Inflation peaked two years ago. Officially, anyway. The Bank of England says it's 3.2% and calls that "under control."

Go to Tesco and tell me it's under control.

Food's up 30% since 2022. Not luxury food. Bread. Milk. Mince. The stuff you actually need. Energy bills have come down from the mad peak but they're still double what they were before Covid. Mortgage rates have settled somewhere that adds a couple of hundred quid a month to repayments for anyone who bought or remortgaged recently.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation put out a report last week. 14.4 million people in the UK are living in poverty. That includes 4.5 million kids. In the sixth-biggest economy on earth.

Sarah Collins runs a food bank in Rotherham. She's been doing it for years now and she's tired of explaining the same thing to journalists: "These aren't people who've made bad choices. They're working full-time and they still can't feed their kids."

She's right. The new poverty doesn't look like the old poverty. It's a teaching assistant with a car on finance who skips meals so her daughter can have packed lunch. It's a warehouse worker doing overtime who still can't cover the electric bill. It's a couple in their thirties who've given up on ever owning a house and are now wondering if they can keep affording to rent one.

The government's done bits. Pension triple lock's still there. Some energy bill support. But working-age benefits keep getting quietly eroded in real terms, and nobody wants to talk about it because pensioners vote and young people don't.

Britain in 2026: work hard, play by the rules, and still end up choosing between the heating and the food shop.

Some country.