Ann Widdecombe: Cut out cheese sandwiches if you can’t afford them | UK News
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A former Tory minister has become the latest high-earning MP to tell hard-done Brits what they should and shouldn’t be eating.
Ann Widdcombe’s budgeting tip for families is to forgo cheese sandwiches if they can’t afford the amid the cost-of-living crisis.
Every ingredient in a basic cheese sandwich – bread, cheese and butter – has all shot up in price in the last 12 months, with a cheese sandwich costing 40p more.
This is an increase of 37%, research firm Assosia found, that comes as most basic essentials, rent, utility bills, taxes, interest rates and more go sky-high.
Widdecombe, an ex-Brexit Party MP, offered the solution to people’s money woes yesterday on the BBC’s Politics Live programme.
Presenter Jo Coburn asked: ‘What do you say to consumers who literally can’t afford to pay for even some of the basics if they have gone up the way that cheese sandwich has, with all its ingredients?’
‘Well then you don’t have the cheese sandwich,’ Widdecombe replied.
The former Tory minister chalked surging food prices down to working people calling for wage increases (Picture: BBC)
‘None of it’s new. We’ve been through this before.
‘The problem is we’ve been decades now without inflation, we’ve come to regard it as some kind of given right.’
Widdecombe laid the blame squarely on workers increasingly striking for wage increases as inflation has stubbornly remained in the double-digits for months.
The most recent figure, 10.4%, is far higher than in the US and Europe.
‘We just have to be as grown-up about this as we can and stop thinking it is solely a UK problem because it isn’t,’ Widdecombe said, adding that supermarkets have long held the ‘whip hand’ over price tags.
‘We also just have to learn the lessons of the past, which is that prices follow wages, follow prices, follow wages.’
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