Ryan Wood

The Great British Rip Off. We pay more for everything and what we get back is falling apart. Food is nearly 40% more expensive than five years ago and on track to be around 50% higher than mid-2021 by the end of this year. Olive oil has more than doubled. Beef, eggs, pasta and chocolate are all up by half or more. Diesel has just hit a record £2 a litre. Petrol is around 174p. A typical energy bill is £1,723 under the October price cap - 58% higher than winter 2021/22. £billions spent on importing oil and gas from Norway and the North Sea, while the government turns off the taps on new UK oil and gas licenses from the same sea. Gas rates are roughly 140% above mid-2021. One of the highest electricity rates in the world. The tax burden is at the highest since records began in the late 1940s and still forecast to climb even further. Employer National Insurance went up. Business rates land on the local independent shop. Retailers now hand over about 72p in business taxes for every £1 of pre-tax profit. Walk the high street and you can see where that money did not go. One in seven high street properties is empty. Hollowed out streets where proud local businesses used to stand bringing communities together. Over 70,000 UK shop closures since 2020. Retail jobs fell by 122,000 in two years. The UK hospitality sector has suffered a net loss of more than 16,000 licensed venues (including pubs, bars, clubs, and restaurants) since the start of the Covid in March 2020. A record 6,365 UK agriculture, forestry and fishing businesses closed in 2025 alone. Familiar names keep shrinking or vanishing - boarded windows, “to let” signs a vape shop where the butcher or the bank used to be. The places that held a town together are being taxed and costed out of existence while you are told the economy is being “supported.” The roads tell the same story. Councils in England and Wales face a record £18.6 billion backlog of carriageway repairs - twelve years of work. Only about half the local network is in good structural condition. More than 32,500 miles have less than five years of life left. Roads are resurfaced, on average, once every 97 years. 1 million potholes. Road drains left without regular cleaning. We pay record fuel prices to drive on roads that wreck tyres and suspension. Water is no better. Pipes leak, rivers take the sewage bills still rise. No major new reservoirs were built in England for over 30 years. Dozens sold off. And we end up getting told that we have a hosepipe ban when there’s a few days sunshine in July. Schools, hospitals and rail carry the same pattern: maintenance deferred, promises announced, yet more decay. But meanwhile data centres, solar panels and wind turbines are being plastered across prime farmland reducing our food supply, natural habitats and resources. And the people in charge? An MP’s basic salary is £98,599 - up 5% this year, more than 20% since the £81,932 they were on in 2021. Ministers take a second salary and huge expenses on top. Their pay is increased while our taxes continue rise - which helps to fund them to manage our decline. What is overdue is a massive, sustained cost-of-living protest - visible, peaceful, organised, impossible to shrug off by the government - until tax rises, food, fuel and energy prices and sense general decay stop crushing ordinary households and until the country we pay more and more for stops being left to rot by local and national governments.

June 2008: Oil price: £109 a barrel Petrol price: £1.19 per litre September 2026: Oil price: £96 a barrel Petrol price: rising towards £2 per litre