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..

I genuinly don’t know how anybody could vote for Ed Milliband,
I can’t bear Starmer but the thought of Milliband and his utterly dangerous unrelenting quest for Net Zero will bankrupt us.
How can it help the fucking environment to NOT drill our own oil and gas but to pay another country for theirs and then ship it here in bloody big tankers!!

The day before the Middle East Argy bargy kicked off domestic oil was 56p per litre. On the Monday (when I ordered) I was accepting but resigned to it being 78p. I got 500litres.
Today - £1.41. Nearly doubled.
So, I’ve been stocking up on foodstuffs that I think will spike.
Olive oil, 2x 10kg bags of rice, loo rolls, Fairy powder & dishwasher tabs, tinned beans (every variety going), dried fruit, pasta, tinned Toms.
if it doesn’t go up - great I won’t need to buy for a bit, if it does well I’ll hopefully ride out the inflation spike,
But I’m furious and very very worried. I don’t know where the government expects us to find the money -we already have the highest priced energy in the Western world,

North Sea oil is very expensive to extract because all the easy to reach seams have been depleted. So it’s only viable when oil costs are sky high, such as now. Under normal circumstances it’s far cheaper to import our oil. Now fracking on the other hand would have been a good idea.

I was going to agree with @Hellohelga - North Sea oil & gas is now not economical to extract, but there is never a reason for fracking. As a nation, we should have had more incentives to convert to renewables over the last 10 years (it wasn't so economically viable 30 years ago). If we were more self sufficient on fuels, the country would be less affected, but there are still many industries based on petrochemicals that will be affected. Be more angry at Trump - he started this war!

We pay 2x as much for energy as the Germans and 4x as much as Americans.

I remember when oil hit $100/bbl way back in 2008 ish. Petrol rose to £1.20 ish. Now it will rise to £2 with the same per barrel cost. The difference is massive tax hikes.

Maybe if the 2010 government hadn't put a stop to investing in nuclear power we'd have a couple of power stations ready to provide electricity by now. Our investment in wind farms has reduced our reliance on oil & gas, nuclear is an easy to control backstop to top us up when necessary.

That’s nonsense.

All North Sea oil and gas goes into the international markets, regardless of which sector it comes from.

Want the UK to open up more fields? You know that’s at least a 5 to 10 year lead in time?

The Jackdaw (gas) and Rosebank (oil and gas) fields are still awaiting approval. Rosebank is the largest undeveloped field in UK waters.

I’m also single but I imagine things are much easier in a dual income household.

Fracking will produce very little in the UK.

We don’t have the massive oil shale deposits like the US and Canada.

You can lay the blame squarely at Thatcher's feet for a lot of this. She squandered the UK's massive windfall from North Sea oil revenue to pay for tax cuts, rather than investing for the long term like Norway did with their sovereign wealth fund. Which country has a better average quality of life now?

A country with 5 million people and a completely different outlook to the UK?

It’s a high tax and high welfare system.

We live in a rural area and use heating oil, as there's no gas mains to any of the villages round here. Unlike gas and electricity the prices are unregulated so subject to market forces. I've been avoiding ordering in the hope the prices would go down but we ran out at the weekend so I got 500l delivered today at a cost of £768. A couple of weeks ago it would maybe have been £270.

For us it's not ideal but manageable, but for so many people it would be completely prohibitive. I have no idea how many people are going to continue to make ends meet.

Local petrol station very small town, prices up by 15p per litre since Saturday, just greed.

The North Sea gas and oil have peaked, there isn't enough left to be self sufficient and its been that way for 20 odd years. Its why we buy so much gas from Norway.

Electricity prices are high because gas is expensive, it costs a lot more to produce electricity from gas than it does from renewable energy.

Honestly, don't believe Farage and the Daily Mail. The information is easy enough to find. If Millliband was drill baby, drill! they'd be screeching for wind and solar power.

I have no problem with net zero, (and the reason our emmissions are low is because we exported our manufacturing industry to Asia so any manufacturing that is done on the UKs behalf should be counted as our emmissions not China and India's) my problem is that governments haven't invested in the infrastructure to support it! There should be solar on every single new build by law and a hell of a lot more money available for people to insulate and get solar installed.

However also agree that true col inflation is massively outstripping wages, I'm getting 1-3% pay rises yet food, mortgage, energy, council tax etc has gone through the bloody roof year on year!

My non frugal food shop is probably around 10% of my net pay. Massively less compared to what my Grandparents spent post war .

We got used to having it so easy until recently and this next increase is going to hit hard.

I don't think that a food shop alone is where the problem lies, it is just where many people feel the pain.
Most people get wiped out by council tax, utilities, rent/mortgage and vehicle expenses. The money for these things goes out as regular automated payments and large single payments, then people find themselves at the supermarket checkout wondering how they are going to pay for their food shop. The food shop is getting expensive but partly that is because the money is being siphoned off elsewhere

I agree that the government should do something. So much of the cost of vehicle fuel, heating etc is tax, they should reduce it to ease the cost of living.

People like Trump and Farage are disaster capitalists and war mongers who don't want strong and stable economies with redistribution of wealth and more equal societies. They thrive on lurching from crisis to crisis and disaster capitalism funneling more money from the average person into the pockets of their rich mates.

The cost of fuel and energy affects the cost of everything else though especially food as it is more expensive to produce and transport. Plus after Brexit, lots of produce is now subject to tax and additional cost. Thanks a bunch for that.

Just imagine if we actually had achieved net zero - we wouldn’t be so dependent on oil then!

I was thinking this just testerday. They are so quick to pass on any rises but much slower to pass on any decreases and the costs never seem to go downto what they used to be.

Absolutely this.

Trump didn’t bomb Iran because of humanitarian reasons. As usual he’s behaved erratically and without thought for the consequences. And even worse, there’s no way to gauge what’s really going on as every time his lips move he utters yet another lie.

I see that he’s announced tonight that the war is “very complete” which makes absolutely zero sense as only a day ago he was insisting that the only possible acceptable outcome was if he chose the next Iranian leader.

Trump’s actions are designed to benefit him and his corrupt family. Screw your average Americans, and certainly screw the rest of the world - except his wealthy pals, of course.

It’s hard to know what to expect with such an uunpredictable, chaotic, and reckless leader deciding what happens next on the global stage.

I think keeping your cupboards stocked and your petrol tanks full is a smart move for now. On the news tonight there was a feature on how to use less petrol - that suggests they know things are about to get bad.

And if we could refrain from somehow pivoting to blame this on the “benefit claimants” for a change that would be marvellous. I see a PP has already made that leap - this is on Trump and historical poor economic decisions by our government, not people who need financial assistance to keep a roof over their heads.

Germany's incredibly 'green', though. They started putting solar panels on all new builds years ago, they have a very high proportion of 'passive' buildings, they do stuff like using heat absorbent & reflective paint to optimise natural energy efficiency. I'm sure there's more.

We could've been doing more of this if govt weren't so very friendly to commercial building giants, who always want to trim the costs.

Wow! 😮

I knew there would be an inflation problem after lockdown - but I did not think we would still be here in 2026 - and in 2020, I didn't realise how badly we were being treated by our own governments in terms of the economy

It started before this though, we never recovered from 08 look at wage stagnation, fiscal drag, lack of investment. Sold of too many things under Thatcher.