A trip to mainland Europe brings home just how expensive food and drink has become in the UK. In Italy last week, I was paying between three and five euros for my regular coffee order for two, which in this country would never be less than £6.75. Food in shops was noticeably cheaper than the UK equivalent.
Europeans still complain about the leap in prices they experienced when they joined the Euro, and while I’m sympathetic, I feel sorrier for us UK citizens now. Our food today costs us about 31% more than it did three years ago.
If you’re a higher earner, spiralling food costs are irksome, but they can be absorbed. If you’re not, feeding the family becomes a grinding source of daily anxiety.
More and more of us dread the checkout bill, but reducing the cost of food doesn’t come over as a priority for Keir Starmer. As usual, food – surely the core human need – seems unimportant to the government.
In the UK, the easiest way to cut your food spend is to fill hungry bellies with low-grade, fattening, ultra-processed foods, yet Starmer pushes injections of controversial weight loss drugs when he could introduce measures to make good food more affordable and accessible to all.
Shouldn’t any government’s first priority be to see that its own people are decently fed? I’d much rather my taxes were spent on free, universal, genuinely healthy school meals – ones that would improve the nation’s nutritional status and take the pressure off cash-strapped parents – than military hardware.
Resentment grows in Britain that the government commits eye-watering sums to foreign adventures, such as £3bn a year “for as long as it takes” to fund the war in Ukraine. Administrations that focus on overseas, ignoring pressing concerns at home, can eventually suffer.
In the US elections, we hear that many black and Latino voters are not persuaded to vote for Kamala Harris because of the cost of living hike and deteriorating standard of living they have endured under the Biden administration.
We used to have food riots in the UK. Might desperation and anger take us there again?
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