Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. Hello and welcome to the spike podcast I'm Fraser Meyers and with me this week we have a spike's editor Tom Slater.

Hello.

And Spike columnist Ella Wheeling.

Hi.

Coming up on the show, The Cost of Living Crisis, NATO's Northwood expansion, Netflix takes on its woke staff, and the Waggotho Christie

trial.

So the economic news just gets grimmer and grimmer by the day in the UK

inflation has hit 9% on the consumer price index we're expecting it to reach

double digits soon the The Bank of England

governor was talking to MPs this week and he warned of apocalyptic rises in food

prices. We know that there's an energy crunch. We're having the worst energy shock since the 1970s. I mean,

Tom, this is just getting worse and worse, isn't it?

Yes, and I think one of the things that's incredibly dispiriting about that is that there's this real fatalism as to what we could possibly do in the face of all this.

It's understandable on one level because a lot of this is about external shocks, about external events.

You can't very well blame Boris Johnson or Rishi Sunat for the

war in Ukraine or the pandemic. Obviously the lockdown measures were very punishing

but you know the whole world essentially pursued those policies. But I think there's also a refusal to

reckon with the kind of longer term factors which have led us to this

particular place. I mean you wrote about this on spike this week, but the

this storm, this perfect storm would have been a lot easier to weather if

productivity and wages hadn't been stagnating for so long. This energy crisis we

find ourselves in we left ourselves very exposed to because of the fact that we essentially

...