economy, for instance, is expected to shrink by just 7% in 2020. The eminent financial journalist who contributes anonymously to this site used the Blavatnik School of Government's tool for ranking different countries according to whether or not they locked down and how severely they locked down and found there was a positive correlation between that and how much their economies are predicted to shrink by. The Government will claim that when it took the ...
