The quarterly GDP figures released last week by the National Bureau of Statistics confirm the disastrous state of the British economy.

Writer Ross Clark said, in a report published by the British newspaper "Telegraph", that Covid-19 has destroyed all economies, but none of them has reached the extent of Britain's economy.

The average drop in GDP for the European Union is 12%, which is just about half that of Britain, but nobody should fool themselves that things cannot get any worse.

The next is worse

Perhaps the most surprising statistics for this week is the unemployment rate, which is still almost at its lowest level in 45 years. In this case, how can there be a 20% contraction in the economy without the unemployment rate rising?

The writer explained that thanks to the scheme to grant workers leave, the wave of high unemployment rates has not hit us yet, but we will witness it this fall when it is canceled, with the addition of several million unemployed people, and the economy will shrink by 20%.

But not only the economy, and the number of deaths from Covid-19 may have decreased to a few dozen per week, but real human misery has not yet appeared, which will be reflected in the harmful health effects of long-term unemployment, and the death toll from cancer and other health conditions. It went undiagnosed and untreated during the lockdown, as well as the cost of the UK being a poorer country than it was.

Last month, the Ministry of Health and Social Care published an analysis of the cost of Covid-19 and the lockdown, in which it stated that the closure will ultimately cost more years of a person's life than the disease itself, and if you think that the past ten years have represented an era of austerity, it is in fact not comparable to what is to come.

Lockdown measures will ultimately cost more years of a person's life than the disease itself (Al Jazeera)

Financial deficit

According to estimates by the Office of Budget Responsibility, this year the fiscal deficit will reach more than 300 billion pounds sterling, an amount more than twice the withdrawal fees left by Gordon Brown - the former Prime Minister of Britain - after the economic crisis of 2008-2009, which was seen as A major obstacle the country faced at that time.

And if interest rates were to miraculously remain at zero, or even just below zero, then surely it can continue that way. But it will not take much of a rise in interest rates for the cost of servicing the government’s debt to become a heavy burden, which calls for deep cuts in public spending.

Printing of money will be the government's way out of the financial crisis. While governments can print money, they cannot print resources, and we will return to our situation in the 1970s when the cost of living was sometimes rising by 30% per year.

The fiscal deficit this year will reach more than 300 billion pounds (Reuters)

Health or the economy?

How can a government that has led to the deepest recession ever, and whose efforts to address the epidemic have failed in so many areas, have so little support since the last elections?

Recently, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was attributed to a comment in which he said that he would never have guessed how easy it would be to take away people's freedoms, nor how difficult it would be to restore them. A large portion of the population does not care about the deprivation or the economic damage caused by the closure, but rather is concerned only with reducing the number of new infections and the number of deaths Daily, and everything else can wait.

There is a phrase we used to hear a lot at the beginning of this crisis and it is still the prevailing belief of many Britons: “Life is more important than money,” but the truth is that the two are interconnected, and that an economic disaster is like disease, costing lives, and with the continuation of the second wave it seems that it will be overlooked. About everything.

This situation will continue as long as the rescue plans continue, and as long as the state is still able to spend, the economic decline will remain an abstract idea, and as long as the Treasury Department can maintain the illusion that the actual unemployed still have jobs that they might one day return to, many Voters will still be preoccupied with disease, but a false depression is coming to an end, and soon after we will be in the midst of a real painful crisis.