John Maynard Keynes wrote, when considering the great inflationary episode of the first world war, that “no one benefited except the profiteer. The seeds of much subsequent trouble were sown. And we ended up with a national debt vastly greater in terms of money than was necessary and very ill distributed through the community.” That is where Britain finds itself heading. Keynes’s penetrating analysis is now ringing through Whitehall and beyond.
When Jeremy Hunt sits down with industry regulators on Wednesday, he will need more than soundbites to make companies stop fleecing their customers. Mobile and broadband companies have just pushed through the biggest price rises for 30 years. And when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development looked this month at whether workers, businesses or governments had contributed most to inflation, the data showed that, for the first time since the pandemic, businesses were most to blame in the UK.
