Britain once rioted over the price of bread. What would it take for us to confront greedflation today? | Andy Beckett

We seem to wearily accept corporate profiteering as a fact of life. But an ever poorer public can be pushed only so far

This country’s rate of inflation, the worst in western Europe, is everywhere in most people’s lives: in our anxious shopping and conversations, our late-night fears and fraught pay negotiations, our cancelled or rationed pleasures, and our sense of Britain’s shrinking possibilities. After the pandemic, Brexit, and years of austerity and political chaos, to be experiencing the biggest sustained fall in the national standard of living for over 60 years can feel like the final straw.

Yet in the endless conversations about the price of everything there is a frequent absence. The role of increased profits in the cost of living crisis remains a relatively neglected topic: sporadically raised by leftwing activists, business analysts and economists, occasionally the reason for protests, but largely avoided by the main parties, and seemingly not a consistently important issue for the wider public. Brief periods of anger about profiteering, as happened last year with the energy companies, give way to fatalistic silence.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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