In the past five years, UK food prices have gone up by 37% under the neoliberal system. Over the same period, Tesco’s operating profit has skyrocketed from £1.8bn in 2020/21 to £3.1bn in 2024/25, an increase of 72%. And yet we have people flocking to Nigel Farage to tackle their woes. That’s while he has announced zero policies on the cost of living.

In fact, he’d likely make it worse through his policy to scrap climate change targets. Climate change is another key factor that drives up food prices, particularly imports from countries in the global south experiencing droughts.

Envision a new system away from the likes of Tesco

Historically, famines have occurred in the name of socialism and because of capitalism. The British believed that the free market should solve people’s food shortages in India and Ireland, leading to the death of around one fifth of the Irish population in the 19th Century. In India, capitalists used the lack of supply to increase prices elsewhere from where famine raged, making more profit rather than relieving starving people. This reflected a lack of a modern welfare system – a left wing hallmark.

In Soviet Russia, Stalin oversaw the Ukrainian famine – the Holdamoor, through overworking people and via a desire to crush Ukrainian nationalism. This is often used as an argument against any kind of collectivisation of the food supply.

But what’s clear is supermarkets like Tesco are wealth extracting middle men between people and farms. Arguably, the farms themselves should be left to some form of market forces to ensure reasonable profitability for the hard work of meeting demand. Recent figures suggest most farms in England are family-run. But the idea we should rent our food from corporations like Tesco is another matter.

Farmers already work with middlemen retailers and buyers to try and ensure production meets demand. There’s no reason such organisation cannot be done in-house, rather than via the obscene profits of Tesco. That said, farms waste 3.6 million tonnes of food every year according to WRAP, because of insufficiencies in the organisation between themselves and supermarkets.

It’s obvious that Farage has no solutions to the waste and extraction inherent to the neoliberal system of austerity, privatisation and deregulation. He only scapegoats foreigners for these issues. We need a systemic rethink.

Featured image via the Canary

By James Wright

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