The Guardian view on the UK economy: deep depression and a huge bill ahead | Editorial

The pandemic is pushing the UK into a historic slump. The government is now the spender of last resort

To grasp how low are the expectations for the economy, consider this: on Wednesday it was announced that the UK's national output had just had its biggest drop since the great crash of 2008 - and the immediate response of many analysts was surprise that it hadn't fallen further. Even so, the statistics make grim reading. Over the first three months of this year, GDP shrank 2% on the previous quarter. The economy was already slowing in February, and then came the UK's first coronavirus deaths. In March alone, GDP plunged nearly 6% - the greatest contraction since records began in 1997. Amazingly, most of that would have happened over just the last week of the month, the first full week of the government's lockdown. The impact was drastic: travel agent demand collapsed, car plants shut and exports fell off a cliff. The winners were few and far between: the computer industry got a boost as those having to work from home bought laptops, while the paper industry had an amazing few weeks. All that hoarding of toilet roll proved good for someone.

However grim those numbers look, they are just the beginning. The near unanimous view among economists is that the UK is diving into what the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, warns is a significant recession". However bad that sounds, it is probably a gross understatement: the Bank of England is forecasting the worst recession in over 300 years.