Price caps are a slippery slope

Sometimes it’s the little things that depress most. I groaned last week to hear the news item. The government is contemplating a ‘price cap’ on ‘basic items’ in ‘supermarkets’. Forgive the quotation marks, but each of these terms is so horribly problematic that one has to start by asking what they even mean. Has Conservatism in the 2020s lost its ideological moorings?

Or perhaps one should start with a quick recapitulation of the history of this idiotic idea, because price control has been tried before, first by a Labour government, and then by their Tory successors who went on to consolidate the folly. The background to those repeated attempts to limit price increases was raging inflation, government attempts to justify suppressing wage increases and growing public alarm at the cost of living. Remind you of anything?

When Labour came to government in 1964 it had promised a ‘prices and incomes policy’, involving a measure of government control (at first voluntary) of both.