Boris Johnson promised Britain a ‘levelling up’ agenda – now would be a good time to start

Editorial: The ‘left behind’ communities of Britain were promised much by this prime minister, but there is little to show for it

(Dave Brown)

The facts, as they say in legal circles, are not in doubt. Inflation is high (a four-decade record), it is rising (since last September) and, most worrying of all, the pace at which prices are rising is accelerating – up two percentage points on the previous annual rate of seven per cent.

It will get worse before it gets better. There may be some comfort in that our fate remains relatively tame by the post-war record of 26.9 per cent inflation in August 1975. Unlike in the 1970s – when trade union power and an accommodative government helped wages keep up with rocketing prices – wages today are falling behind. Barely have households and firms recovered from the financial crisis and the Cameron-Clegg-Osborne “age of austerity” than they are hit with another series of shocks.

This is fast becoming a wider social crisis. The question is what to do about it. Labour, unusually, has a plan that people find credible – scrap the national insurance hike on employees and employers in its entirety, abolish VAT on fuel, and pay for it with public borrowing and a windfall tax on energy companies’ supernormal profits. Some of the money would be used to smooth bills; the rest to fund a programme of investment in energy-saving technologies and insulation. These investments should pay for themselves in coming decades. Indeed, so attractive is this package that, given a free vote, many Conservative MPs would happily support it.