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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

#221

Post by kasey_junk »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #146
blibble wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

quite what the summed market caps of companies traded on a single exchange has to do with the size or competitiveness of the UK financial sector I really don't understand Apple's market cap alone is larger than the entire LSE, and Paris exchange

You do realize the US is a MAJOR outlier, right?

It’s only an outlier because it so handily dominates equities trading.

Using the Paris exchange overtaking the London exchange as a barometer for broader overtaking of the finance industry is akin to saying that a person is taking over the F1 title from someone after beating them in a bike race around their house.

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

#222

Post by mjburgess »

gsatic wrote: post #65
jl6 wrote: post #53

The UK government is pulling financial levers as if this is a financial problem. But while there are several contributing factors, this is overwhelmingly an energy problem. The UK is 20 years behind where it needs to be in terms of nuclear, renewable and storage capacity. There is no silver bullet. It’s going to take 20 years to resolve, and that’s assuming they start today with an Apollo-program-level investment in…

I think the plan has always been - let London grow and let everything else wither away and die.

Sure, and people have been saying this for quite literally 1000 years.

The country has been geographically "unbalanced" for most of its history, and if you understand preferential attachment, you'll see why.

There's been nothing one can do to "rebalance the UK" for several hundred years at least.

20% of the population lives in london, and it often has ~1/3 of the people in the country in the area -- as tourists, travelling in, etc.

No one in a millenium has done anything to "plan" this

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

#223

Post by mike_hearn »

ceejayoz wrote: post #137
blibble wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which wasn’t that far from succeeding, at 44%. Since then, they were made to leave the EU, the Queen died, and the party that proposed it has done well electorally.

The party that proposed it did well electorally last time too. Apparently there are lots of people in Scotland who vote for the SNP without fully agreeing with their goals.

I'm neutral on the topic of Scottish independence but from a purely tactical perspective it'd be surprising if another referendum could be won at the moment. Sturgeon appears to know that and looks a lot like she's trying to string the SNP base along by claiming to want one without actually getting another referendum.

Problems any new campaign would face:

- The EU. It could be mostly ignored last time. A large part of the SNP base is pro-EU and wants to join as a separate country, whilst another large part of the SNP base is genuinely pro-independence and wants Scotland to be ruled by Scots. These two positions can't be reconciled. EU membership means rule from Brussels. The SNP is theoretically an independence party but would be campaigning on a vision of gaining full independence and then immediately attempting to give it up again, and this would create weaknesses that any competent pro-union campaign would presumably exploit. The hard border and being required to join the Euro would also be a new requirement that wasn't a part of the debate last time.

- Relatedly the financial situation is now worse than before and the EU might not want Scotland as a consequence, as it would be expected to replace the UK's massive subsidies. Joining can take years, in the meantime it would require severe austerity measures to stabilize the new state's finances.

- The SNP has never resolved many of the open issues that caused them to lose last time. What currency would they use, would there be access to the BBC and other infrastructure, border issues, North Sea decomm etc. These questions had clearly been left to the last minute and the pro-union side hammered that fact to great effect. Yet they don't seem to have got much further with the planning since. Tactically this just strengthens the unionist attack line that the SNP don't really want independence - if they did, surely they would be obsessive about all the things they'd do differently after leaving the UK and would have whole libraries devoted to the topic.

If the SNP want to force and win another referendum they need to start having these discussions with their supporters, even if they're unpleasant (e.g. adopting the Euro is generally unpopular).

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

#224

Post by mhh__ »

factcheckdec wrote: post #220
VBprogrammer wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So? What's your issue working with British and/or Indian people?

European talent is more than nice to have access to.

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

#225

Post by mike_hearn »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #216
mike_hearn wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To what degree are they worse than the EU's? You're making a very slippery argument here. You started by asserting that things are worse in the UK than elsewhere in Europe and this is due to Brexit, but you didn't name any specific way in which things are worse. So you were called out on it because this discussion is about a single data point - food price inflation - which is not different to elsewhere. Now you're sa…

The UK CPI increase year-over-year was 11.1% in October [1]. The France CPI increase was 6.2% for the same period [2]. That is a huge difference for similar developed economies. 1. https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/bull... . 2. https://www.rateinflation.com/inflation-rate/france-inflatio... .

Now compare to Germany.

The difference is caused by France more heavily subsidizing/capping energy costs. It reflects a short term deviation in market policy triggered by gas shortages, not some fundamental divergence.

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

#226

Post by bsnnkv »

gw98 wrote: post #54
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…

So you traded our bananas republic for a gun toting corporatocracy with low employment protection and comedy healthcare and no food standards. I'm not sure who's worse off.

I'm personally better off. Not sure that would be the case for you or others.

Re: food- Fresh produce in the PNW is incomparable imo. Never had anything like it in the world. In the UK I was largely limited to Sainsbury's etc., which have pretty poor quality food and produce.

Here in the PNW the variety (and quality) far exceeds what was available to me in the West Midlands, Greater Manchester and Greater London (not sure about other parts of the country).

It's a very pleasant luxury to not be limited to supermarkets.

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

#227

Post by de_keyboard »

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…

> They have to find Brexit benefits so we have pointless plans to depart from eu rules

The purpose of this is two-fold:

1. Make it harder for future governments to reverse Brexit or reverse parts of Brexit

2. Make it harder for Scotland to leave the UK by making it harder for an independent Scotland rejoin the EU due to regulatory differences

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

#228

Post by messe »

fweimer wrote: post #157
jmyeet wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I think Brexit was (and is) a disaster that was really just a reactionary vote against immigration (particularly POlish immigration), I think "Scexit" is a mistake and fail for the same reasons that there will be Ireland reunification. Land borders. In Northern Ireland this creates a problem because you eitehr have to have a customs border between NI and the Republic of Ireland or between NI and Great Brit…

Not every border has to be a hard border. The Scottish border would not necessarily have to change at first because an independent Scotland would not be automatically part of the EU or even the Schengen area. If Scotland wants to join and the status of Great Britain is still not clear by then, then that's another border issue to resolve. The situation with Northern Ireland is different because Ireland is part of the…

> The situation with Northern Ireland is different because Ireland is part of the EU

It's also significantly worse, as there's only around 25 scotland-england border crossings, whereas there are over 200 border crossings between NI and ROI (more than on the entire eastern border of the EU).

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

#229

Post by alkonaut »

What was the expected cost of Brexit in terms of wage stagnation and inflation relative to EU?

Sure, now the cost is added on top of the global average, but the UK economy would be suffering regardless, now it’s just suffering more.

But this was a deliberate choice. The Brexit was about “are you willing to pay X to get Brexit?”. Even low estimates of X were pretty bad.

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

#230

Post by YakBizzarro »

themihai wrote: post #165
ml_basics wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was also the issue that some EU countries(i.e Italy) were giving italian/EU citizenship to fresh immigrants from Africa so that they can travel to the UK. Source for this please? As far as I understood it is extremely difficult for such people to get Italian citizenship and had never heard of this as an issue

I can't find the exact article. For some reasons "everything" pre-brexit about immigration has been buried by Google. However the route of African migrants through Italy to the UK was well known before Brexit. https://www.euractiv.com/section/uk-europe/news/african-migr...

You are mixing two things: Yes, illegal immigrants get into Italy from the Mediterranean sea. From there they move to north Europe, but this is far from getting Italian citizen and have the freedom to move in EU. However is sometimes very easy for many south americans to get Italian citizenship thanks to our dumb citizen law that grant citizenship to anyone who could prove to have kind of remote Italian ancestor
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