Until today there were only 15 years since 1700 in which the UK economy shrank by more than 4.5 per cent. The financial crisis was not one of them. In 2009, at the height of what some now call the Great Recession, GDP fell 4.1 per cent. Today the Office for National Statistics told us that the decline in 2020 was more than twice that. At 9.9 per cent, the economic contraction caused by the Covid-19 pandemic was the deepest since the Great Frost of 1709.

Source: The Times February 12, 2021 09:05 UTC