RE: Normal Service29 Sep 2023 17:24
Your anti-Brexit bashing unfortunately doesn't match up with today's news and filtered.....:
ONS upgrades size of the UK economy
By Ross Clark
The Office for National Statistics has revised the UK’s economic growth figures since Covid upwards. Instead of still struggling to reach its pre-pandemic high, it seems that the UK economy surpassed 2019 levels two years ago.
Previously, the ONS estimated the economy in the last quarter of 2021 to be 1.2 per cent smaller than pre-pandemic. It now calculates that it was 0.6 per cent larger. The ONS says its initial forecasts were compromised by the difficulties of calculating GDP during the pandemic.
The upshot is that instead of performing worse than the economies of France and Germany since the pandemic (and Brexit, which took effect six weeks before the lockdowns began), the UK economy has now outperformed them.
But no one should get carried away. UK GDP – along with the whole of Europe – remains sluggish. Europe’s economy has been pretty moribund since the 2008/09 crisis, in some cases shockingly so. Italy’s GDP last year, per capita, was 16.5 per cent lower than it was in 2008. Britain has not – yet, at any rate – been able to escape the cycle of low growth which has come to bedevil the continent. But it does put the brakes on the theory that Brexit was an act of self-harm which was going to damage Britain uniquely as the EU sailed off on its own to a brighter future.
The ONS’ revisions to UK GDP didn’t end in 2021. It has also revised economic growth in the first quarter of this year from 0.1 per cent growth to 0.3 per cent growth. This is very significant, given that this time last year the Bank of England was predicting that the UK would spend all of this year in recession and others such as the IMF forecast that the UK would be the worst-performing of any major economy this year.
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