So going back to the UK's poor performance vis-a-vis other comparable economies, one argument

that I've seen being made to explain the UK's poor economic performance is, is to say that

the UK is somewhat unusual in how globalised its economy is, so any shutdown of cross-border

flows is going to have a heavier impact on a more outward-oriented economy like the UK's,

and especially one that depends on services to the

extent that the British economy does. Do you find that argument just wholly and persuasive?

It's really not going to fly. If you take services in general, France has a similar size

service sector, a bit smaller to us. I mean, most of the large developed economies now have

significant service sectors. This is like how capitalism

operates, with some variation in Germany. Obviously, has a much larger manufacturing sector than most.

But France has been nowhere nearly as badly affected as Britain in this. If you take the most

globalised part of services, the bit that if you talk about trading services, and bear in mind,

most services aren't traded, right? It's very hard, internationally, I mean. It's very hard to sell hairdressing to the rest of the world, right? Because you have to fly the hairdresser there or have people fly in. I mean, mostly hairdressing, you don't sell internationally. So most services are not traded internationally. If you look at the bit of services that is trade internationally,

which is basically financial services, which is big in Britain, this hasn't been that much

affected by it. A lot of very large financial companies basically said everyone worked from home

and you can carry on doing more or less what you were doing before. You're just at home now

rather than in the office. So it hasn't had that impact. So this is really not going to

work as an excuse of what's happened in Britain.

The real reason is that this is a government failure on a very grand scale.

They had a government that tried to do as little as possible, supposedly to protect the economy for as long as possible,

made a series of very bad decisions, including stopping, testing, and tracing in early March, that kind of thing.

And then because this was producing a disastrous public health situation, these are the models,

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