Why is everything so expensive now ? Is it partly due to the lockdowns ?

[Lipglosser]

Seriously somethings are four/five times the price they were

just wondering why everything has got so so expensive

Brexit really pushed prices up. Along with COVID which meant that the UK is affected more than other European countries

France has always been more expensive for food. In the UK far too much of our budget gets swallowed up by high housing costs.

four or five times the price they were since when? 1920?

Yes, prices have gone up but come on, I can't think of anything that has gone up four/five times since pre- March 2020. I'm struggling to think of anything that has doubled tbh.

Bear in mind that minimum wage has also gone up nearly 50% over that time (£4 per hour), which is far more than any other 5 year span - from 2005-2010 it went up 88p).

Bear in mind that minimum wage has also gone up nearly 50% over that time (£4 per hour), which is far more than any other 5 year span - from 2005-2010 it went up 88p).

Salaries should increase though

The minimum wage and NI increases will have made a huge difference. If every company along a supply chain has to increase their prices due to increased costs then the end result is massive price increases for the end product.

During the lockdowns, 300 billion pounds was created by the Bank of England, just brought into existence from nothing, lent much of it the government, and much of that was paid to furlough workers who used them to pay their bills. Quite a bit was also used for contracts to 'private partners'.

The end beneficiary were corporations and wealthy individuals who turned around and bought assets in competition with everyone else, driving up prices both in being in competition and also in their policy pushes at higher profits.

Wealth inequality skyrocketed during the lockdowns, and it's just grown ever since.

NI policy was warned against as it would drive up prices, people didn’t want to hear it though.

Brexit. People knew it would make everyone poorer and lots tried to warn.

Also, supermarkets are still making healthy profits but saying they have to raise prices. Good for shareholders but not customers.

Brexit, but hey, we got our sovereignty back!

Exactly. Lots of people seemed to think that, because their pay packet wasn’t affected by the tax changes (if anything, their pay packet increased because of the living wage), everything was fine and they wouldn’t be worse off. What people didn’t seem to realise is that huge tax rises elsewhere would filter through the whole economy and cause prices to rise.

Covid cost a huge amount. Both direct costs and also furlough for 11.7 million people: a full third of the working population, who continued to be paid during furlough but weren't making anything during that time which anyone else (the taxpayers paying their furlough payment) could consume.

Thise costs are now being paid back - mainly through inflation caused by the money-printing. The result of that inflation is that we can't buy as much with our monthly salary because some of the value we are creating each month was already used up 5 years ago to pay for furlough (which we don't get anything for in return, because people were relaxing in their gardens).

On top of that, government spending has also gone up from £840.7 billion in 2019 (29.5% of GDP) to £1,278.6 billion in 2024/25 (35% of GDP). That's a 20% increase in percentage of the value we create each month which we have to hand over to the government (for increased welfare, increased NHS spending, public sector pay rises etc) leaving us able to buy less for ourselves than 5 years ago in return for the same amount of work.

We came back from holiday yesterday. On my lunch break from work today I discovered something I have bought regularly in M&S for years has increased in price by 24%. I mean wtf? This is after all the Ukraine war and Brexit related price hikes. Yes, we're not poor, but bloody hell 24%.

Brexit - we haven't had the same protection of being in a large successful trading bloc since it happened.

COVID - the world's entire energy was focused on it for several years and everything was disrupted.

Ukraine - items like wheat and sunflower oil were major exports.

Climate change - chocolate and coffee harvests in Africa have been badly hit and in the UK we don't grow as much food as we need to sustain the population. Potato harvests have literally been a washout and other crops have suffered thanks to the long, dry periods. For many farmers it just isn't worth the hassle any more and younger generations don't want to go into farming.

We were very insulated from a lot of things while we were in the EU, not so much now.

@FreyasCats - whilst Brexit has brought increased trading costs, being in the EU wouldn't have insulated us from the rest. France has had even worse food price inflation than us.

Covid cost a huge amount. Both direct costs and also furlough for 11.7 million people: a full third of the working population, who continued to be paid during furlough but weren't making anything during that time which anyone else (the taxpayers paying their furlough payment) could consume.

Plenty who received furlough were also
taxpayers. And plenty of that furlough money was spent and went back into the economy.

Then there was the impact of people like me who worked & saved a large sum because I had nothing to spend it on. A lot of that money ended up going into assets.

We've resorted to tinned pears as fresh ones remain rock hard for ages then turn to mush.
At least with tinned we actually get to use them unlike above which was getting binned.

This but with profiteering being the main issue as supermarkets and utilities jump on the bandwagon.

And they let the shoplifters shoplift which, obviously if their profits are high, we are subsidising.

The most annoying one is the rise in interest rates on mortgages as that was literally £500 extra profit a month to the bank for no change in the service they provide us. It’s not like I have a big fancy house, it’s a 3 bed ex council but we live in the South East. That’s £500 we can’t spend elsewhere (getting a takeaway/pub meal from an independently owned place in the village etc) to help the economy grow.

Don’t you qualify for the small business relief on NI?

There should a law around profit on basic items so they can’t be inflated prices - fruit veg , bread, ru e, pasta, milk, gas, electric etc

Plenty who received furlough were also
taxpayers. And plenty of that furlough money was spent and went back into the economy.

The foundation of the economy is producing, not spending.

If those people had not been in furlough, their work during that time would have resulted in £x amount of value produced, eg windows fitted, plumbing fixed, coffees sold.

They would get money to represent the value of that work, which they could swap for other people's work (including food farmed, electricity generated etc).

Instead, they got the things other people made (food, electricity) without producing anything themselves.

So everyone has to work a bit more now and get nothing in return, to make up for the furloughed people receiving the value of that work for free 5 years earlier.

The way the government did it was to print money. But money just represents work done. The mechanism is that the printed money is used to buy some 'work output' now, but then the resulting inflation reduces the value of the money so later people get less for the same work.

In the end, money is just a way of exchanging work that is done - and in furlough people were given money to buy people's work without exchanging it for their own. So we all have to give some work without getting anything for it ourselves.

That doesn't mean furlough was wrong. Without it, companies would have gone out of business which would have hugely reduced people's ability to work and create value. Then they would again be given the value of other people's work without doing any work in return- in benefits - possibly even more than furlough.

My gas and electric is so high now. Only live in a modest house too and try to use white goods after 5pm for the cheaper electricity, haven’t got the heating on yet , turn lights off and so on. How peoooevin bigger homes manage I’ve no idea and mine is on a fixed rate and they still put it up. Someone is making a lot of money somewhere

The problem is that if you put a maximum cost on a product such that the producer doesn't make a profit - or makes less profit than they would making something else - then they'll stop making it.

Then you end up with shortages. Read up what happened in Venezuela under Chavez socialist government when they introduced price caps and controlled capital. It didn't end well.

@strawberrybubblegum I'm not sure what you think I am misunderstanding?

I simply made the point that some of those furloughed were also tax payers.