Britain's hidden recession

Capitalist media and the BBC keep using the term "technical recession" to downplay Britain's economic malaise, but the GDP per capita stats show how bad it's really been

According to convention two successive quarters of falling GDP constitute a recession, which means Britain technically went into recession at the end of 2023 as a result of hard-pressed families cutting back on spending due to soaring housing costs (mortgages, rent hikes), obscene utilities profiteering (especially energy bills), and below inflation wage rises.

Capitalist media and the BBC seem to love downplaying the term "recession" by calling it a "technical recession" and there’s no justification for this softening language because there’s no functional difference between a "recession" and a "technical recession".

They’re just using this redundant word to make it seem like Britain’s only in economic difficulties on some kind of technicality, rather in real economic trouble.

It’s obvious to everyone that issues like obscene corporate profiteering and Brexit bureaucracy have been at fault for the spiralling cost of essentials like energy and food over the last couple of years, but for ideological reasons the Tory government and the Bank of England have decided to hike up interest rates and stamp down on workers wages in response to these soaring prices.

The Tory government simply cannot admit that their Brexit has caused significant economic damage and dramatically hiked the cost of importing and exporting goods, and the entire establishment order is so addicted to hard-right "free market" dogma that they simply won’t intervene to support hard pressed families and clamp down on excessive capitalist profiteering.

Everyone knows that times have been tough for much longer than just the second half of 2023 when the economy as a whole shrank, and the proof of this lies in the GDP per capita figures.

When we look at the national wealth in comparison to the total population, we’re now into the seventh consecutive quarter of economic stagnation, which is the longest run without per capita growth since records began in 1955.

This unprecedented streak without population-adjusted growth means that the UK economy is still 1.1% smaller than it was in 2019 before the coronavirus pandemic!

In comparison the EU has grown 2.7% in the same period, and the US economy has grown 6% on the same per capita measure.

Between early 2022 and mid 2023 the UK economy was only technically growing at all as a result of high levels of immigration. And that’s not the comparatively tiny trickle of refugees arriving on boats to seek asylum, but the hundreds of thousands of economic and family visa migrants arriving via aeroplane.

It’s quite clear that the UK has been in a hidden recession for the best part of two years, obscured only by population growth, and what’s most infuriating is that it’s been entirely avoidable.

The establishment order has caused this long economic slump with 14 years of ruinous austerity cutbacks followed by the ideologically driven choice to protect obscene capitalist profiteering at the expense of millions of ordinary people, and it’s now becoming so bad that they can’t even hide their economic failure behind mass immigration anymore.

Dispiritingly there are no signs of hope for the future either.

The Tory Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is intent on using this Tory-made economic stagnation as an excuse to impose another ruinous round of austerity cutbacks and lavishing even more tax breaks and handouts on the mega-rich and corporations who have looted the country into recession, and Starmer’s version of the Labour Party have been repeatedly signalling their fealty to the same greedy interests (no tax rises on the rich, no excess profit taxes, no rent controls, no cap on bankers’ bonuses, etc) and outright hostility to those who say Labour’s job is actually to represent workers’ interests, not the interests of their exploitative capitalist bosses.

You can’t subject an economy to 14 years of austerity ruination and falling productivity, reward those who looted the economy into recession with tax cuts and handouts, and then expect to magically make things better with a nauseating dose of "more of the same" (whether this snake oil is served from a red bottle or a blue one).

Both Labour and the Tories are promising recovery and economic growth, but as long as they continue pushing more damaging austerity cutbacks and continue actively supporting the greedy minority who have looted the country into recession, it seems likely that the economy will only actually get out of this so-called "technical recession" on the technicality of further population growth.