[rosstaylor90]

No, the primary reason is that the UK is a heavily service-based economy. Quarantine impacts the service-based subset of the economy the most. Therefore it makes sense that the UK would be hard hit. A “nation of shopkeepers” suffers when the shops are closed...

[gvjddbnvdrbv]

Really? I'd have thought that stuff like financial, accounting and legal services (things the UK is good at) can be done via work from home rather better than e.g. car and machine parts manufacturing...

[wdb]

Yes, but all the restaurants (lunches), cafe shops (for their coffees during breaks), etc aren't frequented as much because everyone is working from home.

Probably the more clientele in the employee's living neighbourhood doesn't equal it out. While I shop more at the local diary store I don't buy lunches etc.

[gvjddbnvdrbv]

The UK doesn't have a uniquely large number of restaurants and cafes, nor are the UK's cafes and restaurants uniquely affected by the lockdowns.

When they say the UK has a strong service industry that drives exports etc they don't mean cafes and bars they mean financial, legal etc services. Those should have stayed strong. I suspect some of the decline is actually Brexit related decline in financial services.

[thu2111]

Brexit has been in the works for years and the economy was growing before COVID. The obsession with blaming all misfortune on Brexit is tiring.

The UK is hard hit because it went from a fairly moderate response to swinging hard into a deliberate policy of panicking the population as much as possible. The turning point was Imperial College / Ferguson predicting millions of deaths if there wasn't hard lockdown immediately. The UK's SAGE committee is largely responsible for the resulting devastation, including deaths: they literally told people they had a quasi-patriotic duty to stay away from hospitals. This is almost certainly why England is one of the few places in the world to report excess mortality amongst young adults. They have been opening and re-closing parts of the country with only hours of notice ... given on Twitter. Even Trump hasn't done that.

They even used imagery straight from 28 Days Later:

https://cdni0.trtworld.com/w960/h540/q75/76203_20200408T1313...

This was largely a consequence of SAGE "experts" telling the government they had to deliberately create fear in the population.

Is it any wonder the economy has been crushed when the government deliberately set out to make the population think COVID is the Rage virus?

[gvjddbnvdrbv]

A no deal hard Brexit was not obvious before the last election.

I said a percentage of the decrease. Obviously Brexit has not caused a 20% economic drop.

[celticninja]

In the UK the hospitality industry as whole contributes 3.9% of GDP. Which is higher than similar European economies.