Facebook has it’s uses sometimes. The Memories reminder system for example. A couple of days ago it threw up this image from one year ago.
You remember the “Let’s get Brexit Done” dribble? The “Sun drenched Uplands”, the “Taking back our Sovereignty”, the “Reducing cost of British produce to the consumer”, the “Better deal of British Farmers”? I may well have misquoted some of those word-bites, but that’s almost certainly irrelevant. There was always a low level resentment of the EU from the far right of the political spectrum, but who listens to them anyway? However when the EU decided it was high time that the rich paid their dues and proposed measures to curb Tax Avoidance, things were ramped up a gear or 20. Conservatives and their shadowy funders don’t like that sort of thing. You don’t get super rich by hard work and you certainly don’t stay super rich by paying your taxes. It’s far easier to become wealthy by exploitation and retain that wealth by Tax avoidance.
How a very slight majority in the UK were hoodwinked by Brexit Boris and his merry bunch of criminals illudes me. But let’s look at the real cost for the families who are paying for this monumentally insane political debacle.
The humble Chicken. We’re very frugal here through necessity. So a Chicken, yellow sticker or not, will make at the very least two meals of us. Like most households we set ourselves budgets but without resorting to medieval Gruel as our staple diet, it’s becoming almost impossible to stick to the budget we managed reasonably well on just a year ago. Yesterday I bought this Chicken as a comparison.
If it was the same size that would represent an increase in cost of a little under 42%! But in fact this Chicken is considerably smaller than last years offering. A trend which is notable for all group priced produce – those item which are priced as ‘Small’, ‘Medium’, ‘Large’ etc. But that’s not the end of the story. Priced by weight staples have also increased in price by a similar margin. 500G of Rice was 60p a year ago, it’s now 90p, for example.
We’re told that inflation is presently 5.5%. So clearly if basic staple food items have increased in cost by more than 40% the cost of something, somewhere must have reduced considerably? Fuel costs? No it’s not that. They are about to rise by over 50% again. Healthcare and Prescriptions? No prescription prices have increased to £9.35. Also I’m not actually sure if NHS Doctors are now extinct, it’s that long since we were able to get a physical appointment. Clothing maybe? Who knows apart from socks and pants most items I’ve bought in the last year has been from Charity Shops.
So either the inflation index is grossly inaccurate from the point of view of working families, or it’s simply a pack of lies. I’ll let you decide which….
It may take decades to recover for this national self harming episode and in all honestly we don’t have too many decades left between us.
So what can be done? Who knows? Anybody for a bowl of Gruel?!!!
