Empty promises all we can rely on now

DON’T panic, Mr Mainwaring! It’s all under control. The nation’s wallets are not going to be drained dry by enormous rises in the cost of food and drink. It’s all going to be OK. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to see here, folks.

How am I able to brighten your morning with probably the best news you’ve heard all week? Because I got it from the horse’s mouth. I’ve just watched a couple of supermarket bosses on telly assuring us that food prices are going to be held down rather than disappearing through the roof because they are going to absorb any increase in costs on their side of the fence by dipping into their profits.

Well on the face of it, that sounds plausible. There is plenty of slack to be taken up, plenty of room for manoeuvre when you compute the billions multiple retailers are able to salt away or distribute to their shareholders in the course of a year.

Indeed, you might be prepared to accept statements such as these at face value and regard them gratefully as a demonstration of the wholly benign intentions of a bunch of supermarkets which have suddenly seen the light and decided to conduct themselves like charitable institutions from now on.

You might, equally, be prepared to believe Boris Johnson if he assured you he was never going to tell anothSupermarkets er lie. Because I can tell you what would have been happening immediately after that announcement. The supermarkets would have been on the trumpet to their suppliers, to the dairy processors and the abattoirs laying it on the line: either they take some of the financial hit from this operation or they will find themselves de-listed.

can only come out with rubbish like this because they know the public has a very short memory and most people will have forgotten similar promises made 20 years ago – and on occasions before that – when inflationary factors were driving food bills upwards.

And what actually happened then? Inevitably the costs were passed back to farmers who, as usual, had to meekly accept what the market was offering because British farmers are only represented by a flabby gentleman farmers’ organisation which doesn’t do price negotiations and so have absolutely zero bargaining power in the market place.

Indeed a repeat of the process is evidently under way to judge by the sight of carrots being sold at 19 pence a kilo in Morrisons at the weekend. Even though this is only using the old ploy of discounting one or two basic items while maintaining margins by stuffing up the price of others, let me ask any farmer if carrots can be sown, grown, harvested, transported to a supermarket door and profitably sold at 19 pence a kilo. I don’t need to wait to hear the answers.

But large sections of the public will almost certainly have accepted these promises at face value. Such a pity that they are – however long it takes – going to realise at some point that they are just empty ones.

The public has a very short memory and most people will have forgotten similar promises made