It is the cost of living that matters to us plebs

The cost of living is a phrase that has fallen into disuse these last 20 years. The politicians don’t want to talk about it a as a general concept and today, Carney in the Daily Telegraph calls for ‘meritless’ RPI measure to be axed and only the CPI published. The RPI is a much closer measure of the cost of living  and as arithmetic mean, is for the same set of constituents,  always higher than the CPI which is a  geometric mean/ That is why our very political BoE Governor likes it. It makes his performance on controlling inflation look better. CPI is  also the measure the EU uses but  conveniently does not include housing costs which are important to us plebs.

All this waffly talk of the economy of course suits politicians very well. The economy is a vague concept that can mean anything. Note how often politicians use it.Cost of living is much harder edged and people clearly understand it. Trade Unionists used to use it a lot in the days when they represented ordinary people Sadly now they are more concerned with gender equality, gay rights and other facets of political correctness and virtue signaling.

Better we returned to simple words and concepts. It is as Orwell wrote destroy the meanng of language and words then mean what the political elite say they mean.