Back in recession says the data on the UK economy in Q1’2012. A ‘technical recession’ is when real GDP falls for two successive quarters. And the -0.2% fall announced today puts the UK in that category.
Well, it’s only the first attempt at estimating GDP for Q1’2012. A lot of analysts are saying that it will be revised up above zero in the next estimate because construction and services are being underestimated.
But even if it is, the figure shows that the UK economy is not recovering by anything like the rate necessary to get unemployment down or create new jobs in the private sector to replace the crushing reductions in public services and jobs being imposed by the UK coalition.
As I have reported on many occasions before, the recovery from the Great Recession in the UK and elsewhere in the mature capitalist economies is the weakest since the Great Depression. Indeed, in the case of the UK, it is even weaker. Look at this graph.
Part of the reason that it is worse now than in the Great Depression is that it was in the early 1920s that the UK had its biggest decline. In effect, the UK entered a long depression well before the Great Depression hit the US. And that is what all the major capitalist economies of the US, the UK, Europe and Japan are now in: a long depression with little economic growth ahead.
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