Or maybe I'm just being hopeful.
1. The civil service has been hollowed out; it is now largely reliant on external consultancies and outsourcing firms for many important functions (e.g., Crapita).
2. It’s lost power at the same time. Simon Case is the weakest cabinet secretary in living memory. The last reasonably powerful cabinet secretary was Sir Jeremy. It’s not so much that parliamentary parties are in charge—though they’re not blocked; rather, nobody is in charge at all.
3. Political advisers now no longer find their path blocked to the same extent, but end up burnt out by political events: see the farce of Cummings’ plan to hire some mathematicians ending up cancelled because he couldn’t be bothered to filter out people unironically advocating the sterilisation of the Untermenschen. Since the SPAD system is so ad hoc, it of course manages even less than the Butskellite civil service did.
Do they blame brexit?
Whereas like here in Sweden you can buy tomatoes, but they now cost $10 per kg.
I can't understand how /every/ UK supermarket chain made the same decision to decline the higher costs without asking myself if they spoke to each other about it. Emergent behaviour caused by racing to the bottom?
Now businesses generally can't make big price shifts due to increased demand or constrained supply.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cma-and-trade-bod...
Paying more to suppliers to import a particular non-essential foodstuff in a year in which most food prices have risen is even less likely to invite action.
If fuel prices can legally double overnight and fuel vendors make larger markups as global prices stabilise without the CMA batting an eyelid, it's quite hard to pretend that the CMA is the obstacle to us having access to the same food supply chains as European supermarkets...
Where I live ( France), at the height of the season, and assuming you live in the south, good tomato will cost about 2-3$/kilo. In winter you can indeed buy tomatoes (for more money) which look like tomatoes but are tasteless and are therefore a different kind of product. It might be possible to get good tomatoes as well, but I assume this will incur a significant premium, at which point I no longer consider them affordable.
They have always been affordable, now they are not
At least in France, there are price fluctuations : typically in season is 2 eur/kilo and off season is 4 eur/kilo (and these are current prices), which means twice as expensive.
My question to the poster living in Sweden was, given that we are in winter: are in-season tomatoes 10$/kilo as well, or is it only the case for off-season tomatoes, and in-season are still 5$/kilo, which, while expensive, is much more affordable ?
I sometimes use tomatoes for my winter dishes (pizza, Ukrainian borscht and Indian Dahl), it used to be terrible. I've since learned that most canned vegetables do not have anything added when canned (not even salt or similar, it's just hot water basically), changed to that, and now I cook almost as much in winter than I do during summer.
No real discussion on how European shelves don't appear to have this problem.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64718826
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/22/aldi-asda-m...
[2] https://news.sky.com/story/tesco-and-aldi-to-ration-some-veg...
[3] https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/food/1737097/Supermarke... ... etc
Supermarkets in France just increase the price for tomatoes for a few months and pay suppliers slightly more to get the stock they want.
In the UK, competition law prevents jacking up the price during a supply interruption, meaning suppliers prefer to direct scarce goods to France instead, where they earn more. That makes scarcity in England worse.
Morocco has responded to the shortage claims by noting that the extreme weather that has been sweeping the country has had a huge impact on fresh produce."
>In the UK, competition law prevents jacking up the price during a supply interruption
UK Supermarkets have contracts with suppliers which are not brilliant, its how supermarkets have become the controlling middleman in the food supply chain in the UK, and as they also employ large numbers of people in the UK, some 2nd only to the NHS which is the largest employer in the world making the USSR seem febrile, they can hold the British Govt to ransom with employment figures, like one did in the 90's when Labour got into power.
Just about the only thing they have honoured in the past is the MOD orders for food get picked first at the expense of the store's orders, during the Balkans conflict.
If a law or regulation does not exist for some activity, it will be exploited if it can make the supermarket money and they are so slow paying, ignoring your supplier credit terms, typically taking 6 months to pay up. They offload admin costs onto you by making you submit your invoices into their systems, but you can pay for a more streamlined efficient way to submit your invoices as another example.
They are not alone though, all big businesses have their questionable tricks, and one of the major causes of these shortages is lack of investment in the supply chain for extreme weather, in this case cold weather that hit north Africa and Spain. The UK has been living too cheaply, through efficiency and lack of investment, something COVID also highlighted to the world with JIT supply chains.
Elements of the global supply chain had little to no redundancy built into it for "natural" events, which COVID highlighted and ionosphere heaters[2] continue to highlight under the guise of extreme weather events! [3] The science is out there if you want to be informed and not be fed your opinions.
[1] https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2023/02/354180/food-shortag...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionospheric_heater [3] https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=846f8785-9613-4...
Today is the turn of competition laws that, we are told, don’t allow supermarkets to increase prices - while food inflation is in the double digits.
It's not incompetence. It is deliberate sabotage.
The economy is being smashed to pieces so the Conservatives can steal it and sell the bits off for a quick fix of cash. They're all junkies, who will steal whatever public property they can to sell, and now they've worked out they can do it to the whole country.
They are both, but the incompetence means that the maliciousness, while intended ends up manifesting in some unintended way.
Oh yeah absolutely, the whole idea of Kwasi Kwarteng deliberately tanking the pound sterling by about 60 billion so that his wee pals at Odey Asset Management could clean up a few million quid was absolutely premeditated sabotage, but everything that followed on from that was like some fucked-up lovechild of The Sorceror's Apprentice and some malign bottle genie's implementation of the "Invisible Hand".
That, in turn, is because despite the "subsidy" we have allowed our energy market to be designed around investors rather than consumers. Most of the continent has shielded consumers from the brunt of price rises: we haven't.
Really, it is just the brokenness of a British ruling class that prefers the success of the financial sector to a decent quality of life for citizens. It isn't caused by Brexit, Brexit is just a symptom.
[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Supply-Chain/Economic-NATO...