The Tesco chairman is backing a windfall tax. This is not business as usual

theguardian.com:

It’s a delicate moment for a chairman of Tesco, trying to describe reality while maintaining the brand-boosterism that someone in some distant MBA hell decided the shareholders demand. In an interview on the Today programme this week, John Allan, who is a former president of the CBI, dispensed entirely with the second imperative. He described what cashiers were saying to him: that customers were asking them to stop when they’d rung through £40. People are out of wriggle room. It was a crunchy, evocative description of how skint people are already, a tacit emphasis that this is everybody’s business, and a hint, if you chose to hear it, that this is unprecedented.

So many phrases have sauntered casually into the vernacular, and we use them as though they’ve been there for ever: income squeeze; rate hikes; energy price spikes; the cost of living crisis. There’s nothing complicated about this new vocabulary, but it does give the impression that the events are technical or abstruse. It was quite striking to hear Allan humanise the matter – there is nothing complicated about it. There’s just a person, standing in front of a cashier, saying, “Stop when you get to £40, and let’s hope the essentials made it.”

Even more striking, though, was that he went on to endorse a windfall tax on oil and gas companies. It is not a controversial point of view. You can split hairs on whether their profits are “obscene” but the entire fossil fuel industry combined wouldn’t deny that it’s all been a bit of a lucky strike, and that they’ve been half-expecting a windfall tax since their bonanza began. Yet if you’ve heard the notion before, it will have been from the Labour party; so the suggestion, being opposition policy, openly defies the