Bank of England chief economist Huw Pill isn’t going to win a popularity contest. Speaking on a podcast for Columbia Law School – a medium in which he perhaps felt a little less exposed than had he said it on a British TV programme – he said:
‘Somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept that they are worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices….What we’re facing now is that reluctance to accept that yes, we’re all worse off and we all have to take our share.’
Nurses, doctors, train drivers and everyone else contemplating striking for an inflation-beating, or even inflation-matching, pay rise: those remarks are aimed at you.
This rather ignores the Bank of England’s own role in the inflationary surge of the past couple of years
Pill is correct.
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