My Lords,

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”,

as Milton Friedman pointed out. We printed a lot of money during the lockdown without producing any real-world goods. If this was really about the war in Ukraine, how come Japan and Switzerland have inflation of less than 3%? Will my noble friend the Minister urge the Bank of England to reduce the ultimate cause of the problem, which is printing lots of money so that people could stay at home producing fewer things? We will not restore fiscal sanity without sound money.