While the coronavirus pandemic was the biggest challenge for most developed economies last year, the UK was weighed down by a combination of destructive factors. The local economy suffered the double whammy of COVID-19 and Brexit.
As a result, the British economy endured its deepest recession. According to the Bank of England, this was the biggest economic slump in over 300 years. Moreover, both the UK government's Office for Budget Responsibility and the Office for National Statistics agreed with the regulator. Notably, such unanimity of views among the departments is rare.
In 2020, UK GDP contracted by 9.9%, much more severely than expected. The last time the economy saw a similar drop in output was in 1709, when its gross domestic product shrank by 13.4%. At that time, Britain was actively involved in the War of the Spanish Succession, which had serious monetary and economic consequences for the country. Apart from that, it survived the harshest winter in the last 500 years.
Interestingly, even the impact of World War II on the British economy was not so strong. In 1945, GDP fell by only 4.6%. In 2009, amid the global financial crisis, the economic output declined by 4.1%.