Busy day - another story - supermarkets have conducted an exercise calculating the UK Global Tariff on internal food/ drink supply chain data for trade with EU (obv zero now), which would happen in Jan with no EU trade deal - total cost £3.1bn, prices up: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54287283

British Retail Consortium acknowledge that not all of this £112 per household per year would be passed on to consumers in shopping baskets, but point out it doesn’t include costs of non-tariff barriers, disruption...

85% of foods imported from EU would face a tariff of 5% or more, say supermarkets, average 20%, which includes 48% on mince, 57% on cheddar cheese, and 16% on cucumbers...if these costs were fully passed on, (and some will be absorbed by companies), eg £1 on £3 cost of beef mince

“If there is no deal before Christmas, the increase in tariffs will leave retailers with nowhere to go other than to raise the price of food to mitigate these new costs.” British Retail Consortium today.

Some of this would be offset by the application of lower tariffs from some non-EU countries, and that hasn’t been calculated in the above... Government response to this story “working hard” for a deal “avoiding tariffs should be beneficial to both sides”.

A detail - the Government response was notably pro-deal, not , as we have had in the past, the argument that this will be fine because we will get cheaper other things from elsewhere, and grow more food ourselves.

The supermarkets point out that this time of rising unemployment and uncertainty is a very sensitive economic backdrop to be doing anything that puts upward pressure on people’s shopping bills...