When even powerful industry voices demand government action, can ministers go on ignoring the hardship people face?
It’s a delicate moment for a chairman of Tesco, trying to describe reality while maintaining the brand-boosterism that someone in some distant MBA hell decided the shareholders demand. In an interview on the Today programme this week, John Allan, who is a former president of the CBI, dispensed entirely with the second imperative. He described what cashiers were saying to him: that customers were asking them to stop when they’d rung through £40. People are out of wriggle room. It was a crunchy, evocative description of how skint people are already, a tacit emphasis that this is everybody’s business, and a hint, if you chose to hear it, that this is unprecedented.
So many phrases have sauntered casually into the vernacular, and we use them as though they’ve been there for ever: income squeeze; rate hikes; energy price spikes; the cost of living crisis. There’s nothing complicated about this new vocabulary, but it does give the impression that the events are technical or abstruse. It was quite striking to hear Allan humanise the matter – there is nothing complicated about it. There’s just a person, standing in front of a cashier, saying, “Stop when you get to £40, and let’s hope the essentials made it.”
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
