Labour’s appeal to the cost of living has a rather old-fashioned feel to it: as if the whole nation still heated water with a geyser over the bath and darned (or got me to darn) its socks of an evening. ‘Till recent years the phrase “Cost of Living” was only used loosely by economists when the balance between movements of wages and prices was in question,’ the Encyclopædia Britannica remarked in 1922. ‘In popular parlance it has since become a recognised economic problem.’ That was when Sidney and Beatrice Webb were busy with their blue books and squared paper, before discovering a ‘New Civilisation’ in Soviet Russia.
The next big step was the construction of an index to the cost of living. Since 1947, the Oxford English Dictionary notes, not entirely helpfully, this has been ‘known in Britain as the Index of Retail Prices’.
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