Accept we are all getting poorer? Workers don’t have any choice

Comments made by the Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill on a US podcast were ill-advised and will be seized upon by those seeking to curtail the institution’s independence, says James Moore

The Bank of England’s chief economist says workers are responding to high inflation by asking for higher wages or charging more for their products (PA)

Oh dear. Another member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee has put his foot in it. This time it is Huw Pill, the Bank’s chief economist. If you’ve read some of Pill’s speeches, you’ll see they have a tendency to be rather, shall we say, heavy-going. While appearing on a podcast produced by Columbia Law School in the US, however, he opted for some plain speaking.

“Somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept that they’re worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices, whether higher wages or passing the energy costs through on to customers. And 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,” he said.

Now, that is a very strange statement to make given that British workers have had little choice but to accept that they are getting poorer. They are already “taking their share”.