This is not the 1970s, or so we are confidently assured by respectable economists. Granted, as we confront soaring levels of inflation, there are nuanced differences between then and now. But the UK’s strikes in rail, mail and rubbish collection point to one overwhelming similarity — namely, that stagflation creates winners and losers. When national real income is squeezed by oil price shocks as in the 1970s or the current food and energy price shocks, rival claimants in the economy compete ferociously to reclaim lost income. A wage price spiral results.

Milton Friedman remarked that inflation is “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”. Clearly, money is an important component in the inflationary process. Yet strikes in the UK and the tightness of labour markets around the developed world suggest that no explanation of inflation can be complete without reference to the distributional power struggle between labour and capital.

While central bankers congratulated themselves on delivering low and stable inflation during the so-called Great Moderation in the three decades before the financial crisis of 2007-09, disinflation was in reality the result of the global labour market shock arising from bringing China, India and the eastern Europeans into the global economy.