Greedy food firms only have themselves to blame for price threat

Companies blaming Ukraine and Brexit are being disingenuous on a grand scale, says Chris Blackhurst

Shoppers have felt the pinch from high prices (PA)

Businesses can sometimes be too cynical for their own good. Worse, they start taking the rest of us for fools. They suppose they are being clever but they’re in real danger of being found out, of becoming horribly unstuck.

They pretend that something is causing them to go down a painful route when a scintilla of thought would suggest that it isn’t. There’s another reason they are behaving in such a fashion – normally the chasing of profits.

So it is with food and supermarkets. The price of milk has risen 38.4 per cent in the past year, reports Will Dunn in New Statesman. Nothing justifies that increase. Not the war in Ukraine, not energy and fuel bills, not wages, not supply chain problems caused by Covid, not Brexit. But under the umbrella of these and other factors, the cost to us as consumers has soared.