It's almost certainly because the Spanish lockdown started earlier in Q1 - if I remember rightly, other articles have mentioned that the UK saw less of an econo

It's almost certainly because the Spanish lockdown started earlier in Q1 - if I remember rightly, other articles have mentioned that the UK saw less of an economic decline in Q1 than many other European countries precisely because of the timing of our lockdown. Comparing Q1 to Q2 results and comparing countries based on that would therefore be misleading, because it's not measuring actual economic differences but an artifact of how lockdown timing happened to align with our arbitrary measurement cut-offs. (Also, speaking of misleading, it's interesting that all of a sudden the BBC can correctly compare US GDP figures with European ones now that it's the UK they're comparing with. Previous coverage quoted US quarterly figures that had been multiplied by four to annualize them next to non-annualized European ones, making it look like the US was doing worse economically than other European countries like Spain when it was doing better.)