Rishi Sunak held a ‘summit’ meeting yesterday with leaders of the country’s supermarkets and food industry to discuss the surging inflation of food prices in the dominant supermarkets.
This meeting was clearly called to try to head off a massive and rising tide of anger amongst workers when, at a time that the cost of feeding their families has shot through the roof, the giant supermarket chains are recording huge profits.
On Monday, the consumer group Which? released data showing that some meat and vegetable prices in supermarkets have doubled over the past year.
Annual inflation on supermarket own-label budget items increased by up to 25% in April while the rate of price increases on branded goods stayed at just under 14%.
So much for the insulting ‘advice’ to workers to switch to cheap brands; the supermarkets have driven their prices up even more to keep the profits soaring.
These figures don’t even begin to tell the full story as Which? found that some individual supermarket items of meat and vegetables shot up by over 90%.
While workers are being priced out of even basic food items the dominant supermarkets are recording huge profits. Tesco, the UK’s biggest supermarket chain, in April announced figures showing that in the last two years the company has gouged a total of £3 billion in profits.
In 2021/22, £704 million was paid out by Tesco in dividends to its shareholders and last July the company launched another massive pay day for shareholders in its £1 billion share buyback scheme, while Sainsbury’s announced profits of £690 million for the year.
These increases are a result of price gouging or ‘greedflation’ as it is now popularly called – the process where the giant supermarkets, energy companies and all the companies in between, under the cover of already soaring inflation, drive up prices even further to make super-profits for the bosses.
Meanwhile, millions of workers struggle to feed their children and heat their homes as the Tories and the Bank of England blame them for inflation, demanding even greater sacrifices with the Bank’s chief economist, Huw Pill, insisting workers ‘need to accept’ poverty as the price to pay for the bosses’ super-profits.
The working class will never accept this, and the profit gouging and greedflation is driving the hatred of workers towards capitalism and the demand for the trade unions to take action.
This fear by the capitalist class is behind Sunak’s meeting – an intervention to politely ask the food giants to not advertise their profiteering so blatantly.
Commentating on this meeting, Sharon Graham, general secretary of the Unite union, said: ‘When millions of workers are struggling to feed their families Britain’s biggest supermarkets are engaged in a grotesque display of profiteering. Profiteering is also happening right across the supply chain. Industries are choosing to take advantage of a crisis, resulting in the spiralling prices of goods we all need.’
Graham concluded: ‘Workers and communities need action not a PR event at Number 10 then back to business as usual. The government must act and take on the profiteers fuelling greedflation.’
Workers certainly don’t want Tory public relations stunts and nor do they want trade union leaders whose call for action turns out to be just another appeal to the Tories to curb profiteering.
The Tories will never take any action that restricts the right of the capitalist class to make super-profits out of exploiting the suffering of workers and their families. Calling for the Tories to act is as much a PR exercise for the continuation of a bankrupt capitalist system as Sunak’s meeting.
The reality for the working class is that capitalism has reached the end of the road and can provide no future for workers and young people except poverty on a scale not seen since the 1930s Great Depression.
The working class is more powerful than the Tories or the ruling class, and the action urgently required is to force the TUC to immediately mobilise this strength by calling a general strike to bring down the Tories replacing them with a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers under a socialist planned economy.
