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PARTS OF Britain are growing uncomfortably hot. On June 13th the Met Office, a weather monitoring outfit, gave warning that large swathes of the country were officially in a heatwave. Data published the same day by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), keeper of other sorts of official figures, suggest that the labour market swelters, too: private-sector wages, excluding bonuses, were 7.6% higher than a year before. That was one of the fastest rates of growth of the past two decades—just shy of a headline inflation rate, including housing costs, of 7.8% in April.
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “Growing hot and sticky”
From the June 17th 2023 edition
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