For some people, Christmas isn’t the only time of year dinner is too expensive

The public relations industry seems to work on the basis that if you see a dead horse, you must flog it until its innards are spattered all over the road. Then you must flog it some more.

This would explain why my inbox has been literally swamped by press releases concerning the cost of Christmas dinner.

Guess what? It’s going up. A lot. Because of inflation. But you already knew that.

Per Kantar, which produces one of the more authoritative estimates, the cost is now £31 for a typical family of four. That includes turkey (up 15 per cent), Christmas pudding (no change, surprisingly) and a bottle of modestly priced fizz (up 4 per cent) in addition to potatoes, condiments and veg.

Kantar puts the overall increase at 9.1 per cent. That is actually below the official rate of CPI inflation (10.7 per cent in November), the official rate of food price inflation (16.5 per cent) and Kantar’s rate of food price inflation (14.6 per cent) which, to the researcher’s credit, it has been drawing attention to for months now (in contrast to some of the organisations which have entered this space for public relations purposes).

Now I understand that Christmas dinner is a good seasonal talking point, and a handy way to illustrate the very real impact of inflation on the things real people spend real money on. But it does rather distract from a much bigger issue: that the punishing level of food price inflation is battering some people to such an extent that it’s not that they can’t afford the ballooning price of Christmas dinner.

They can’t afford dinner full stop. Or maybe breakfast. Or lunch. Supper? Tea? The names of meals don’t much matter. The fact that people are missing one or maybe two of them a day? That does.

One in seven families are, according to the TUC, in that position.

I know I’ve used that figure before. But we’re in danger of becoming de-sensitised to it and the misery flowing from it. This isn’t just me being a bleeding heart, dedicated to raining on people’s crimbo. People should be able to enjoy the holiday season. I hope they do. But we should remember those figures and the growing demands on food banks in Britain; not to mention the fact that donations have been slowing.

Poverty is not a new phenomenon in Britain. But the current level of food poverty is, I think, a more recent development. It has grown from the seeds planted by the austerity policies launched by the Tories that followed the financial crisis, during which time working-age benefits were cut in real terms and then cut again.

The government had to cave in to its backbenchers and hike them by the rate of inflation this year. But it is only the fourth time in the last decade that this has happened. “Our projections show that the 2016-20 cohort are expected to face the highest rates of relative child poverty to date, at close to 40 per cent at the age of two,” the Resolution Foundation said in a 2019 report. This needs to be addressed.

The fact that children in that position are sent off to school on empty stomachs ought to be unconscionable. Ditto the fact that their parents are often in the same boat as they head out to work. Those jobs will often be poorly paid and insecure. This isn’t solely an issue of working-age benefits and the erosion of their value. It is a multi-pronged social problem to which government ought to be paying attention.

Except that it isn’t.

We’re encouraged to think about the less fortunate at this time of year, mostly by people who think there ought to be more to the Christmas holiday than an exercise in consumerism at its worst. They’re often religious types who heard the message about healing the sick and feeding the hungry as opposed to those who think it’s all about taking the preacher’s words as gospel, suppressing women’s rights, beating the kids and (in America) guns.

They have a point.

This situation ought to prick our conscience. It ought to stain the conscience of our rulers whom, despite what they might have you believe, could do something about it if they wanted to. In the new year, we need to think about calling them to account so that we can, in future, more easily enjoy that dinner without that little voice in our heads saying, what about that family at the other end of the street who may not be eating dinner at all.