Anger at forth coming COL crisis

[MyCheekyEagle]

Of course I understand that the ME war is going to have an impact on oil prices & that will get passed onto the already struggling families; but when things stabilise again & maybe oil prices reset the greedy corporatez never pass this saving back to customers fo they. They just think as we've got used to these new higher prices we'll just keep them there. This thought has given me the rage most of today!
Just needed to vent somewhere, thanks if you listened..

My age has got nothing to do with it and don't be so rude.

Have you forgot about Gordon Brown selling off the gold reserves at a cut-price and Harold Wilson devaluing the pound?

Between 1900 and 1992 there were four full-blown financial crises involving the British government, and Labour administrations were implicated in all of them. (And no, I wasn't around in 1900 and neither were my parents.)

You can read it for yourself here :
https://politicalquarterly.org.uk/blog/the-economic-competence-of-the-labour-party-in-historical-perspective/

ive never understood why there isn’t a law ensuring that all new builds have solar panels. The rate they are going up we would be so much more self sufficient and there would be no planning concerns or people complaining about the look of them as they would all look the same. It would be so simple to do this. It’s just infuriating that it’s never even spoken of.

I wasn’t being rude. Of course your age is relevant or you wouldn’t have “seen several Labour governments”. No Labour politician got anywhere near power until 1923. The 1970s saw changes of government so often that it’s close to impossible to attribute blame for the economic disaster that ran through the entire decade. Six of one and half dozen of the other.

Despite selling the gold reserves, Brown oversaw a decade of economic stability and rising living standards accompanied by a steady improvement in public services. If that’s wrecking the economy, please can we do it again?

British Gas is the retail arm of the publicly listed Centrica group. As such, there is a lot of publicly available information about their financial performance that will explain this to you (and the BG results specifically in their segmental analysis). If you are not satisfied with the level of disclosure you could consider a complaint to the Financial Reporting Council.

@blossomtoes "I wasn’t being rude. Of course your age is relevant or you wouldn’t have “seen several Labour governments"

Just because I was around in the 70's that doesn't make me "ancient" as you claim. And even if I was "ancient", it doesn't mean I'm too stupid or senile to know whether of not a government isn't making a complete arse of things.😏

https://goldbank.co.uk/insights/gordon-browns-gold-sale-what-happened-learned/

Please read the paragraph entitled "What happened to gold prices...." and you'll see it paints a very different picture to the one you've described.

Edward Heath in the early 70s strikes 3 day weeks
ERM crisis - 15% Interest rates
&
Liz Truss - a trebling of gilt yields and an emergency £65 billion by the BoE, pensions wrecked, which we are still paying for.

Thats 3 in about half the period you mention.

Brown sold off a very small proportion of our Gold reserves and it made diddly squat to the nations finances, we actually ran a budget surplus under Labour, something not done since by the Tories.

I'm not arguing for individuals to front the costs. The costs it should be funded through government schemes for initial capital costs and supported by decent buy back tarrifs.

If there had been decent loan schemes and a decent tarrif many people could have had these on their properties at no cost to themselves and paid back via selling back electricity for decades. If houses are sold the costs can pass on with the house sale.

I live opposite council housing several of which have had panels on for over 10 years thanks to a scheme back in noughties. The residents have really low bills, and are still tied into to the old (good) tarrif.
In countries that have done this well. It has benefited the poor far more than it has the rich. Rich people don't have to worry so much about utility bills. Because there's such a small proportion of their household bills. But for poorer people after housing, utility bills are generally the biggest cost.

Additionally much greater investment could have been made into off shore wind.

We all show should have done much more for retrofitting through relatively low cost schemes around insulation and led lighting.

However, in the UK we didn't do this on scale.
Instead we pandered to the oil companies who gave huge donations to poltitcal parties to not do this. In particular, the Tory party have been given anywhere between ten and twenty million pounds from companies and individuals with fossil fuel interests. That sort of money comes with conditions and expectations.

I should add I have never been in a financial position to be able to afford solar panels!

@thecatsgotyourtongue Brown sold off a very small proportion of our Gold reserves and it made diddly squat to the nations finances, we actually ran a budget surplus under Labour, something not done since by the Tories.

Your response shows you haven't bothered to read the article I posted which highlights many more Labour financial cock-ups.

Absolutely.

Everyone was encouraged to go to uni because "everyone was entitled to a degree" or some other Leftie crap.
So Unis obliged by dumbing down degrees and people were taking degrees in 'Media Studies', 'Textiles' and 'Outer Mongolean Pottery' that were as much use a a chocolate teapot.
I've just moved house again and proper time-served tradesmen around here are like hen's teeth.

Yes i did read the article but thanks for being able to tell me what i have or haven't read.

On Financial crisis, the Tories have also caused many more than i mentioned, one more recent one was unemployment at 8% in the early 2010s.

Sunak wasting billions on giving away money to Covid fraud (Dwarfs Brown's Gold sale)

The wider point here, which you might not accept, is all Governments mess up, but i don't go around saying "Labour is always financial competent" they are not and neither are the Tories.

Often due to World events but sometimes down to local policy - Privatisation, Right to Buy, ERM, PFI, Truss and Austerity

Right wing policies don't help the ordinary man/woman in the street. Just the rich
At least trump has stopped the media bringing up the Epstein files, which is the whole point of this needless war. Watch the rich get richer because of it.

Please note Labour's term in government ended in a recession,

fullfact.org/economy/unemployment-under-Labour/

As the result of a global financial crisis which the UK weathered better than most of the rest of the world.

What is the point in trying to achieve Net ) when Trump, Israel and Putin are blowing up everything right left and center. I shudder to think what they are contributing to global warming!

Exactly this. What is our tolerance threshold when ‘living’ is simply economic survival and not getting by for a huge segment of the population? When EVERYTHING gets more expensive where on earth does the extra money come from?

In 2026 with all the incredible technological advances civilisation has made we’re still stuck in a COL crisis loop. It beggars belief.

National debt rose from 29% of GDP in 2002 to 37% of GDP in 2007. That is definitely not "low and stable"! It had risen by 28% BEFORE the financial crash! That was during a period where Brown self-proclaimed he'd ended boom and bust and claimed the economy was thriving!

China pollutes a lot, and still does.
But over the last few decades they put loads of resources into green energy. Such that they are now the top electricity provider from green energy sources. They still burn a lot of fossil fuels and likely will for a while but they are now leaders in the technology and manufacturing of renewable infrastructure like wind farms. And they are on track to gradually make it their primary source of energy, meaning they don't depend on fossil fuels and have energy sovereignty. Also it's good for the environment.

The UK had massive lobbying against spending on developing renewable alternatives. There was far less government subsidies in wind etc than on fossil fuels. As a result it's been much slower to get of the ground which means:

1. We don't have the capacity to build wind turbines here**. We have to get it from China/other places
2. We are still hugely exposed to shocks in the market like the current Iran war. As long as we need fossil fuels we will be at the mercy of global events and other countries

The irony that 20 years ago the main talking point against renewables was "China" and yet they are the ones forging ahead. They are not doing it to be woke. They are doing it because it makes strategic sense. I don't think we should turn off all the traditional power stations overnight. But working towards a future where we are less dependent on them makes sense and should have been prioritised a long time ago.

**Realistically we could never have completed against China without subsidies partly because it's cheaper to make things in China and also because China subsidises those industries themselves. But now all of it is outsourced when maybe some spending before would have created jobs now. Or at least not forced startups overseas.

What was the national debt at the end of the last Tory government?

Twisting the figures there! 28% indeed!

Between 2010 ands 2020, before Covid, the debt to GDP went 65% to 87% (34% by your workings) BEFORE Covid but perhaps more importantly, despite record borrowing, they trashed public services, took unemployment to over 8% too.
Plus lumbered our young people with eye watering debt, as they took tuition fees from 3k to over £9000 per year.

Its indefensible

Time for this tired old bar chart again.

Over 50% of the cost of fuel at the pumps goes to the government. Who are the "greedy bastards cashing in"?

The suppliers who put prices up 10p a litre overnight on the same fuel that was in the pumps the day before. They’re not spending it on the common good, are they?

Exactly. Thank you.

Yes the day of the attack, that evening, the ASDA near me, put prices up 6p, by the morning it went up another 3p.

Tesco, tbf, did not do this, by the following day, had gone 2p.

But both increased prices on fuel bought under the older pricing scheme.

When wholesale fuels fall, who would like to bet on them being equally so quick to drop the price?