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

bbc.co.uk

271–280 of 364 posts

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

#271
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeremy Hunt campaigned for Remain and then pushed for a second referendum when his side lost, so it's unclear why you think his anti-Brexit stance is worth remarking on. Are you thinking of someone else, perhaps? Re: OBR. We're talking about food price inflation. The article you cite in turn cites the OBR, but (a) contrary to what you're suggesting the OBR doesn't have seem to have done any of its own analysis and (b…

Why mention Jeremy Hunt? Just the small matter of him being the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the UK govt with a track record of good analysis. Believe what you want at the end of the day. I would love to have to been proven wrong, but Brexit is an unmitigated disaster to almost every expert worth listening to.

But you said "even Jeremy Hunt has conceded", implying his position is new. It isn't. Hunt's previous analysis of Brexit, from the original campaign:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/26/nhs-under-t...

"The National Health Service will face budget cuts, falling standards and an exodus of overseas doctors and nurses if the UK leaves the European Union"

NHS budget has dramatically grown since leaving the EU and so has NHS employment of immigrant workers:

https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/chart/number-of-eu-and-non-...

i.e. his predictions were wrong and his track record is therefore not good.

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

#272
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…

The FT journalist Stephen Bush had a great tweet along these lines, although his point was more about how we write about other countries: 'Analysts believe that the return of 'Bambo' Johnson, the controversial strongman whose protectionist policies have been criticised for the country's sluggish growth rates, will bring little respite to the troubled country.' https://twitter.com/stephenkb/status/1583375789630054400

This is great!

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As someone who works in education, we education nurses, the public services (think police, fire, army etc) IT, coding, space tech, brickies, chefs, etc etc etc .... so many lecturers have an exit plan, or are already gone. The very foundadtions of the country are being removed. How do you run an economy when there's no one educated enough to do it? Even if we drop 1% of the future leaders, business owners, start up f…

Italy has been a "mess" for decades and it's still fine. Of course it's no longer a world leader but life is not that bad in Italy.

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

#274
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…

Being in a similar boat to you (having left the UK in 2018) you won’t really find much is different on a visit except prices are a bit higher than you might remember.

All these things in the news are very real but you only really feel them when you live there and your bills are higher than last month, etc

It’s quite strange feeling like a “foreigner” in your home country but I suspect you will feel it just as I did when I visited last year.

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

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding was that the EU has many universities.

They’re not anywhere near where the Swiss universities are if you look at the rankings.

I just looked, US News ranked ETH Zurich as #29 globally, but Univ. of Amsterdam is #39, Univ. of Copenhagen is #42, and then ten more European[0] universities before getting to the Univ. of Zurich at #67 overall. I scrolled down a ways further but didn't see any more Swiss universities listed.

[0] I excluded the UK but I'm not going to check which Nordic countries are EU members.

It's well-known that the US News rankings have their problems, but it seems like they'd have to be really out of the ordinary in order to support your claims.

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

#276

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…

From the time when I used to live in UK - You guys have almost no manufacturing and no tech sector. You are importing everything from abroad, yet there is nothing interesting in UK, no reason why I should ever want to get a work visa into the UK. Only thing which works is finance services, but you completely forget on that one during Brexit and you were concentrated on fishing which has almost comically low fraction of UK's GDP. So even the financial sector is slowly pouring away into USA and EU.

Despite your dire situation, you are keeping to make things even worse - See UKCA mark, return of imperial units, endless squabble with EU over Northern Ireland Protocol and threating a trade war, which would finish you off.

Thing is that you used to be interesting for investors (and for me personally) because you were country speaking English and connected to EU. So if somebody from abroad (USA, Asia) wanted to do a bossiness in EU, he would start in UK. That's gone thanks to Brexit and Estonia + Netherland took this role from you. Now you just become a hollow English speaking island which really has nothing to offer.

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

#277
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why mention Jeremy Hunt? Just the small matter of him being the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the UK govt with a track record of good analysis. Believe what you want at the end of the day. I would love to have to been proven wrong, but Brexit is an unmitigated disaster to almost every expert worth listening to.

But you said "even Jeremy Hunt has conceded", implying his position is new. It isn't. Hunt's previous analysis of Brexit, from the original campaign: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/26/nhs-under-t... "The National Health Service will face budget cuts, falling standards and an exodus of overseas doctors and nurses if the UK leaves the European Union" NHS budget has dramatically grown since leaving the EU…

My point is that, as Chancellor of a government which accepts Brexit as a done deal, it is interesting for him to do anything other than shower Brexit with praise. Criticism from within the ranks of the Tory government is significant and a sign of shifting tides. This is the sense in which he 'conceded'. Until recently this was omerta.

As I say, believe what you want, I genuinely want to be wrong as I feel ever-growing despair at what has happened to my country, not least under recent Tory governments. We are a country in decline. I'm now pretty certain of it.

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

#278

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…

It's happening all over the western world. 50 years ago everything of value happened in the west. Currently there are alot of block on the economy and they only grow.

- people work less hours - education is slipping - lots of imports because we don't have it anymore (outsourced because of lack of cheap labour or environment laws) ...

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

#279

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…

if we are heading into a recession, then a public sector spending spree is exactly what we do need.

Households won't spend, private sector won't invest as households are not spending, so if the public sector also stops spending then you go into a much longer and deeper recession.

Money itself for a government with a central bank is just a unit of account. There can't not be enough of it. It's just a way to measure resource distribution.

Wealth on the other hand. There's plenty of that in the UK, but it's increasingly in the hands of a few.

40 years of financilising public services and nearly every aspect of our lives means that household and public spending eventually ends up being concentrated even more in the hands of a few. That's the actual issue with public spending into such an economy, that without an effective tax system (which we don't have), then it makes inequality worse.

Both Tory and Labour are pushing a false narrative, because ultimately they represent those who are doing pretty well out of this deal.

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

#280

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…

It's happening all over the western world. 50 years ago everything of value happened in the west. Currently there are alot of block on the economy and they only grow. - people work less hours - education is slipping - lots of imports because we don't have it anymore (outsourced because of lack of cheap labour or environment laws) ...

> It's happening all over the western world.

It's not really happening in the US. The US economy remains strong and may not even go into a significant recession in the next year.

The US dollar remains the world reserve currency and allows unparalleled monetary and fiscal policy freedom. No-one is losing confidence in the dollar the same way they did in the pound.

Inflation is coming down in the US and it's in a fantastic place in terms of energy and food security.

The decline of "the West" you refer to is really the decline of Europe.

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