Food For Thought

Lower inflation does not mean that prices are going down. It means only that they are going up by less than the last time that anyone officially checked, and in this case only by very, very slightly less. Today's inflation rate comes straight after yesterday's unemployment figures, so whatever happened to the impossibility of mass unemployment and galloping inflation at the same time?

Heaven help us all if the price of our staple foods were ever to be set by Rachel Reeves, but if that really were a competitive market, then no such intervention would have occurred to anyone. Rishi Sunak wanted to do it in May 2023, when the Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party was Lee Anderson. And now, this. Does Yvette Cooper agree with Ed Balls that Reeves was comparable to Stalin?

Nothing would be done about any of this by Wes Streeting, whose resignation statement was heard by a half-empty chamber, with Streeting himself flanked by Jess Phillips but otherwise surrounded by interning nephews, nieces and godchildren who had been granted special dispensation to sit on the green benches. 

Yet as for Andy Burnham, he cleaves to the position of the last Conservative Government that male bodies should be allowed in the ladies' if their owners felt like it, and he therefore has no reason to oppose the continuation of that Government's austerity programme, either. These things are all of a piece, along with the ban on British oil and gas while buying it from Russia, just as we have spent 40 years importing coal from child and slave labour at the ends of the Earth while sitting on a thousand years' worth of our own.