Rishi Sunak has claimed there’s nothing he can do about the external global circumstances driving the cost of living crisis, but he’s dodged the real question: how can he best respond, and avoid an escalating crisis and a costly recession? In fact, there are fair, green solutions to this crisis staring us right in the face.
And they’re solutions that should get support from business. Over the past few days, the trickle of increasingly panicked messages from businesses on the cost of living crisis has become a flood. Already alarmed by the Bank of England’s warning of a looming recession and “apocalyptic” price rises, business leaders were spooked when Sunak’s speech at the CBI last week left many people wondering if he understood the scale of the challenge. At the weekend, the chief executive of E.On – a company not known for its economic radicalism – declared that “the most important thing is that the government intervenes” and the chancellor must “tax those with the broadest shoulders”.
