We had hoped that the one enduring lesson of the bad old days of the 1970s with spiraling inflation and food and gas shortages was that price controls NEVER work.

Margaret Thatcher must be rolling over in her grave as the U.K.’s Labour Government proposes pressuring groceries into conforming to government price-settings or be walloped by net-zero climate regulations and obesity regulations:

The Telegraph reports:

Under the proposed price cap, first reported by the Financial Times, supermarkets could be excused from some government policies if they capped the prices of a basket of around 20 items.

This could include lifting regulation on net zero packaging policies, which charges retailers per tonne of packaging materials, and delaying a proposed obesity crackdown aimed at selling healthier food.

Senior Treasury figures are understood to have contacted a number of “friendly” grocery executives to float the proposal and ask how supermarkets could be persuaded to accept it.

However, officials in other government departments are believed to have been blind-sided by the idea.

Andrew Griffith, the shadow business secretary, said the proposal demonstrated Ms Reeves’s “economic illiteracy”.