Soviet-era price caps are the last thing the consumer needs

You know a government is running scared when it starts talking stupid.

- JAMES MOORE

There is no compulsory food-price cap coming, ministers say. Yet they are nonetheless pressuring supermarkets to cut or freeze prices on essentials. That sounds like a cap to me. A cap is certainly what we’re talking about when ministers say they’re holding “talks” with the supermarkets to urge them to “voluntarily” freeze the price of basic items (milk, eggs, bread and suchlike).

This is “more nuts than a squirrel convention”, as the shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith said on X. He says he “warned Rachel Reeves prices would go up if she raised taxes and drowned employers in red tape. She didn’t listen and now she’s proposing Soviet style measures”.

Perhaps I need to borrow a hat - or a cap - from an old-style Kremlinologist: someone who is skilled at finding the truth from the statements pushed out by central government.

To be fair, Rishi Sunak took much the same approach as Reeves has during the last inflationary spike, only to retreat in the face of a fierce backlash, while promising other measures to limit the price of essentials. The big stick of the Competition and Markets Authority was waved. It didn’t get very far, because the sector is quite competitive, and margins are low. Repeated investigations have demonstrated this.