In the grand, damp theater of British decline, there is a particular kind of comedy found only in the decimal points of ruin. The latest performance involves a number: 3.4 percent. This is the rate at which U.K. inflation rose in December, a figure that has sent the usual collection of prognosticators and political parasites into a state of performative shock. It shouldn’t be a surprise, of course. For a nation that has spent the better part of the last decade meticulously dismantling its own relevance, a failure to meet a basic economic forecast is simply on-brand. It is the fiscal equivalent of tripping over one’s own shoelaces while trying to explain why the shoelaces are the problem.

Let’s address the ‘experts’ first. A Reuters poll of economists—those modern-day haruspices who read the entrails of the FTSE 100 instead of goats—confidently predicted a rise of 3.3 percent. They were off by a tenth of a percent. In any other field, being consistently wrong would result in a career change or, at the very least, a moment of quiet reflection. In the world of economic forecasting, however, it is merely a Tuesday. These individuals are paid handsomely to stare into the abyss of global markets and return with a number that is invariably incorrect, yet we treat their declarations as if they were carved in stone by a burning bush. The 3.4 percent figure isn’t just a statistic; it’s a testament to the collective delusion that we can predict the behavior of a system designed by the greedy and navigated by the incompetent.

The political response has been as predictably pathetic as the numbers themselves. On the Right, we see the remnants of a government that has spent the last decade treating the national treasury like a personal casino, now acting baffled that the house always wins. They speak of 'headwinds' and 'global pressures' with the weary sigh of a gambler who just realized he put his kids’ tuition on red. They want you to believe that this 3.4 percent is a cosmic fluke, an act of god, rather than the inevitable result of a calcified system that prioritizes corporate subsidies over the ability of a citizen to buy a block of cheddar without taking out a payday loan. Their solution is always the same: wait it out, tighten your belts, and perhaps if we’re lucky, some of that mythical 'growth' will trickle down from the penthouses to the food banks.

On the Left, the outrage is so choreographed you can almost hear the stage directions. They point fingers with the practiced intensity of a secondary school drama teacher, decrying the 'cost of living crisis' as if it’s a brand-new phenomenon they only just discovered. Their rhetoric is a hollow shell of performative empathy, offering no actual alternative other than a slightly different flavor of managed decline. They pretend that if they were in charge, the fundamental laws of a crumbling global supply chain would simply vanish because they care more. It’s a binary of failure: one side is too cynical to care, and the other is too vapid to lead. Both sides look at 3.4 percent and see not a crisis of human suffering, but a talking point to be weaponized in a 24-hour news cycle that has the attention span of a concussed goldfish.

Then there is the Bank of England, that austere cathedral of fiscal inertia. The high priests of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street will undoubtedly look at this 0.1 percent discrepancy and decide that the only rational course of action is to make life more expensive for everyone. Their logic is the logic of the medieval physician: the patient is feverish, so we must drain more blood. If the economy is overheated—a laughable term for a country where most of the infrastructure is held together by rust and optimism—they will raise interest rates until the pips squeak. They believe that by making it impossible for a young family to pay their mortgage, they can somehow stop the price of imported avocados from rising. It is a delusional cycle of self-flagellation masquerading as monetary policy.

The reality that no one wants to admit is that the United Kingdom is a laboratory for how a first-world nation can gracefully, or disgracefully, slide back into a pre-industrial malaise while still having access to Netflix. The 3.4 percent inflation rate is just a symptom of a deeper, terminal rot. We are living in a society where the 'experts' can’t count, the 'leaders' can’t lead, and the 'solutions' are just different ways to burn the remaining furniture to stay warm. The public, for its part, continues to shuffle along, tut-tutting at the headlines before returning to the miserable task of choosing between heating and eating. It’s a masterclass in national self-harm, and the best part is that we’re all invited to watch the slow-motion car crash while paying for the privilege. 3.4 percent? It’s not just a number. It’s a punchline to a joke that stopped being funny twenty years ago.