You have to go back more than 40 years to find Brits this gloomy about their economy just one year after electing a new government. It was Margaret Thatcher’s first year in power in 1980, when inflation and strikes were raging, and now, it looks like history is repeating itself.
In the latest Ipsos polling, a whopping 68% of people in the UK say they expect the economy to get worse in the next year. That level of post-election pessimism hasn’t been seen since Thatcher’s early days. For context, after the first year of John Major or Tony Blair’s leadership, only about one in four people felt the same dread.
