The trade association Comité Champagne is to launch a £350-a-bottle of Bollinger champagne. Comité Champagne said the rich have been largely unaffected by soaring inflation and were seeking out specific vintages and more valuable bottles (Guardian 10 March).

‘Yes, the cost of living crisis and inflation affects most people, but the ultra-high net worth people we are selling to are very insulated… their spending power certainly hasn’t decreased.’

Cult Wine Investment said champagne prices, ‘don’t affect the richest people. Luxury goods are doing better than ever during a cost of living crisis – I’d arguably say luxury is doing better than it ever has done. The cost of living crisis has really shown us the scale of wealth inequality.”

23,003 people died during 2022 after spending at least 12 hours in an A&E waiting for care or to be admitted to a bed, according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (Guardian, 28 Feb).

That equates to roughly one every 23 minutes, 63 every day, 442 a week or 1,917 each month.

The College said its findings, while ‘shocking’, were ‘unsurprising’ as it reflected the fact that emergency departments are often overwhelmed and unable to find patients a bed in the hospital.

Just another grim reflection of capitalism’s priorities: profits for the rich, but don’t go to too much trouble to keep the poor alive. There’s plenty more where you came from, after all.

As much as a third of the already cut UK overseas aid budget is now being spent on housing refugees in the UK. More than £1bn of the UK’s aid budget was spent on refugees in the UK in 2021. Save the Children estimates that the amount of aid spent on in-country refugee costs could be as high as £4.5bn in 2022-23.

The Parliamentary International Development Select Committee described the trend as unsustainable and unprecedented.

The MPs say it has been a political choice by the government to spend so much of the aid budget on refugees in the UK, and insists it is not required to do so by international rules defining legitimate aid.

Greece reinforced border controls along its frontier with Turkey to halt people made homeless by the earthquakes that have devastated south-east Turkey and northern Syria. Hundreds of extra border guards began patrolling the Greek-Turkish border.

‘The mass movement of millions of people is not a solution,’ said Greece’s migration minister, Notis Mitarachi.

Actually, migrating away from an active tectonic area is a solution, but not one capitalism would ever condone.

Greater numbers of refugees are risking their lives to travel in vastly overcrowded boats from Turkey to Italy. 59 refugees, including a newborn baby, were found dead on Sunday after their vessel ran aground in rough seas off Calabria. They had started their journey from the Turkish coast.