The cost of living crisis isn’t temporary

At the height of austerity there was a lot of public focus on the rise of food banks, with everyone from political commentators to filmmakers addressing the issue. What is much less discussed is that it is now about 15 years later and they are still there.

This is the point the head of a food poverty charity makes today; these are no longer transitory or temporary solutions to an acute problem but persistent ones that are in effect now permanent. This is precisely the sort of charity-based crisis solutions from the Victorian era which resulted in a multi-decade campaign that was to result in the post-war welfare state.

This appears to be a public policy issue on which the public are far ahead of the politicians – 72 per cent of the public identify the cost of living crisis as structural, not transitory. Which is to say that the public thinks the cost of living crisis is now built into our economy, not purely the result of external factors.

How many politicians in Britain take that view? The answer is basically none of them – though with two exceptions which we will return to. We have just been through a series of high-profile elections and every party going into those elections was framing the cost of living crisis as an acute event that they were offering help with until it passes.

The 'cost of living' offer in party manifestos did not go further than help with costs through moves to temporarily reduce rents or energy bills. Almost nothing being proposed would have altered the structural conditions which the public correctly identifies as being at the heart of the problem. For politicians, foodbanks can exist continually for 15 years and still be temporary.

In fact it goes further than that – the main parties in elections across the UK want more people to have affordable homes, but (crucially) none has said they want to make homes more affordable. This is arithmetically impossible – if more people have an affordable home than at present it is next to impossible for the average cost of a house not to decline.

This is precisely why politicians refuse to see the cost of living as a structural issue. The administrations of both Labour in London and the SNP in Edinburgh are entirely predicated on the patently incorrect premise that it is possible to have more and more winners without additional losers. It is the belief that what is good for the landlord is good for the tenant.

These parties want to persuade the public it will govern in their interests without that meaning the government can't also govern in the interests of wealth. That was the basis of trickle-down economics, an ideology developed by the wealth industry to justify why society as a whole should prioritise the interests of wealth.

Again, 72 per cent of the public believe the outcome is an economy and society distorted in such a way that working people can't afford to eat at every meal. The politicians refuse to accept this – with those two exceptions that hint at something different.

The first may be a questionable policy but at least indicates a different approach. Common Weal is unconvinced that the SNP's proposals to cap the price of certain foods in supermarkets would have worked, and it was clear the SNP saw it as a temporary measure, but price controls are the kinds of regulatory practices which actually can alter the structure of the economy.

But it is the second which is easily the most radical and most realistic as a response to the cost of living crisis; the (English) Green Party's proposal to implement a universal 10:1 pay ratio (the Scottish Greens do not have the power to implement that policy but instead proposed a 10:1 pay ratio condition for any business receiving public funding).

This would mean that the person who is paid most in a company can only be paid a maximum of 10 times the pay of whomever is least well paid. Someone working full-time on minimum wage now earns over £24,000, so no company paying minimum wage would be allowed to pay its chief executive more than quarter of a million pounds a year.

It is traditional for establishment commentators to claim that these kinds of policy are 'not serious', yet at the moment the opposite is true. It is politicians telling the public they can help you with the cost of living crisis or that they want to see the end of food banks but without doing anything to change the structure of the economy who are being naive and dishonest.

Food banks stopped being temporary a while ago. If they were passing responses to austerity, or Covid, or either of the two sequential cost of living crises, we would see them decline in number between these events. That is not happening. The public is right and the politicians are wrong; unless they make structural changes to the economy, food banks are here to stay for good.