Is anyone really surprised that GDP fell by 20.4 percent in April? Perhaps we should be. It doesn’t sound high enough to me. We have just been through a great economic experiment in which most shops have been forced to close, all pubs and restaurants been forced to shut their doors and the public ordered to remain indoors except for essential visits. Road traffic at one point was back to 1950s levels. And yet the economy officially shrank only by a fifth – taking it back roughly to the size it was in 2003.
I am not sure that these statistics quite pass the smell test. According to the breakdown provided by the ONS, accommodation and catering fell by 88.1 per cent. It makes you wonder how that 11.9 per cent still got spent, given that every pub, restaurant, hotel and holiday park was closed. Do we eat that many takeaways? Arts, entertainment and recreation apparently fell by 39.7
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