Tory policies will determine how bad this recession gets – and the signs aren't good | Owen Jones

Boris Johnson vowed that austerity, and the misery it inflicted, would not return after Covid. Labour must hold him to it

It's not recessions that should scare us the most: it's the political choices that follow. Due to a failure to suppress its public health crisis and the subsequent lockdowns, Britain suffered its worst annual decline in 300 years, with a 9.9% drop in GDP in 2020. Behind this abstract statistic is an all too real human crisis: lost jobs, cut wages, rising debts, rent arrears, hunger. Whether this crisis is exacerbated or resolved will not depend on market forces, but on political responses.

More than a decade ago, it was David Cameron of all people who declared: It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money and it's time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB - general wellbeing." It is normally those who have too much of it who claim there's more to life than money - those who spend sleepless nights staring at ceilings panicking about energy bills rarely utter those words - but the point about wellbeing trumping economic statistics is an important one.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist