2020

Friday

Kate Andrews

What a record GDP slump means for economic recovery

It’s been no mystery that the UK economy took a severe beating in 2020: two lockdowns, a host of circuit-breakers and fire-breakers, Christmas cancelled for millions of people. The experience of an economy forced to hibernate for months on end last year is reflected in today’s GDP update from the Office for National Statistics, showing the economy contracted 9.9 per cent last year — the ‘largest yearly fall on record’ and biggest contraction in 300 years. The fall isn’t quite as stark as the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast alongside the Chancellor’s spending review last November (an estimated 11.3 per cent), but it still represents one of the largest economic

Sunday

Johan Norberg

Why 2020 was the fourth best year in history

The Spectator has a long and proud history of fact-based optimism, sometimes represented by an end-of-the-year article explaining that statistics bear out that this was the best year ever, even if you didn’t get that impression when following the news. Well, 2020 is not a good candidate for such an article. ‘The worst year ever’, according to a Time Magazine cover story. We all share that sentiment to some extent. We will remember 2020 as a year of disease and death, and lockdowns that separated friends and relatives, and businesses from customers, causing depressions of both the economic and clinical sort. But if we were to take it literally –

Thursday

James Walton

A documentary about the M25 that will make your heart soar

When a 90-minute documentary is introduced with the words ‘This is the M25’, you’d be within your rights not to feel your heart soar. Nor would you necessarily expect what follows to be full of wonders of all kinds — natural, historical, literary and scientific. Yet this is exactly what happened in BBC Four’s The Hidden Wilds of the Motorway, presented by Helen Macdonald. Macdonald is best known for her 2014 bestseller H is for Hawk, which mixed memoir and falconry with a biography of the author T.H. White. In Tuesday’s programme, she was on similarly genre-blending form as she set off on a television journey that, in a rare