Britain’s last Prime Minister, Liz Truss, sold herself as a liberty-loving free-marketeer. Yet her energy policy was decidedly statist. Instead of letting the market handle rising energy prices, she proposed a £170 billion bailout.
Truss’s replacement, Rishi Sunak, is generally seen as more pragmatic – though in July of 2022, he penned an op-ed for the Telegraph titled ‘I will be the heir to Margaret Thatcher’. Now, writers don’t often choose their own titles, but Sunak did say, “I am a Thatcherite, I am running as a Thatcherite and I will govern as a Thatcherite.”
Well, he can repeat the word “Thatcherite” as many times as he wants, but that won’t make his solution to Britain’s rampant food price inflation any less socialist.
According to the Telegraph, “Downing Street is drawing up plans for retailers to introduce price caps on basic food items such as bread and milk”. The newspaper describes this as “the biggest attempt to manage supermarket prices since controls established by Edward Heath in 1973”.
It’s the five-year-old’s approach to economic management. If prices are going up too fast, we’ll just cap them. And why stop at price caps – why not introduce price reductions? That would make basic food items cheaper!
“No 10 insists that any action by retailers would be voluntary”. But why would retailers voluntarily set prices below the market rate? There’s something funny going on. The Telegraph talks of a “deal with supermarkets”, which may mean the government ends up subsidising basic food items. They’ll be taking money out of our left pocket and putting it back in our right pocket – all while taking credit for “tackling inflation”.
Just how bad is food price inflation? According to the ONS, Britain is the second worst in the G7 after Germany, which just entered recession.
In fact, the inflation rate for food and non-alcoholic beverages in the year to April 2023 was 19.1%. So Brits are paying almost 20% more for food and drink than they were a year ago.
Unfortunately for Sunak, the British Retail Consortium has already poured cold water on his proposal, with a spokesman telling the BBC, “This will not make a jot of difference”. Prices aren’t rising because supermarkets suddenly got greedier. They’re rising because of higher energy and transport costs – which stem from other failed policies.
My advice to Sunak would be to govern a little more like Thatcher, and a little less like Heath. That is, after all, what he claimed he would do.
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We already live under a form of socialism. The country’s biggest employer, by far, is the social healthcare system. The bloated public sector represents 45% of the economy, and rising. The State has regained total control of the energy supply via the price cap which shows no sign of being scrapped despite wholesale gas prices being back to pre-conflict levels.
What the Tories appear to be doing is fusing the socialist state sector with a dwindling private sector to create some kind of Technocratic Totalitarian State which reaches its tentacles ever further around the necks of private citizens. CBDC’s and internet censorship will only make this worse. A Labour Government will do much the same.
Labour will do much the same at an accelerated pace. It’s curious how Jeremy Corbyn was smeared to within an inch of his career. Wrong type of socialist?
Interestingly, Nazism was likened to the cult of Shiva.
Corbyn just wasn’t as good at hiding his loathing for this country.
I loathe Corbyn and his Muzzie-love. But his cardinal sin was being critical of the Jews who are nested in every nook and cranny of governance, pharma, finance, media etc. See Rona for more info. Goyim who criticise the Jew master are banished.
The NHS is the key to it all. It is not even seen as socialist and that means it is difficult to do anything about it.
Of course, if they actually drilled for oil and gas and started fracking, prices would come down. And Labour are worse, with Starmer saying he’ll ban all drilling. Talk about an oncoming storm!
Unless Sunak also plans to rise taxes, taking money out of our left pocket and putting it back in our right pocket isn’t a proper description. If the government would really subsidise food, this would amount to an indirect tax reduction, ie, government indirectly giving some of the money it’s taking anyway back to the people it has been taken from.
Uncle Klaus and Uncle George have issued their instructions – he will follow orders.
That is the top and bottom of what is going on. A wee hors d’oeuvre to whet the national appetite for Universal Basic Income.
He must think we are firkin blind as well as stupid.
How have we allowed this unelected puppet of a Hindu to be living at No 10..
Starkey was being kind with his remark..
I could go a lot further…
It worked so well for Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela.
Tory party leadership and policies have been Blairite since at least Cameron. They can rot in hell as far as I’m concerned.
Is it terribly bad to feel like I want to smear excrement all over his silly face? And I suppose just having written this marks me out as definitely a racist, because he’s not got “white” skin or something. Never mind that I am referring to how silly his truly silly ideas are, regardless of his race or anything else. I couldn’t care less where his ancestors “came from”. He’s an idiot.
Never mind this stupid stinking Rich WEF puppet ! HAS anyone seen the Speech Dr David Martin gave at the EU this month chronicling the near 60 year development of covid 19 by America ! More info please ??? This has to be a game changer !!!..
A neologism I produced after hearing this: Food Rishioning.
OK Sushi – give one example anywhere in time or place where caps on food (or indeed anything) have not resulted in shortages of that/those product(s) and a black market.
Energy prices have been capped and guess what – we have an energy supply problem.
All his policies are socialist and that is because Cameron turned the Tory Party into a socialist party. Once socialism appears in any country it cannot be reversed because more and more people vote for benefits. This means that polticians have difficulty getting elected if they don’t rob the responsible to hand money to the irresponsible.