A striking similarity between today and the 1970s

What is an inevitable consequence of the higher inflation we are now seeing? More strikes. This is because rising prices create a race to keep up. The size of your pay rise will make a vast difference, and the need to beat inflation will loom larger than whether the business in which you work is profitable. In the public sector, there is no profitability anyway, so the sense of what can be sensibly afforded will be even more remote.

This empowers trade unions. In a time of high inflation, pay rises are won by might, not earned by productivity. Unions can claim to have the collective muscle necessary.

It is no coincidence that the rail unions are leading the way in pushing for strikes. Margaret Thatcher’s trade union reforms barely touched the highly politicised rail unions, even after her successor privatised the railways. The unions retain their power to make the travelling public suffer, and their pleasure in using it. Expect similar disruptions across the public sector.

After a few stonking wage settlements in the coming year, and rising strike threats, people will start to worry about everything getting out of control. Then someone will have the bright idea of a prices and incomes policy. The Government will sit down with employers and unions to work out what is “fair”.

Then, before you know where you are, political decisions about what things should cost and what millions of people should be paid are imposed upon everyone. These are inevitably adrift from economic reality, tending to add to the “stagflation” they were set up to avoid.

Pay “stages” are soon invented to give a sense of direction to the process, but they are just milestones along the same via dolorosa. Like Theresa May’s energy price cap, from which we are all suffering, they ultimately increase rage against politicians and address symptoms but not causes.

In the short term, all this makes voters more socialist. In the medium term, it makes a country go bust. In the longer term, it forces people to confront economic verities once more. But, if the history of the 1960s and 1970s is anything to go by, one can expect more than a decade of illusion – and the failure of governments of both parties – before the truth dawns.

I follow both Ukrainian and Russian propaganda in the current war. Not surprisingly, the former is about a hundred times better than the latter, much better presented and better grounded in fact. It is also humorous, and makes good use of stories about heroic dogs, like the glorious bomb-disposal expert Patron, a Jack Russell.

Even the Ukrainian side, however, has until now omitted certain facts. One omission, recently becoming noticeable as its troops mount counter-offensives and incur greater risks, has been the lack of Ukrainian casualty figures.

Each day, Kyiv publishes its latest estimate of the total Russian dead. As I write, this is approaching 30,000. I suspect this huge figure is exaggerated, but not absurdly so.

But what is Ukraine’s figure for its own troops? It puts out precise statistics for its country’s children killed in the hostilities (currently about 250) and plenty of figures about civilians killed by Russian attacks. Until yesterday, it remained vaguer about its military losses. When pushed last month, President Volodymyr Zelensky estimated between 2,500 and 3,000 dead.

This reticence may have been understandable at first but has become dangerous with the passage of time. The Ukrainian people’s capacity to bear suffering is inspiringly high. It will not improve if families of fighters come to feel that bad, sad news is being denied them. It is good that President Zelensky now recognises this and has admitted that 50 to 100 Ukrainian fighters are dying each day, mainly in the East.

Calvin Robinson, who is of mixed race, trained to be an Anglican priest. He has now been denied ordination, however, after an intervention behind his back by the Bishop of Edmonton, Rob Wickham. “Calvin’s comments concern me”, he wrote to his senior, the Bishop of London, Sarah Mullally, “about denying institutional racism in this country.”

By Mr Robinson’s account, he asked for a meeting with Bishop Mullally. She put her hand on his arm and said: “Calvin, as a white woman, I can tell you that the Church is institutionally racist.”

Bishop Mullally might consider two questions. Since she is white and he is not, and since those with her views constantly defer to the “lived experience” of “people of colour”, should she not defer to Mr Robinson?

The second question is: Bishop Mullally, if you think your church is institutionally racist, why do you encourage anyone, especially any black person, to join it? Indeed, what are you doing in it?

St Paul, a Jew, famously asserted that the Christian Church he helped found was completely opposed to racism: “There is neither Jew nor Greek … for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Luckily for the spread of the faith, there was no Bishop Mullally around to rebuke him.

Mr Robinson is now off to join Global Anglican Future, an evangelical alliance led by black Africans who support traditional Bible-based Christianity teaching. I sometimes suspect that the way the C of E excludes their views is, well, institutionally racist. In which case, Bishop Mullally is right after all about the state of her church.

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