Headline inflation has reduced from 3.4% to 3.2%. That figure is a bit less than the expected drop and it remains to be seen if the Bank of England’s target figure of 2% will be reached.
It means of course that prices are still going up and given inflation over the past couple of years, the cost of food, energy and housing is hugely more than it was. Wages, not so much, hence there remains a cost of living crisis.
According to Rishi Sunak, inflation is coming down because the Tories have a plan and the plan is working.
This is interesting in several ways. Firstly because there didn’t seem to be a plan when inflation headed above 10% for key items. Secondly because the Tories both as a party and philosophically do not believe in economic plans. Their focus is on the market and the market adjusting around issues of supply and demand. Of course they allow for some degree of regulation and an economic framework but still at the core of that are market forces.
By contrast Labour, even right-wing Labour, has stood for a planned economy where the operation of the market is tempered to make sure that there is some benefit for the many as well as the few. Gordon Brown’s term for this was ‘no return to boom and bust’ until 2008 reminded him and everyone else that trying to tame the tiger of capitalism by skinning it claw by claw is a strategy that is very unlikely to work.
Does Starmer Labour have an economic plan? According to Rachel Reevs MAIS ecture to City suits it does. It involves yet more austerity (except for spending on wars) together with some form of intervention to make sure that industry takes more into account than just the bottom line of profit.
Protest and Survive might be a better a strategy
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