People should not make cheese sandwiches if they cannot afford the ingredients, Ann Widdecombe has said.
The former Brexit Party MEP, who joined Reform UK earlier this year, insisted there was no “given right” to low food prices amid the current levels of double-digit inflation.
Ms Widdecombe was taking part in a conversation about BBC research that showed the cost of a homemade cheese sandwich has jumped by a third in the past year to 40p.
Asked what her message would be to consumers who could not afford to pay for basic items such as a cheese sandwich she said: “Well, then you don't do the cheese sandwich.”
She told the Politics Live programme farmers would “constantly” complain to her about supermarket pricing and rising costs on the shelves when she represented the rural constituency of Maidstone as a Conservative MP.
“The only way this is going to be tackled is if inflation is going to come down,” Ms Widdecombe said. “You will not get inflation coming down if you continue to have inflationary wage rises.
“We just have to be as grown-up about this as we can and stop thinking it’s solely a UK problem, because it isn’t.”
Challenged by New Statesman journalist Rachel Cunliffe on the rising cost of basic items meaning that families “cannot afford to feed their children”, Ms Widdecombe replied: “None of it's new. We've been through this before.
“The problem is we've been decades now without inflation, we've come to regard it as some kind of given right...”
You should be made to pick
In a separate panel appearance, Ms Widdecombe said thousands of people currently claiming unemployment benefits should be made to pick fruit to fill labour shortages.
She told Jeremy Vine on 5: “I ask why it is that we've got 1.2 million people on the dole, and I do mean on the dole, on unemployment benefit. Some of them obviously wouldn't be fit enough to work at fruit picking. But 1.2 million?
“And the word that is always used is that our people aren’t ‘willing’ to pick. Now ‘willing’ doesn't matter if you’re drawing public money – I think you should be made to pick.”
Earlier this week Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, said there was “no good reason” Britain could not train up enough of its own fruit pickers to deliver on a 2019 manifesto pledge to reduce dependency on low-skilled foreign labour.
Ms Widdecombe joined Richard Tice’s Reform UK party in March, citing Rishi Sunak’s revised Brexit deal with the European Union as the final straw.
In subsequent remarks at her conference, she described herself as “politically homeless for a long time” and expressed her fears that the Conservative Party was no longer “truly conservative”.
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Don't make cheese sandwiches if you can't afford the ingredients, says Ann Widdecombe - The Telegraph
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