Disastrous - there is hardly any other way to describe the balance sheet of the British economy for the second quarter. Around a fifth of economic output was lost in the past quarter, which was largely characterized by a strict corona lockdown, compared to the previous quarter - this is more than in any other important industrialized country. Only if the first quarter, in which the crash began almost everywhere, is included in the analysis, the United Kingdom no longer comes off worse than the EMU bottom-quarter Spain, which was also particularly hard hit by the pandemic - but that is only a weak one Consolation.

How could it come to this? It was only late in the day that the British government took the risk of the epidemic seriously enough and decided to close schools and businesses and to restrict exits. This meant that the economic losses in the first quarter were still limited, but the infection rate was all the more serious. Prime Minister Boris Johnson then tightened the reins for a long time during the spring months, probably also under the impression of his own Covid illness. Only in the second half of May did industry and construction gradually resume regular operations, stationary retail was not allowed to reopen until mid-June, and catering even had to wait until July.

The consequences of this long, artificial coma can be seen in today's figures: the construction industry shrank by 35 percent in the second quarter, even a little more than the catering trade. This was also reflected in particularly weak investment demand (-25%). Otherwise, the similarly high losses in industry and in the service sector of around 20 percent show that no sector of the economy was able to escape the devastating consequences of the weeks of standstill. Even public consumption shrank significantly and was therefore hardly able to fulfill its function as an economic stabilizer. The export industry recorded the smallest minus, which gave Great Britain's otherwise chronically deficit foreign trade the highest trade surplus in decades and a positive contribution to growth of over three percent for the economy as a whole.

But there are also bright spots: The monthly economic figures show a strong recovery since June. Economic output grew by almost nine percent in the final month of the second quarter, which even gives hope for double-digit results in the current third quarter. Nevertheless, the country will still be far from being able to compensate for the losses incurred. The gap to the pre-crisis level at the end of the year is likely to be around eight percent, and with a GDP decline of twelve percent, Great Britain should also bear the “red lantern” in 2020 as a whole in the circle of the G20.