You Better Watch Out, You Better Not Cry?

"Falling inflation" does not mean that prices are falling. It means only that they are going up by less than the last time that anyone officially checked. In this case, prices are going up by 3.6 per cent rather than by 3.2 per cent. But contain your glee. Below the headline, food inflation has gone up from 4.5 per cent to 4.9 per cent. The same again or worse next month, and we shall have ourselves a Merry Little Christmas.

All this, and five per cent unemployment, too. Tell us again how there cannot be both mass unemployment and galloping inflation. There can be, there is, and from the point of view of the people responsible, there is supposed to be. Almost all Labour and other MPs regard that as neither a failure nor an accident, but as something to be engineered and celebrated, as it has been and is being, since the fear of destitution is fundamental to their control of the rest of us. They are the Heirs to Blair, whom Margaret Thatcher identified as her greatest achievement.