Businesses Urge Swinney to Scrap 'Gimmick' Food Price Cap
Twenty-three business organisations — from the Scottish Retail Consortium to Dairy UK — jointly urged John Swinney to abandon his planned statutory cap on essential food prices before tomorrow’s programme for government, calling it “an appallingly terrible idea… not a solution, a gimmick” and citing Hungary’s experiment producing shortages. Mr Swinney’s manifesto case is that a basic nutritious shop has become unaffordable and government has “a public health responsibility” to act.
Price caps are where popular politics and price theory collide on schedule: polling adores them, economists point to Hungary — where capped staples vanished from shelves while everything else rose faster — and retailers warn the costs simply migrate to uncapped goods or crush the corner shops the legislation would not even cover. Mr Swinney knows the critique and has calculated that being seen to fight food prices is worth the fight itself, particularly with a programme for government to launch and an independence campaign needing economic empathy at its front. The twenty-three signatures represent, unusually, the entire chain from dairy to checkout. Watch tomorrow’s programme — whether the cap survives as legislation, softens into consultation, or quietly becomes a “summit”.