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..

We rely even more on the FS now, the UK did ok after 2007/8, by 2010 UK growth was 2.1%.

Manufacturing contracted heavily in the 2010s.

Yes Labour are not on target at all & the Iran situation will make that worse, so yes, on current trajectory, we will have a 1 term Govt but what is also currently true is that the next Govt will not be a Tory one, thats quite remarkable.

My brown stew blocked the loo😳😳😳. My parents were not amused. 😂😂😂♥️♥️

Manufacturing is struggling because of the price of our industrial energy is among the highest in the world. Thanks to a combination of Net Zero policy and other political idiocies over the last 25 years.

Improving under Labour.
https://www.themanufacturer.com/articles/12-months-of-labour-how-has-manufacturing-been-impacted/

It’s mostly this driving down growth

Construction down another 2%, hospitality down another 1.8%.

I paid £1.68 for diesel yesterday. It’s insane. Friend of mine who is a HV says all the community staff are threatening not to work as their mileage allowance might be getting to a point where it’s not covering costs. Why should they be out of pocket doing visits?

I will admit this somewhat supports your arguments (with petrol not specifically British Gas) https://bsky.app/profile/peterstefanovic.bsky.social/post/3mgx2yj5j6s2p

Yes HMRC have cut mileage allowance too, NHS staff have to use their own cars for community visits and the higher HMRC rates only cover the first 3000 miles, after that, the rates do not cover costs, one broken spring on a car, after hitting a pot hole, nor can the extra costs of Business Insurance cannot be claimed against tax either.

RR can of course change all of this today.

That diesel was taken out of the ground, transported to the UK and paid for by the petrol companies well before Iran kicked of. So thats pure profiteering on their part. They paid a much much lower price for it than they are charging.
I agree that's scant comfort for the out of pocket health visitors and anyone else relying in their car for work.

I am afraid they are all the same...

How much pence per mile do they get?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crk83e2g65no

This is heartening, I hope they follow through with it. Also like how the petrol companies had the audacity to pop a strop over it, then said they were going to boycott the meeting and ultimately didn't.

After 3500 miles it’s 21p a mile.

if your car does 40mpg and fuel is £1.68 it costs 19.1 p per mile. If you’re urban and your mpg goes down you’re losing money. If fuel goes up more you’re losing money. And even by clearing 2p a mile that won’t cover tyre and brake wear, business insurance, etc.

I work in manufacturing. Our industry is struggling like fuck so you can post all the Labour loving links you like, I'm living the reality.

The NHS rates are here.
Up to 3,500 miles pa it's 56p a mile.

https://www.nhsemployers.org/articles/mileage-allowances-faqs

When I worked for the NHS I got a lump sum and then a lower mileage allowance.

Maybe the Government will increase tax from 78% to 80% on North Sea oil producers to encourage us to produce more of our own oil rather than import, increasing taxes has worked very well on schools, growth, brain drain and unemployment so far the last 2 years.

Even when "we" produce our own oil, we still pay market value for it because the oil companies are private enterprises. They are not charities. They will sell the oil at the highest price available and when supply is limited elsewhere that oil price goes up. So opening up the oil fields would not make the cost of oil cheaper. They aren't large enough to bring down world prices like that.
We could nationalise the oil fields I suppose. But that would cost a lot of money and when the oil price goes down the government would be operating at a loss. Or if the government was providing the oil cheaply to British customers or would be operating a loss/not making a profit. Which would make people mad the same way the NHS makes people mad.

During the 1970's oil crisis there was a secret deal between Shell, BP and the government. We paid market rates, but we got as much as we needed. That's why there were never huge queues for petrol in Britain, but there were in Europe.

Having our own supply gives us security.

We had a Nationalised oil company to extract North Sea Oil in the 70s (BNOC) thats why we could ensure supply.
Prior to that, all oil gas belonged to the state, the Govt could tell private companies what to do.

Starter for 10 "Who privatised that in the 80s? giving away the money as tax cuts, mostly for the very wealthy"

Any oil/gas extracted now, belongs to private companies, sold on world markets, no security for the UK, unless we nationalised this & we do not the billions required.

Real phone lines as well as has been discovered in the storms and people depending on telecare or just basic emergency phone calls. Digital is useless and being pushed at a stupid rate in areas that have iffy signals at best.

I've been saying for decades that some things need to go backwards to go forwards. A big bit of it is health and driving. I'm older, yes, but since I've been driving I'm so much less healthy. Probably doesn't help that it's so much easier to avoid others when driving but then you have to put up with other terrible drivers.... increasing cortisol production. Also bad for health.
On red tape - if you change that to safety and rights, people/unions (same thing) have spent decades campaigning for them and then business obviously wants to get rid of them as they don't want to care for their workers properly. It costs them more.

But we are still paying for falling down hospitals and schools due to their stupid carrying over of the PFI and PPP financial disaster stuff proposed under the previous tory government. Bad long term planning.

A tree takes down a copper line far easier than an overhead fibre line, as they are re-enforced.

On power, the requirement for Openreach is to provide a minimum battery back up for the Telecare user, by this time, National Grid are required to provide a Generator or fix the issue.
In long running power issues, small local BT exchanges would have run out of power back up in anycase.

The UK is running out of spares and people to maintain the old digital exchanges, some are 40 plus years old, copper lines are becoming more unreliable too
IP lines are the only way forward.

Again, without PFI, how would you have paid for the Hospitals we need? Tax or Borrow?

Those Hospitals were desperately needed during Covid and by having lower borrowing than otherwise (had they been funded with borrowing) the UK had the headroom to fund all that furlough money poured down the drain (or rather into the banks and energy companies)

PFI carried on into 2015, both parties realised they had no choice, the mistake was the poorly written up contracts but many have been redrawn and the amount the NHS spends on PFI is less than 1% of its annual budget.

Weren't there a load of nightingale hospitals built in covid yet they were useless with no staff. Furlough money was stolen by some companies whose employees were in work. Us taxpayers are owed loads back into the treasury from those companies.