Tom Porter-Brown, Birmingham Socialist Party
With the current rate of food inflation the fastest it’s been in the last 18 months at 4.2%, more and more working-class people are having to cut back on groceries. This is coupled with an energy price crisis due to hitting working-class people for the fifth winter in a row.
Countries Britain imports fruit from are seeing their growth and production rates drop courtesy of the climate crisis. This leads to reduced stock and supermarket bosses increase prices to maintain their profits.
It used to be the case that working-class people were making a choice between heating and eating but even that is going to feel like a non-option for many workers going into winter this year. The rate of food inflation is expected to hit 6% later in the year and this will hit the lowest-paid hardest.
Bosses of retailers such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s claim to ‘do everything we can to limit price rises for households’. But they continue to make massive profits from sales and underpay their staff. Many claim Universal Credit to make ends meet; the government is effectively subsidising supermarket bosses paying poverty wages.
Supermarkets see groceries and food as a source for profits instead of a basic resource humans cannot survive without. To prioritise what we need instead of what makes a profit, we cannot leave supermarkets, food manufacturing and distribution, and agriculture in the hands of the bosses.
We need a socialist solution to the rising cost of food. The private companies that dominate the food industry should be nationalised and run by workers ourselves democratically in the interest of the whole working class. We could use the profits hoarded by the bosses to invest, to ensure groceries are affordable and high quality.
It should also be said that it’s corporations and their respective bosses that are responsible for the climate crisis damaging workers’ and farmers’ ability to produce food. The fight for affordable groceries has to be linked to the fight for a solution to the climate crisis. This means fighting for the socialist transformation of the world and running society as a whole on a democratic basis which can provide us all with a decent standard of living without damaging the environment.
