The ruling elite’s manufactured cost of living crisis is about to get worse with grocery prices rising by £275 this year. As anthropologist David Graeber said, “the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently”. And currently it’s being made by the ruling class whereby Tesco made an operating profit of £3.1bn in the year ending February 2025.

Cost of living crisis: a rigged system

At the same time as the cost of living crisis looks set to worsen, a report from the Education Policy Institute (EPI) has highlighted that a quarter of households with children under four are experiencing food poverty. The EPI also found that children under five are 25% more likely to experience food poverty than other children.

More broadly, 4.5 million children are living poverty in the UK. Meanwhile, as of 2023, the super rich extracted a whopping 45% of the UK’s entire national income in profiteering rent, meaning everyone could almost be twice as well off. On the flipside, only 55% of national income went to working people.

As well as food, prices for energy and water are also going up. As of April 2025, the Ofgem energy price cap increased by 6.4%. At the same time, water bills are going up by 26%.

Reimagine

We need to reimagine the system whereby we have a mixed economy with an expanded public sector and a thriving private one. Public ownership of essentials like green energy, water and internet brings down costs not just for households but for businesses too. A progressive tax system for businesses would also promote small and medium enterprises while increasing taxes on big business profit.

There could be similar moves with inheritance tax to avoid a system of unearned wealth and family dynasties. At the moment it’s a flat rate of 40% for estates worth £325,000 or more. It should have higher thresholds for the super rich.

Then, we’ll need a further reimagining of society once artificial intelligence and automation can deliver us increasing leisure and creative time.

In 2015, Callum Chace, author of Surviving AI, warned us of the current trajectory of for-profit ownership of AI:

There will be people who own the AI, and therefore own everything else. Which means homo sapiens will be split into a handful of ‘gods’, and then the rest of us

It doesn’t have to go that way. Yet with the ongoing cost of living crisis looking like it will not, currently it is. However, we have the power to change this.

Featured image via the Canary

By James Wright

This post was originally published on Canary.