The UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has offered a grim projection of a one-third fall in output in the April to June period. Even without a second Covid-19 wave precipitating another government shutdown later in the year, the OBR anticipated a full-year contraction of about 13 per cent of national output, worse than anything in recorded history. Some economists speculated this scale of collapse could be greater than any since the Great Frost of 1709 (though, of course, no one was measuring anything like gross domestic product then). This shows how unprecedented this government-determined recession really is.

However, at a Downing Street briefing last week, Rishi Sunak, the chancellor of the exchequer, said something that was even more disturbing and, ultimately, economically damaging. Acknowledging the ‘tough times’ flagged up by the OBR, Sunak sought to offer some comfort: ‘But we came into this crisis with a fundamentally sound economy.’ On the back of this he went on to insist that the economy will ‘bounce back’.

The great danger of this false portrayal of the past is that today’s self-imposed and brutal recession could be extended into a self-imposed and much more vicious depression than we have experienced up until now. This is not inevitable.

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