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...
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.
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.
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:
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.