YET another crippling rise in 40-year high inflation shows that workers have no choice but to fight for better wages, union leaders warned today.

Price increases, which had slowed slightly in January, unexpectedly rose by 0.3 per cent to 10.4 per cent in the year to February, the Office for National Statistics confirmed. 

The rise was fuelled by the fastest jump in food prices in 45 years, as the soaring cost of vegetables, milk, olive oil and eggs pushed food inflation to an eye-watering 18.2 per cent — the highest since 1978.

Consumer group Which? warned that the cost of some everyday groceries, which lower-income people depend on, has more than doubled over the last year amid supply chain pressures and climate change-hit harvests on the continent.

This has coincided with surging energy bills following the Ukraine war and rising interest rates after ex-prime minister Liz Truss’s botched Budget last autumn. 

Unite the union, which has repeatedly slammed Tory ministers for urging striking workers to show “wage restraint” while doing little to curb rampant corporate profiteering, said that Brits “continue to be hammered by high prices.”

General secretary Sharon Graham said: “Unite’s own research shows that it’s profits propelling inflation, while workers’ wages struggle to keep up.

“There’s no end in sight to the cost-of-living crisis and people are sick of seeing their budgets get stretched thinner and thinner every month while big business racks up record profits.”

TUC head Paul Nowak demanded a “comprehensive plan to get wages rising across the economy and to boost social security.

“That’s how we build an economy that rewards work not wealth,” he said.

GMB leader Gary Smith accused Downing Street of being “utterly complacent about the wages crisis.”

He argued the fact that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is nowhere near his target to halve inflation by the end of the year “should be a huge warning to working people — who face yet more pain due to the Tories’ disastrous economic policies.”

Labour’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said that families are “feeling worse off and nothing is working better than it did 13 years ago.”

Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman said that the Tories “cannot be trusted to protect people in a cost-of-living crisis that they are responsible for.”