Brits must accept they are poorer and stop asking for higher wages or prices will continue to rise, a Bank of England boss has said.
Chief economist Huw Pill said there was a game of "pass the parcel" taking place over the economic pain - and said workers asking for higher pay and firms putting up prices were fuelling inflation.
The former banker said that there was a "reluctance to accept that we're all worse off" in the UK and people needed to take their share.
His out-of-touch comments are likely to spark fury as hard-pressed families face soaring food prices and sky-high energy bills.
Inflation dipped to 10.1% in March but remains in double-digits, despite Rishi Sunak's vow to halve it this year.
The price of groceries is an eye-watering 17.3% higher than last year, according to Kantar.
Speaking on the Beyond Unprecedented podcast from Columbia Law School, Mr Pill said: "The UK, which is a big net importer of natural gas, is facing a situation where the price of what you're buying from the rest of the world has gone up a lot, relative to the price of what you're selling to the rest of the world, which is mainly services in the case of the UK.
"You don't need to be much of an economist to realise that if what you're buying has gone up a lot relative to what you're selling, you're going to be worse off.
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"So, somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept that they're worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices whether through higher wages or passing energy costs on to customers etc.
"What we're facing now is that reluctance to accept that, yes, we're all worse off and we all have to take our share; to try and pass that cost onto one of our compatriots and saying, 'we'll be alright, but they will have to take our share too'.
"That pass-the-parcel game that's going on here, that game is one that's generating inflation, and that part of inflation can persist."
Last year, Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey urged workers not to ask for big pay rises to prevent inflation spiralling out of control.
