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UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

bbc.co.uk

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Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#81

Post by physicsguy »

It’s worth noting that for a long time, food prices in the UK have been significantly lower than in comparable countries in Europe. I go to France and Germany quite regularly, and to do a supermarket shop in either is significantly more expensive.

My wife and I do online shops at Waitrose (which is probably the most expensive supermarket) and at a local butchers and don’t particularly try and save money on food. We spend about £100 a week on average including the delivery cost.

Where I’ve noticed increases this year it’s been on milk, butter and some basic vegetables like potatoes. But at the same time - there’s been articles about how dairy farmers were under such competitive pressure in the UK that they’re closing and going out of business in the last couple of years, so to some extent, price rises in that area were inevitable.

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#82

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #75
IMTDb wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know that it's not a single issue. Brexit, Covid-19 and the war with Russia – not one of these issues alone is the cause of our problems. Only one of these issue is UK specific tho; so either your fears extend to the rest of Europe and/or the western world, or you can pinpoint the cause of your anxiety.

Exactly. All of Europe, and the world really, has had to deal with the pain (both economic and in lives) of Covid and the war in Ukraine. But the severity of UK's problems are solely of their own making and are pretty much entirely due to Brexit, and the fallout from Brexit that caused by a string of ill-prepared "leaders". That said, one reason I'm hopeful about the UK is that, compared to US politics, there is much…

>But the severity of UK's problems are solely of their own making and are pretty much entirely due to Brexit, and the fallout from Brexit that caused by a string of ill-prepared "leaders".

The leaders weren't just I'll prepared with Brexit, they head-on despite the consequences, since they were chasing the "EU-bad" popularity votes by pointing at the EU as the scapegoat for the UKs own self inflicted internal issues. Now the leaders have no more outside scapegoats other than COVID and Putin.

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#83

Post by r_hoods_ghost »

racktash wrote: post #25

I genuinely fear for the UK. It's going to be a very different country in ten years, and I fear it will be a weaker, poorer and more divided one. I don't know for sure what the main cause of our current problems is, but I know that it's not a single issue. Brexit, Covid-19 and the war with Russia – not one of these issues alone is the cause of our problems. My hope for the country rests in the fact that it still has…

Well there are many reasons, but one of the major ones is that the last time the ruling party in the UK won a majority of the popular vote was, drumroll... 1931.

The FPTP system essentially means that elections are decided by a small number of people living in marginal seats, that usually straddle poor urban and wealthy rural areas and so that is who (successful) politician's messages and policies are targeted at. It's also how you get the weird situation that on a lot of social and economic issues both major political parties are often to the right of the public.

Add to that the dominance of the Oxbridge PPE brigade in both parties, and you end up with them all drawing on a small, outdated set of policy options (basically what they were taught as undergrads), that don't really work in the modern world.

Finally we still have a monarch, and it turns out the last one (God bless 'er) had a large number of kaws modified in her and her family's favour.

So yeah. Sclerotic socio polotical system

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#84

Post by cjbgkagh »

racktash wrote: post #25

I genuinely fear for the UK. It's going to be a very different country in ten years, and I fear it will be a weaker, poorer and more divided one. I don't know for sure what the main cause of our current problems is, but I know that it's not a single issue. Brexit, Covid-19 and the war with Russia – not one of these issues alone is the cause of our problems. My hope for the country rests in the fact that it still has…

I fear that this time it’s terminal. I’ve been advising my friends to leave the UK for over ten years. To paraphrase Peter Hitchens, “I’ve never seen a more doomed society and I lived in Russia during the fall of USSR”

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#85

Post by gghhzzgghhzz »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #60
gghhzzgghhzz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debt being an issue is mostly a self imposed limitation / political tactic. Parties were saying exactly the same thing about debt in 2010 when debt / GDP ratio was lower in order to win an election and implement austerity. Covid Debt in the UK was all QE anyway, so is effectively money we owe to ourselves. I do agree that Truss could have done all the things she wanted to do if she had just been smarter about present…

Government spent massively during Covid through borrowing, that's not QE. Edit: Level of QE does not imply that the government did not take on massive debts as well. It's not one or the other.

There's graph.

QE went from 445bn before Covid to 895bn at end of 2020

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/quantitative...

EDIT: also https://neweconomics.org/2021/10/99-5-of-government-covid-de...

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#86

Post by CommanderData »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #43
COGlory wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but net migration is still way down: >An estimated 202,000 citizens from other EU countries immigrated to the UK in the year to September 2018, and about 145,000 emigrated abroad. So EU ‘net migration’ was around 57,000—roughly the lowest level recorded since 2009. >In the year before the referendum, net EU migration was estimated at 189,000, so there’s been a large fall following the vote. Obviously other countr…

Not sure what your quote is supposed to say. It doesn't mention anything about total net migration. This is from Steptember 2022 about immigration to the UK: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06... If you look at that report you will notice that the main change to net migration was Covid-19 and even with that, it's pretty steady but you can see that EU migration is down significantly but compl…

I was searching for this to reference in my post, lost inside my bookmarks. Thank you.

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#87

Post by cjbgkagh »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #73
racktash wrote: post #25

I genuinely fear for the UK. It's going to be a very different country in ten years, and I fear it will be a weaker, poorer and more divided one. I don't know for sure what the main cause of our current problems is, but I know that it's not a single issue. Brexit, Covid-19 and the war with Russia – not one of these issues alone is the cause of our problems. My hope for the country rests in the fact that it still has…

No you're right, the UK is done. Little to no industry left, they were a nation of bankers and multinationals that exploited their former colonies. But it's not because of Brexit, COVID or Russia. It's because they never adapted and the rich in their country cared more about maintaining status than improving the country. Look at France and Germany: industry, tech, lots of "producing" businesses thrive. Paris has even…

No taxing India for opium to force sell to China to bail them out this time.

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#88

Post by dazc »

themihai wrote: post #36
bsnnkv wrote: post #30

I left the UK for the US in 2019. My I-485 was approved this week. I haven't been able to travel back to the UK since 2019 first because of Covid and then because of the pending I-485 petition. I'll be going back for the first time once my card is delivered. Reading about what has been happening over the past years in the UK while sitting in the US is really strange. Sometimes it feels like reading about a cartoonish…

Media always exaggerates. UK will be fine even if it has lost its shine.

This likely applies to most countries - there are two versions of the UK, a media-controlled whiny, everything is terrible version and another version where most people go out in the morning and just get on with it.

I have lived in countries that are so corrupt and incompetent where I wonder how anything ever works at all and yet I never read how terrible these places are in the media?

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#89

Post by Macha »

rayiner wrote: post #63
kergonath wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be ok in the long term. It has the resources to overcome its current issues (most of them self-inflicted). However, the next decade or two might be quite difficult. To be fair, there is some justice in it. You (collectively, as a country, not you personally) cannot keep voting for the same failed ideologies and then complain when the consequences come. This needs to be the end of Toryism as it currently exist…

Blaming “Toryism” is pretty odd. You think the economic problems affecting the UK started in the last decade? To me this seems to be the product of Blair-era Labour, which gutted the country by shipping jobs and industrial capacity to Eastern Europe and China. Populist nationalism is rising throughout the western world. It’s a reaction to the failings of globalist liberalism, not the cause of those problems.

Isn't the de-industrialisation of the UK normally attributed to Thatcher?

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#90

Post by recuter »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #3

I’m quite curious how this will end in the UK. Regardless of how much Brexit has to do with this, I think the lack of actual Brexit opportunities and the contribution it has to core inflation is at one point going to change the political landscape.

Proposed Scottish independence is 12 months away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_second_Scottish_indep...

> In July 2022, the Scottish Greens announced that, if a referendum were blocked, they would fight the next general election as a referendum instead

General elections are 25 months away. Labour is up 30 points in the polls or something like that. Brexit probably didn't help the UK economy but the economical ramifications of the Ukraine war haven't even begun to unfurl yet. Hard to take polls two years out seriously no matter how huge the margin is and yet if these things don't somehow resolve that will be a general election for the history books. The UK will simply never be the same again.

I don't have a horse in this race but it is pretty clear that Labour surfing such a populistic wave, given their current rhetoric, will turn the place into an actual banana republic. (People no doubt will get bent out of shape about this because of political ideologies but the observation is simply about populism)

Much as it pains me to say it, the French will become the new UK. And England will become like Italy.

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