Sunak should stop pretending that he controls inflation

The government is delighted with today’s inflation update. Rishi Sunak released a clip this afternoon, talking about his government’s efforts to ‘halve inflation’ by the end of the year. ‘I know it’s still tough’ he says, but ‘the plan is working, and we are delivering.’

The problem is that it is not in his gift to deliver on his particular pledge. The economics in this video rival his chancellor’s coffee cup video from a few months back – in that they simply don’t add up. Politicians do not control inflation. They have no reliable mechanism for doing so. Windfall taxes do not bring down inflation, as he suggests in the video; and borrowing and spending at record levels definitely does not bring down inflation. 

Sunak knows all this. The most common feedback about chancellor Sunak during the pandemic was that he understood economics better than almost anyone else in the Treasury. He was one of the only people in the UK to see the inflation