Inflation is a huge issue of contemporary relevance, and the quest for policies to address the problem of rising prices occupies many minds right now. You can find some of my past musings on this issue here, here and here.
One of the worst ideas ever devised to fight inflation, however, is also making the rounds: price controls. Price controls are a terrible idea in a market economy (in any economy, in fact), because they interfere with the information discovery process that prices embody (when price go up, it signals an increase in relative scarcity, incentivizing consumers to curtail demand and producers to expand supply). Price controls lead to shortages, and rationing. Their design is very difficult to get right, as price control boards are made up of humans (or even worse, economists!), who do not have the knowledge required to get prices right like a decentralized system of competitive markets does. In almost all cases (including during the last bout with inflation experienced by the US in the 1970s), they were an unmitigated disaster. So why The Guardian would agree to publish this utter nonsense is beyond my understanding...