UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both [email protected] and [email protected] .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
view the rest of the comments
There's a good post on Reddit with video proof from 1977 - https://www.reddit.com/r/Britain/comments/15s3zsw/food_prices_back_in_1977/
The basket showed in the video is £26.17 in today's money. It will cost £22.06 today from the same Tesco. There are more examples in the comments. In short: everything is chaper now and people earn more. It's a fact.
If people spent the same amount of money on housing as they are paying for food, maybe you'd have a point. Even in the link that you've provided, people calculated that housing is about x6.1 median salary today compared to x2.7 in 1977.
I didn't know you could eat your house... Also overall affordability wasn't that much better back then. Again, plenty of examples there.
Ah yes, as any statistician will tell you - 10 items from one shop is more than enough to determine the impact of inflation over 50 years.
It absolutely won't cost £22 quid, that's CPI adjusted of course if you read the comment you're referring to. But yes, in real terms (asking honestly do you know what that means? your comment seems pretty ill informed) food is cheaper. So are some other items like consumer electronics. On the other hand housing and utilities (you know the majority of a household's spending) has advanced well ahead of inflation. Hence "cost of living crisis" which maybe you think is imaginary.
Worse, while average earnings have outpaced inflation the bottom end of the distribution has accrued almost none of that benefit. Massive increases in inequality mean that while for the comparatively well off (and the very well off) things are mostly fine for a sizeable chunk of society life has been getting materially harder.
The post has links with 1977 prices adjusted to purchasing power as well - most things for cheaper. A lot cheaper.
Thanks for clarifying that you have absolutely no idea or interest in learning how inflation is calculated so I can safely ignore you.