In no way can Jeremy Hunt’s autumn financial statement on Thursday be treated as a budget like any other. The economic stakes for the country and the political stakes for the Conservative government after the Liz Truss debacle are simply too high and too serious for that. Today, though, the stakes ratcheted up a notch, when the UK inflation rate rose unexpectedly steeply in the year to October to reach 11.1%. This is a big moment, resonant with grimmer 20th-century times. It comes in part as the latest in a series of severe economic shocks, following Brexit, Covid and the energy crisis, that appear to be driving Britain into a longer and deeper recession than its neighbours, and which are not yet over. But the inflation spike is also an event of which millions of voters, with mortgages, overdrafts and needs that they cannot cover, have no recent experience. The return of high inflation marks the return of something that haunted British politics for much of the past century. After the millennium, however, inflation seemed to disappear and was almost forgotten. Inflation was something that your grandparents and parents talked about, like black-and-white movies, coal mining or student grants. As a result, the social and political impacts of high inflation in a 21st-century economy and democracy are hard to predict. The 20th-century precedents do not necessarily tell us what to expect, as this is unquestionably a very different Britain from the one that existed the last time UK inflation was at this level. That came in October 1981, when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and Rishi Sunak was a one-year old. In fact you have to be nearing 60, or older, to have any clear memory of what inflation of this kind does to the fears and insecurities of ordinary life. As one whose memory does stretch back that far, let me assure you the impact was inescapable. The tough, unsentimental struggle to preserve a standard of living and levels of expectation in the face of falling real incomes and shortages of goods and jobs was something that penetrated deep into every home in the country in the early 1980s. Those were extremely angry times. Now high inflation has returned, 40 years on. Though there are some similarities, the dynamics of November 2022 are also different. Both hikes in prices may have followed a global energy shortage – caused by the oil producers in the 1970s and by the gas and oil giants today. But the directions of travel are opposite between then, when UK inflation was actually falling (in May 1980, when Sunak himself was born, inflation had been 21.9%), and now, when inflation is rising sharply from historically low figures. The economic effects will be different, too. The latest month-on-month inflation rise from September was large enough to suggest a steep trajectory that may not plateau nearly as quickly as optimists expect. Much of the surge comes from energy costs, which would have pushed inflation to nearly 14% year-on-year this time, if it had not been for the government’s price guarantee scheme. That support scheme only lasts until the end of March. We will not know until Hunt addresses MPs how much support he plans from April onwards, but the chancellor has signalled that it will be less overall than now. For many, the really tough hardship will kick in then. Food and drink prices have risen by 16% in the past 12 months. This hits poor people disproportionately harder than the rich, and the north of the country harder than the south. These rates are not heading downwards any time soon, especially if the Ukraine war continues through 2023. The history of political opinion polling suggests that they will leave lasting marks. Today’s situation also comes on top of other calamities. Interest rates, now 3%, are likely to rise higher through the winter. The economy is already officially contracting and, if it does so again in the final quarter, Britain will enter a recession that the Bank of England has predicted will last through 2023 (watch out to see how the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast on Thursday compares). And Hunt’s statement is forecast to claw back more than £50bn in public spending cuts and higher taxes. The pressure on living standards, in other words, will get worse not better, will be long term not short term, and will make demands for higher wages – languishing at an average 6%, and lower in the public sector than in the private – far more likely. Because, even now, we are still in the relatively early days of the full onslaught of the cost of living crisis. This is all very different from the situation back in the early 1980s. Back then, an inflation rate like 11.1% might have felt like an easing of several years of even worse financial pressure, not an unfamiliar trauma as it does today. How this trauma plays out in the months to come will have profound electoral consequences. Current polling suggests that the Conservative party brand has been hammered by the events of this year and the rollercoaster response under Boris Johnson, Truss and now Sunak. Thursday’s autumn statement is an attempt by Sunak and Hunt to set down a more orthodox (and thus more credible) approach to the markets. But even if the markets approve, it does not follow that Tory fortunes at the ballot box will now revive in parallel. In the early 1980s, the Conservatives did not pay the electoral price at the polls for inflation. Margaret Thatcher instead won a landslide victory in June 1983. There are lots of reasons for that. They include opposition party divisions (this was the era of the Social Democratic party breakaway from Labour), the lasting shadow of the 1970s winter of discontent under the previous Labour government, and the popularity of Britain’s victory in the Falklands war in 1982. Few if any of these apply today. Yes, it is possible that a decline in inflation next year, alongside an easing of energy prices in the winter of 2023-24, may find some voters feeling more chipper and less vengeful. A lot depends on what happens in Ukraine. And yes, Sunak may enjoy decent job ratings compared with Johnson and Truss (not a high bar). Most of the signs, though, suggest that there has been one of those occasional sea-changes in British voting intentions, similar to those that carried Thatcher into power in 1979 and then Tony Blair into office in 1997. The autumn statement can probably do relatively little to reverse it. Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist