FOOD prices rising at their fastest for 45 years means inflation is driving a social emergency for millions of households across Britain.
Tory cuts since 2010 have already led to widespread hunger. It was not so long ago that foodbanks were almost unknown — Britain’s biggest provider the Trussell Trust had just 35 foodbanks in 2010-11. The figure had swelled to 1,300 by 2019-20 — a rise of over 3,600 per cent.
Most media reports paint the “cost-of-living crisis” as a recent phenomenon. It is not — today’s pain has been building for 15 years in which wages have been held below inflation.
Tory governments have presided over a steady rise in child poverty — with 800,000 more children growing up in poverty in 2018 than when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition took office in 2010. They have driven a steady rise in in-work poverty too. In 2010 one in five children in poverty came from a working household; that had risen to one in four by the time Boris Johnson became PM.
So this crisis has been a long time coming.
The lie that wages are driving inflation has been exposed in detail by the trade union movement, especially the invaluable economic studies published over the past year by Unite’s research unit Unite Investigates. Wages cannot be driving inflation when they are falling so far behind it — and have been doing so for over a decade.
Prices are being ratcheted up by monopolistic corporate giants. Wholesale food prices are rising — but decision-makers in corporate boardrooms are raising prices much faster than that.
Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda increased their profits by 97 per cent in 2021 — and “the eight top UK food manufacturers made profits of £22.9 billion,” as Unite leader Sharon Graham points out. Food industry giants have not hit the headlines in the way energy exploiters like BP and Shell have — but their profits are just as obscene. Unite’s warning that we are facing a “greedflation” crisis points the finger of blame directly at those responsible — the corporate profiteers.
No major political party has risen to the scale of the crisis. Jeremy Corbyn’s call for immediate price controls on staple goods will not find an echo on either front bench. But it should be taken up as a campaigning demand by an emboldened labour movement.
The world is changing. News last week that 60 per cent of Spain is now in drought — with ground water disappearing entirely from some regions and farmers describing their land as “bone dry” — is predicted to cause crop failures across 3.5 million hectares of farmland. Economist James Meadway points out that 32 per cent of vegetables and 20 per cent of fruit sold in Britain is grown in Spain.
The salad shortages blamed on Brexit by liberal obsessives and used as material for lame jokes about Tory incompetence by the Labour Party are an early warning sign of a much more serious crisis.
Climate change is disrupting global food production and supply. Worldwide only China, which has built up years’ worth of grain reserves to shield its population from supply and price fluctuations, has devoted serious consideration to what this could mean. Preventing the return of malnutrition on a serious scale means overhauling both the production and distribution of food to place human need over bosses’ profits.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt claims inflation will slow significantly by the end of the year. But even if true that just means prices will be rising more slowly, not that they will go down.
Unions’ fight for inflation-proofed pay rises becomes more important than ever — and Tory and Labour dismissals of such claims as unaffordable should cut no ice with our movement. Every real-terms cut will only pile on the pain for future years.
