Writing in his Economic Outlook column in The Sunday Times of 20th October 2013, David Smith posed the question: Why is inflation so much higher in Britain?<\/p>\n
New Eurostat figures show that the UK inflation rate last month of 2.7% was the highest of all 28 EU member states and more than double the EU (1.3%) and Eurozone (1.1%) average. More than half of EU member states have annual inflation rates of 1% or less. This has been picked up by the opposition Labour party adding weight to their argument that there is a cost of living crisis in the UK which the government is failing to control.<\/p>\n
Ruling out the effects of previous Sterling weakness pushing up import prices for globally-traded commodities such as food and energy, or pay increases (up by only 0.7% on a year earlier), the major problem for the UK appears to be domestically generated inflation and particularly in the service sector (3.4% last month). Over the past 6 years for example, food and drink prices in Britain have risen by 35.6% compared with only 1% in the Irish Republic! It would appear that companies can push through price rises in Britain more easily than in other countries or , put another way, perhaps up until now such price increases have been more culturally accepted (or expected) than in other EU countries, but not now with consumer incomes squeezed during a period of austerity.<\/p>\n
Inflation is significantly too high for the current rate of earnings growth and, with so-called Green Taxes already 9% and rising to 14% of consumer energy bills, it is not so surprising that the Prime Minister has been forced by the Opposition in the Commons yesterday to announce a re-think on energy policy, pricing and the overall competitiveness of the UK energy market<\/p>\n
Reference<\/strong>: Like it or not, Britain is hitched to high inflation, David Smith (david.smith@sunday-times.co.uk) , Economic Outlook, The Sunday Times, 20th October, 2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Writing in his Economic Outlook column in The Sunday Times of 20th October 2013, David Smith posed the question: Why is inflation so much higher in Britain? New Eurostat figures show that the UK inflation rate last month of 2.7% was the highest of all 28 EU member states and more than double the EU […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,193,191],"tags":[187,170,171,194],"class_list":["post-1687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economic-policy-for-many","category-high-uk-inflation","category-winning-in-2015","tag-2015-election","tag-british-politics","tag-conservative-party","tag-cost-of-living"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/conservatives-paris.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/conservatives-paris.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/conservatives-paris.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conservatives-paris.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conservatives-paris.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1687"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/conservatives-paris.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1692,"href":"https:\/\/conservatives-paris.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1687\/revisions\/1692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/conservatives-paris.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conservatives-paris.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conservatives-paris.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}