DURING a public on-line question and answer session on Monday, the Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill warned that higher food prices ‘may be here to stay’ and that a return to cheaper food is ‘something we may not be seeing for a while yet, if in the future at all.’
The price of food and non-alcoholic drinks increased by 17.4% in the year to June, hitting a high of 19.2% in March, according to official figures, leading some at the Bank to claim that food price inflation was steadily coming down.
Pill said: ‘Our expectation is that food price inflation will fall back to around 10% by the end of this year’ but admitted: ‘That’s still not a very comfortable level’ and that food price inflation had been ‘more lasting than expected’.
He added: ‘Certainly for us, when we’re looking at trying to reduce the overall level of inflation down to our 2% target, having food price inflation running at 10% is not really compatible with that on a lasting basis.’
Pill placed the blame for the continued soaring cost of food on ‘some hiccups’ along the way, notably the imperialist war being waged in Ukraine that has caused havoc in grain exports to the world.
Pill further admitted that while external ‘hiccups’ like war were largely to blame, some food companies had taken advantage by locking in higher prices ‘in the face of uncertainty’ which had pushed up prices on supermarket shelves.
In fact, the only certainty is that the supermarkets and food corporations are hell bent on making as much profit as possible.
An investigation by the Unite union revealed that while millions of workers were struggling to feed their families, the two biggest supermarkets, Tesco and Sainsbury’s, have paid out a massive £1.2 billion to their shareholders this year.
While the supermarkets were paying out massive sums to shareholders, the Trussell Trust network of food banks recorded that between April 2022 and March 2023 the number of first time users of food banks topped 760,000.
Nearly three million emergency food parcels have been distributed by the network in past 12 months, while the number of children in food poverty doubled last year to over four million, with the Food Foundation estimating that one-in-five households reported skipping meals, going hungry or not eating for a whole day last January.
Now Pill is telling the working class that food inflation will remain at around 10% forever and workers had just better get used to living in permanent poverty.
Pill has a record of spelling out bluntly that workers must accept paying the price for the capitalist crisis through unemployment and poverty level wages.
In April, he complained that British workers are ‘reluctant’ to accept they are destined to get poorer and ‘need to accept that they’re worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices’ by fighting for wage increases to protect them from inflation.
This earned him a rebuke from the Bank’s governor Andrew Bailey who said Pill’s ‘choice of words was not right’ and forced him to apologise for his ‘inflammatory’ language, while making sure that he didn’t disagree that this is the only way to drive down inflation by making the working class accept poverty and starvation to keep capitalism from collapse.
Pill’s crime was that he came out in the open with this declaration of class war.
This is the only future capitalism holds for workers.
The powerful working class will never accept this as their future, and the immediate demand must be to force the Trades Union Congress to organise this power by organising a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
Join the lobby of the TUC in Liverpool on Monday 11th September called by the Workers Revolutionary Party to demand that the TUC call a general strike to bring down the Tories and go forward to a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and resolve the crisis through the victory of the socialist revolution.
This is the only way forward.
