OVER half of UK companies are planning to push up prices in the next three months according to the latest research by the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC).
Out of the 4,800 businesses polled by the BCC, 55% said they expected to increase prices by April.
A similar survey conducted in the second half of last year reported 39% of companies forecast price rises.
The sharp increase in the number of companies planning price rises comes at a time when the research recorded that UK business confidence has slumped to the lowest level since the disastrous mini-budget of Tory prime minister Liz Truss in 2022.
In that budget Truss, with her unfunded tax cuts for the rich, came within a hair’s breadth of crashing the entire UK economy. For business leaders to have even less confidence in the ability of British capitalism to survive today speaks volumes for the economic crisis that is crippling the UK.
The gloom gripping UK bosses is over the increase in business taxation contained within Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves’ Autumn budget which included an increase in employers’ national insurance contributions intended to raise £25 billion in an attempt to cut the huge government debt.
This supposed tax on business is immediately being passed on in the form of increased prices that will drive the cost of living for workers even higher.
Shevaun Haviland, director general of the BCC, said this increase in NI contributions had sent ‘worrying reverberations’ throughout a UK economy that was already diving into recession.
While the BCC was predicting a massive surge in the cost of living, another organisation of bosses, the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), was blaming the proposed Labour Employment Rights Bill for a rapid increase in job losses in the new year.
The FSB announced that 92% of small businesses are worried about this Bill, which Labour has promised to introduce in 2026, as it includes a ban on zero-hour contracts and the right for workers to sick pay on day one of employment.
This is not what the bosses are demanding from the business-friendly Labour government of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
They are demanding that the working class bears the full cost of the capitalist crisis through massive inflationary increases in the cost of living along with a huge surge in unemployment – a surge they are proposing can be averted by creating an army of workers without any employment rights who can be hired and fired at will by the employers.
To rub salt into the wound, yesterday the campaign group, the High Pay Centre, released its annual figures on the pay of chief executives of the top 100 companies in the UK.
According to the Centre, the average pay for these chief executives is £4.22 million – 113 times the pay for workers in full-time employment.
If these bosses started work on January 2nd, by about 11.30 yesterday they would have ‘earned’ more than their workers will earn in a year.
While workers face wage cuts, unemployment and cost of living spiralling out of control, with millions living in absolute poverty, these chief executives are getting the biggest increase in pay ever recorded.
Now, these same bosses are demanding even more sacrifices from workers and their families to keep them in luxury.
TUC general secretary Paul Nowak commented: ‘Every working person plays a part in producing Britain’s wealth. But while millions of low-paid workers are still feeling the effects of the cost of living crisis, people at the top are taking more than their fair share.’
This is the treacherous bleating of trade union reformists about ‘fair shares’ – there is nothing ‘fair’ about capitalism.
The wealth of the country is produced solely by the labour of the working class while the CEO’s and the capitalists produce nothing while claiming everything.
The working class will never accept being driven into the ground to protect the profits of the bosses.
Leaders like Nowak must be removed and replaced by a leadership prepared to organise the strength of the working class in a general strike to bring down Starmer’s business-friendly government and go forward to a workers’ government and socialism.
Join the WRP and Young Socialists to build up the party to lead the British socialist revolution to victory.
