To think Britain is heading towards economical and social collapse

[Cheesecakeandwineinasuitcase]

It feels like we are living in strange times, having come out of a global pandemic, the war in Ukraine and now the cost of living crisis and the added pressure from Brexit.

Ive barely slept tonight, worrying about what might happen with energy prices. I’ve heard the energy price cap is expected to rise to £3,850 in October. A few months ago I’m sure they predicting it would be £2,400 and that was horrifying enough.
Now I’m seeing people on the energy support Facebook group talking about monthly energy costs of £900 per month. It feels like this is escalating out of control very quickly and the Government are allowing us to sleepwalk into a disaster.

I realised tonight that if the price cap does keep increasing at the rate it has then what will happen to all the businesses once people can’t afford their energy bills anymore? They will probably increase their prices to try and cover their costs but that will drive down sales even more as people won’t have as much money to spend anymore. Eventually it will only be the essentials that we can afford so that surely means that all the other businesses won’t be able to afford to keep going?

Then what? Unless our government actually get their heads together about this then the whole country will end up in financial ruin and we will see the breakdown of society. Why so much focus on the leadership contest, surely that must take a back step.

Ive just checked the parliament website and the House of Commons has now gone into summer recess so they won’t meet again until September! I think this is an emergency situation and that they should be called back to focus on this. They get paid enough.

I think it’s outrageous that they can claim for utility bills on their expenses when there are people out there with young children who are worried about being cut off and put onto a prepayment meter.

Surely solutions to climate change are the perfect place for that, then? If people can't see the collective good of us all having a habitable planet to live on, rather than none, what hope is there?

Well, that's exactly what's happening and what many people believe will happen? I fully believe we are on a slow and steady route to "collapse" one way or another. Wether that is in the shorter term due to economic collapse, or longer term due to climate collapse and the fact our planet becomes completely uninhabitable I couldn't say, but IMO there is only two real ways of dealing with it.

The collectivist - socialist way as I described below which would involve millions of micro communities who are as self-sufficient as possible (firstly because it's the only way I believe socialism works and secondly because if we want to keep our planet then we MUST restructure supply chains so they are local). There is no reason why there couldn't be larger / higher levels of state to cover shared goals i.e an NHS, or infrastructure between communities, or the probably fruitless tackling of climate change.

The individualist - libertarian way is basically continuing on as we are now and doing everything possible to increase the skills and income of you and your own circle, with the ultimate goal of doing what I described above except with your own resources in the hopes that what's coming down the road won't affect you.

Basically that would mean wether it falls apart in 5-10 years time when the vast majority of people literally cannot afford to eat or turn the lights on, or wether it's in 20-50 years when whole swathes of the world face famine / inhabitable climate while the other half are overrun with refugees and collapsing due to years of relying on the half who are dying for food and resources... the old, the young, the poor, the disabled, the unprepared etc will be fucked.

I also fully believe the individualist way is already happening, btw. You only have to look at who is buying up the land. The added kick in the face is they are doing it with the assistance of government funded subsidies. They can all see what's coming, and the times we are living in RIGHT NOW is about those with the means syphoning off as much money and resources as possible so they will be the ones who come out the other side of it.

I except people will probably think I'm raving mad or have anxiety etc, and that's fine, but honestly I'm not. I really didn't give a shit about covid and was anti-lockdown / restrictions because I felt it was massively blown out of proportion and was only a threat to a very tiny proportion of the population (and I've since been proved right).

This is completely different because no matter what you think is going to happen, the end result is basically the same. We can "go back to the dark ages" in a planned and structured way which would allow us to preserve things that would give us all a better quality of life, or we can "go back to the dark ages" collapse style in 20 / 50 / 100 years where the vast majority just will not survive. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I would 1000% prefer the former but am absolutely preparing for the latter.

It can do, in theory and to some extent in practice. I'm just growing less and less convinced of its ability to meet the scale of the challenge. We've had governments dominated by neoliberal economics for the last forty years, during which there's been a steadily increasing level of concern among experts about climate change, eventually spilling over into widespread panic among more and more of the population as the effects become present reality. What have any of those governments done about it? Practically nothing, certainly nothing anywhere near what needs to be done.

I don't actually subscribe to the idea that climate extinction is an unavoidable result of capitalism. But the fact is that capitalism has reigned largely unopposed for the last forty years and had ample opportunity to do something about it - and spectacularly failed.

And even the most diehard capitalists are willing to engage with collective solutions when faced with existential threats. Eg. rationing and centralised direction of industry during times of war, or the furlough scheme during the pandemic. If climate change is not such a threat, what is?

Yes I was nursing during those years too - Tory Government then as well. Thay really don't like the NHS.
When Labour finally got in we had a sudden injection of cash, my goodness it was a breath of fresh air! In our unit (GI cancer diagnosis), our routine waiting list went from 2 years to 6 weeks!! And our urgents / suspected cancers from 6 months to 2 weeks. We achieved that through new equipment, more staff, sending staff on more training, spending money on our physical space.

@StridTheKiller could you elaborate a bit further? A quick google tells me one of the main aims of Agenda 30 is to end poverty, which sounds like a positive.

"I certainly will not be able to pay £8/900 in power per month"

• so what do you plan to do? Just not pay?

why does the UK have such low productivity as someone upthread mentioned?

A number of factors

service industry with less manufacturing
lack of investment in general
lack of skills in workforce
lack of investment in education
high house prices

This is exactly right.

Many people struggle in silence with financial problems because it is taboo to disclose money problems. Financial issues can feel so bad to some that they take their own lives rather than seeking help. I would advise anyone reading who is worried to go online to Citizens Advice, and for debt problems, go to Step Change. There is loads of info on their websites.

The problem is the energy companies (who don't own a direct resource of gas ext shell, bp are excluded from this ) buy their energy from the same source. Energy is bought bit like the stock market, the problem is fixed tariffs hedge the market will stay the same or lower.
The unit rate price has gone mad, and these companies are now leaking money, ofgem regulates the cap -to lower cap would ultimately take quite a few of the big six down if not all and then we end up having a monopoly situation making this situation so much worse

Yes @pitchforksandflamethrowers, I have a relative who works in the energy sector and the global energy markets are insane. It's not as simple as saying that private energy companies are deliberately charging customers too much - they're paying far more for natural gas now, so they have to recoup the cost.

Nationalising energy companies wouldn't necessarily solve this problem. It would just mean that the government would be leaking money instead.

For people on low incomes and benefits this is going to be a disaster and we should be helping those the most.

For those on moderate and medium incomes this will be a harsh lesson on budgeting and lowering consumerism.

High income folk will waltz around consuming masses and wasting the planets resources as usual.

@MarshaBradyo exactly!

They have actually invented "machines" (more like reverse power stations or industrial sized trees) which breathe in dirty air and spit out clean. They eat up the carbon and turn them into rock, which can then be buried underground / used in whatever way we could find a purpose for them.

It already exists.

What doesn't exist is a way to make money off them at the scales the people who hold the power would need to make it worth their while.

We can regulate this all we like but it just seems to add to the fucking mess. Companies want to offset their carbon so instead of buying one of these things, they buy up the Scottish countryside (an appreciating asset instead of a depreciating one like those machines), kick people off the land, "rewild" it and collect a cheque from the government.

Zero acknowledgment of the fact that these places were probably not wild to begin with, at least not in the sense they intend to make them. The communities who lived and worked there for 1000s of years were cleared off it to make way for fields for sheep and forests for hunting. There is fuck-all natural in what they're doing, and there is fuck-all benefit to the people of the country either who should be the ones who get to decide what happens here.

Paying companies to offset carbon. Paying farmers to grow unsustainable food. Paying us £400 to pay the profit-making energy suppliers. All of it is playing lip-service to the actual problems we face, kicking them down the can for another day, and I don't understand why more people aren't waking up to it.

Think about some of the greatest feats of mankind and consider that in many cases, the people who started them, funded them, worked on them etc all knew they would never be alive to see them finished.

Can you imagine the people who hold the power now doing that now? The government who are thinking about the election in 4 years time or the massive companies who are thinking about what profits they'll need to report at the shareholders meeting, and what that will do for their stock-price?

I don't think so.

And that is why we need massive change to prevent the inevitable.

Rinatinabina

Yup, some posters on here seem to genuinely think everyone else is coping with this better. They are not, we are all going to suffer from wholesale energy price increases and food becoming more expensive. India for example banned grain exports the other month (understandably so), nirtrogen shortages will make life extremely difficult for farmers and prices for food will probably stay high for a while. The EU has agreed a 15% cut in energy usage (exceptions granted to some countries). Reality is you will probably see brownouts/blackouts across europe over the winter or restricted hours of usage while Putin tries to put pressure on everyone.

I totally agree. Whether you support the present govt or not, you only have to listen to the in-depth news discussions, or business/economics stuff on Radio 4 or TV or broadsheet press to realise that some countries are in even deeper trouble (Germany is really precarious at the moment). France also is in crisis. The reality, even if you are highly dissatisfied with the UK government, is that this is a much, much wider problem and not just the fault of Boris and his merry band.

@Blossomtoes if 1997 to 2010 was the best shape its ever been then that is nothing to be proud of. I might not have worked for the NHS by that point but plenty of friends and family did and reported if was still awfully run and increasingly short staffed.
From my point of view I had all my children 1997-2010 and for the youngest 2 we were told to prepare to drive 50 miles to the next nearest large hospital when I went into labour as our local hospital was full.
I'm grateful to the NHS for all sorts of reasons but pretending it's been well run by Labour or anyone else is just not true in my opinion.

My DS used to make jokes about not living in the 1970s - when I was a kid. But - not doing the living In a shoebox joke - food was boring, nothing out of season, we all stayed in the living room/kitchen because bedrooms were chilly, people were I lived shared lifts to work from the village to town, my dad had a professional job but as ppl have said taxes were higher but also reaching 80 was unusual, treatments were more basic and less costly or long-term. There were lots of well-paid manual jobs. I look at the cafes and coffee shops that abound, everyone on holiday abroad and think for the middle third - where I’d put myself - will have to cut back heavily but there is slack. Trouble is we’ve all been deluded into thinking we can live like the top third and been persuaded to believe the bottom third are there because of personal failure that society has no responsibility for. We have behaved like spoilt children for several decades, we need to be adult again and realistic. It won’t be nice — 30s and 70s weren’t much fun - but the big mistake is to believe pipedreams that low taxes, growth and personal hard work are attainable. We need the sort of big rethink that happened in 1945. Whoever gets elected will have a shock when they see the figures fully. Either face it full on - higher taxes, insulate homes, fix social care or go for fascist populism. I fear the latter but as recent strikes have shown people get why workers are striking. We bought prosperity by exploiting other countries - colonialism, cheap consumer goods from developing counties, importing labour, but that won’t wash anymore. China and India are far bigger and need to do want we did previously to support their populations

Either face it full on - higher taxes, insulate homes, fix social care, or go for facist populism. I fear the latter.

I'm afraid the latter is already happening. And no there's no way this Government are going to be brave enough to face up to reality (and why would they? it works for them), and I've got serious doubts about Keir Starmer having the balls either.
What I would like is a coalition Government of Labour/ Lib Dems and The Greens. Lets have a combination of the best of their policies.

But the government doesn’t set the price cap - Ofgem does.

People do need to wise up though, and quickly.

There an article about young people struggling with money on the bbc news today. There's a clip where a 24 year old mum is in Tesco's and sadly puts a £2.05 box of 12 kids chicken dippers in her basket along with Tesco's own cocoa pops type cereal for 89p and saying she used to give her toddler fresh food and now she can't afford it.

Bollocks.

You can get 1kg of chicken legs in Tesco's for £2.10 and a 1kg of porridge oats for just over a pound. There is no need to feed kids crap and feign poverty. It's just absolute rubbish. 1kg of porridge would last months for a 2 year old and is 100 times more nutritious than the chocolate cereal rubbish she chooses.

@Tha csn you say how you’re preparing?

Other comparable countries are facing the same crises as us. We are particularly vulnerable as individuals/households due to the historic and current low wage, low tax, small state political approach we have favoured. Germany e.g. is particularly vulnerable to Russia, that’s a consequence of their decision-making. At least they can admit it was a mistake. Our situation is an outcome of the choices we’ve made. Yes, it’s had benefits for some. Yes, we are going to suffer more than our directly comparable countries. I don’t see anyone admitting to any mistakes in the UK.

According to Martin Lewis there is a growing movement in the UK with the intention of doing just that. Civil disobedience in the form of just not paying.

This will come back to bite those people

I’m not sure why he’s endorsing it

Interesting! So why have these apparently been reserved for private communication to Polly Toynbee, and I can't find anything about them, apart from a few woolly generalisations, on the Labour website?

I don’t see anyone admitting to any mistakes in the UK.

When did any politician anywhere ever admit to making a mistake ? It’s always either due to circumstances beyond their control, or someone elses’ fault.

Me either. It’s quite scary too - makes you wonder where it’s all going to end.

This is an interesting comment:-

twitter.com/campbellclaret/status/1553026852847079427?cn=ZmxleGlibGVfcmVjcw%3D%3D&refsrc=email

I think Germany have pretty roundly admitted that Russian gas dependence was a mistake, and a political one. That’s on their policy-making, they didn’t have to increase reliance.