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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

#201

Post by VBprogrammer »

mhh__ wrote: post #172
klelatti wrote: post #115

It might not seem like the biggest issue at the moment but the departure from fact based economics seems to me to underly lots of UK’s current issues. One example. They have to find Brexit benefits so we have pointless plans to depart from eu rules. Result is higher costs for businesses and uncertainty for anyone trying to plan. This allowed someone like Truss to get into power with a fantasy economic plan. You can w…

Brexit is annoying for consumers (try buying stuff from Germany as easily now) and actively lethal for some businesses. I'm feeling the sovereignty already

More annoying than that. Try hiring software engineers. When I started working in London 15 years ago my colleagues were from a mixture of counties across the EU, easily greater than 50%. Now it's rare to see a CV from outside the UK except for a perhaps people from India.

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

#202

Post by ClumsyPilot »

bsnnkv wrote: post #161
blibble wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 banana republic in a novel aimed at young teenagers. that's funny as that's exactly what we think about the US (especially its political system) this was particularly terrifying to watch: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-63417249

I think as a Brit I'm still technically in the "We". ;) What I have realized since living in the US is that every state is wildly different. Even regions within states are wildly different. Of course, I knew this before moving here, but it's a different thing entirely to experience it. There are definitely big issues in US politics, at the federal level, at the state level and at the city/regional level. But if you d…

> The impacts of poor governance at the country level are felt everywhere and cannot really be offset by regional authorities

Reguonal authorities seem to have just enough power so that central government can blame them when something goes wrong, but nothing of substance.

The pinnacle of their day seems to be a pay dispute with the bin collectors or blocking someone from converting their loft because they submitted the request on the wrong kind of paper.

The only chance for UK to turn around is constitutional change, for example federalisation

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

#203

Post by [deleted] »

blibble wrote: post #95
recuter wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 economic…

> Proposed Scottish independence is 12 months away. the SNP have been saying this since the first vote in 2014

[deleted]

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

#204

Post by alephxyz »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #155
etiennemarcel wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What colonies are you referring too? The last one was Djibouti in 77...

Mail for example. But there are quite a few French troops still protecting French interests in their various former colonies in Africa - a place where statehood is a nebulous concept so I think it’s fair to say that many of these places still act in effect as protectorates. Add in resource extraction and it also starts to look like a colony again.

Most of the mining industry in Mali is owned by Barrick, Allied Gold and Anglogold Ashanti, none of them are French. The French intervention in northern Mali was to avoid a spillover into western Niger (where France sources most of the uranium it uses for its power production).

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

#205

Post by ColonelBlimp »

mike_hearn wrote: post #162
klelatti wrote: post #115

It might not seem like the biggest issue at the moment but the departure from fact based economics seems to me to underly lots of UK’s current issues. One example. They have to find Brexit benefits so we have pointless plans to depart from eu rules. Result is higher costs for businesses and uncertainty for anyone trying to plan. This allowed someone like Truss to get into power with a fantasy economic plan. You can w…

This generic explanation for everything always gets posted to HN whenever the UK comes up in any capacity, but it isn't "fact based economics". Inflation is surging throughout Europe and the world. Trading Economics has a useful map that visualizes it: https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/inflation-rate Inflation is high because governments printed enormous sums of money to fund lockdowns and furloughs. Helicopt…

Inflation has a supply dimension that should be mentioned too. Not everything can be explained by excessive consumer demand.

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

#206

Post by squidbeak »

blibble wrote: post #55
squidbeak wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How full are supermarket shelves in the US? Whole product lines are missing in supermarkets in the UK.

> Whole product lines are missing in supermarkets in the UK. where does this rumour keep coming from? bar during covid I haven't observed this in any supermarket (unless you go at 9pm on a Saturday night or something, where they haven't restocked yet)

Rumour? I'm reporting what I see at my local Tesco. Items that have been incredibly difficult to get hold of recently include eggs, bananas, many types of biscuit, some varieties of crisps and lettuces.

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

#207

Post by Retric »

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #143
kesor wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume that a government in an elected democracy will solve anything or be any better than the current situation. This has proven to be false over and over again in history. The only countries that flourished and had tremendous economic growth, are those who had a period of more personal freedom and an almost non-existent government. The more government you have, the less can the human spirit succeed in moving th…

Communist China says hi! And the British Empire was hardly a bastion of freedom and yet kickstarted the industrial revolution. Even the USSR, for all ita horrific flaws and mass murdering ways turned the Russian Empire from an agrarian one to an industrial powerhouse in 2 decades.

Russian industrialization started well before the USSR came to power. The Trans Siberian Railway for example first opened in 1904. The locomotive’s boilers, engines and some other components were built in Saint Petersburg, industry was alive and well at the time.

Arguably it was the new power blocks associated with industry that destabilized Tsarist Russia, not that WWI helped.

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

#208

Post by mjburgess »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #174

The UK is declining, and people are starting to notice it. People are blaming the government, and clamouring for more support and money, but unfortunately I suspect it’s not that simple. The elephant in the room, in my opinion, is that we simply don’t have the money to maintain the standard of living we once enjoyed. Almost all political conversations here are contingent on this fact, but this underlying problem is r…

2008 "should" have been a severe global depression for 2 years, hitting the UK very hard. It was an extremely drawn out, perhaps decade-long, recession masked by zero/negative interest rates.

The UK's performance wrt the growing west became uncorrelated in 2008, and negatively correlated since Brexit came into effect 2020ish+.

The UK was, in many ways, ground-zero for one of the most severe financial crises in modern history. It has never really addressed that, nor does it have an answer for a version of the UK which can exist "in the shadow of that event".

The UK's "best future" from 2008 was an significant pivot to "boring tech", a pivot to the EU, and a rationalised financial system which could support both goals. Instead, it redoubled on relatively pathological elements of the financial industry and away from the EU.

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

#209

Post by bArray »

klelatti wrote: post #115

It might not seem like the biggest issue at the moment but the departure from fact based economics seems to me to underly lots of UK’s current issues. One example. They have to find Brexit benefits so we have pointless plans to depart from eu rules. Result is higher costs for businesses and uncertainty for anyone trying to plan. This allowed someone like Truss to get into power with a fantasy economic plan. You can w…

> One example. They have to find Brexit benefits so we have pointless plans to depart from eu rules. Result is higher costs for businesses and uncertainty for anyone trying to plan.

I don't think this has anything to do with Brexit, Brexit was achieved when the UK gained sovereignty. This is clearly a really dumb move to do quickly and unplanned. They are on purpose putting an insane amount of pressure on politicians to look through literally thousands of potentially important documents.

One reason could be that they think the Labour party have a real chance of election in the next cycle, and they want to sabotage them from being able to rejoin the EU.

I suspect the real reason has more to do with purposely destabilizing the legal system to promote growth. The idea would be that you suddenly open tonnes of holes in your legal system that relax regulation and open profitable loop-holes.

In the long-term these EU laws do need to be repealed and merged with the British legal system, but you could set a more realistic target like 10% per year or something. I would at the very least commission a study to be conducted to evaluate the actual contents of these laws.

I think what ends up happening if this is stuck to is that we end up with a broken system that _nobody_ understands or knows how to enforce. We then end up with rushed and messy legislation being rammed through to plug the holes, which open up other problems. We will also likely see other things being slipped in under the rug that further erode people's freedoms.

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

#210

Post by m00dy »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #174

The UK is declining, and people are starting to notice it. People are blaming the government, and clamouring for more support and money, but unfortunately I suspect it’s not that simple. The elephant in the room, in my opinion, is that we simply don’t have the money to maintain the standard of living we once enjoyed. Almost all political conversations here are contingent on this fact, but this underlying problem is r…

Well, it is just because the middle class in China, mainly in Shanghai and nearby, has almost replaced the middle class in the west. It has been like this for the past +15 years or so. Money is a relative term. Every government can print and use money. I think the more important one is purchasing power for goods and services. In other words, someone needs to produce goods and services, and then you buy with your money and start to feel happy after all. I think there are two critical things to say on the production side.

1-) China is not producing goods as before the pandemic. Another one is China's zero-covid policy, like bringing down the entire city for just one covid case.

2-) Europe's energy problem. I'm not an expert on this, but Europe's reliance on Russia's cheap gas could be Europe's competitive advantage in the markets. So, when it is gone, I might expect purchasing power could drop significantly for Europeans.

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