When the CEO of Iceland – the supermarket group, not the country – says that says some food banks are rejecting potatoes and root veg because people ‘can’t afford the energy to boil them’ this should surely make you sit up and wonder. Because that’s exactly what said CEO, Richard Walker, has said. And this is happening before a 54% increase in utility bills this April and a further rise in the autumn which is likely to see energy prices costing the average household circa £300 a month. Today’s the day when multimillionaire Chancellor Rishi Sunak, whose wife is richer than the Queen, unveils his spring statement.
The date of today’s statement was deliberately chosen by this cynical government, being that it’s two year’s on that the country went into Covid lockdown. Sunak was to stand up before a grateful country and announce just how much the economy was rebounding. The sunlit uplands were upon us and we were all going to be millionaires. Vladimir Putin’s murderous invasion of Ukraine has put paid to all that.
As Sunak prepares to address the country, he does so with inflation, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index, at 6.2%. This tells only a small part of the story. Petrol prices, utility prices, council tax bills, interest rates, rail fares are dramatically on the rise. Experts, so hated by the government, predict inflation will reach 10% before long. There is no way even well-to-do middle class people will avoid feeling the pinch this time. Those at the bottom end of society’s food chain will find the cost of living crisis existential. You can’t pay with what you haven’t got.
It will not be enough for our gurning chancellor to stand at the despatch box and mouth empty generalities, Osborne-like :”We’re all in it together” when some are more in it than others. “I feel your pain” will not keep people warm, stop children going hungry. Because doing nothing, or even nothing, or even little, will be a political choice by Sunak. It will not be that he cannot stop people going without food and heating: it will be because he will have consciously decided to punish poor people.
Yet, that’s what I expect will happen. This oily chancer, who bought fame by handing out free money during the pandemic, does not believe in the state or the government helping people. On the contrary, he believes in what he calls ‘self-reliance’ and that people without legs should stand on their own two feet. There may be token help for those at the very bottom but most of us can go hang. Government, he will say, can’t do everything so it won’t do anything. This levelling up malarkey can only work if we eliminate the lower orders from the equation. They won’t count at all.
