Saturday, 24 February 2007

Greatest Thing Since...


The price of a loaf of bread in Britain has broken the £1 barrier.

This is one of those pieces of bad news that is actually good news in disguise. The notion that Tesco's think a loaf of Warburton's is worth a quid a loaf is ludicrous unless each slice is individually gold plated and comes with a coupon of a free loaf of decent bread at another shop, but it is heartening that this story ended up as a minor item on the business pages.

It wasn't that long ago when news of a rise in the price of a loaf would have made headlines and threatened to bring down the government as a sign of an unacceptable jump in the cost of living. Today, the price of bread is no longer the touchstone of the British living standard when there is so much wealth sloshing about that people worry more about ipods and 4x4s than bread. Indeed, the economy is so robust that it has even survived ten years of Labour rule without failing the bread test.

And that's like the Titanic ploughing through a phalanx of icebergs without a scratch.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Socialism: guaranteed to drive nations socioeconomically backward since 1848.