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Inflation in Britain ran at 10.1 percent in March, barely down from 10.4 percent in February and higher than the 9.8-percent average that analysts had expected.
The culprit remained energy prices, which were 40.5 percent higher last month than a year earlier. In contrast, U.S. energy costs were 6.4 percent lower in March, year on year.
U.K. food prices shot up 19.1 percent on an annual basis, the sharpest such rise since 1977.
Relentlessly higher prices have sparked a national strike by nurses. Unhappy with negotiations, they plan to strike again on 30 April and 1 May. Doctors staged a one-day walkout and teachers are poised to halt work on 27 April and 2 May.
The strikes will further bog down Britain’s economy, which has so far managed to avoid the recession that last year was being widely predicted.
However, inflation’s persistence may persuade the Bank of England to raise its interest rate yet again, which would push the U.K. closer to recession.
The British economy will contract BY 0.3 percent this year, the International Monetary Fund predicted last week.
Blame the People, Swallow the Pill
Last year, the Bank of England’s governor Andrew Bailey told people not to ask for big pay rises, and that would stop prices from sharply rising.
Singing the same Bankster toon, the BoE’s top economist Huw Pill told the British plantation workers of Slavelandia that they should accept being poor to stop complaining about rising prices and stop asking for pay raises as inflation spikes… and it cost them a lot more money to buy a lot less products and services. In a Beyond Unprecedented podcast from Columbia Law School he said:
“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.”
TREND FORECAST: Not a word in the media of who caused the inflation: Fighting the COVID War which decimated the U.K.’s economy and the long list of sanctions the government imposed on Russia which have sharply driven up energy and other costs.
With inflation rising, so too are the expectations that the BoE will continue its tightening policy by raising interest rates when they meet on May 11th. With the British pound trading at a 10-month high against the dollar, the expectation is they will raise interest rates 25 basis points. This in turn will drag the U.K.’s economy down further and the country will suffer from Dragflation: declining economic growth and rising inflation.