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’m surprised geothermal heating still isn’t really a thing in the UK. Where I live over 70% of households use it. It’s so much cheaper to run but costs a bit to install. Is it not being talked about or encouraged? Maybe the government need you to be reliant on oil and gas even for you basic needs such as heating and warm water.

Windfall taxes don't help the consumer though, ordinary people who cannot afford these increases, don't get the money back.

We are all working to stay poor.

It's awful isn't it. The price of food is totally ridiculous. A few years ago I could do a big shop for the full month for £80, with a further £20 being spent on the month to top up milk etc. Now my shop is at least double that and the same for the top ups. My spending habits haven't changed. I'm still buying own brand, using discounts etc but it's so expensive.

I'm eeking out what I've got in the freezer and cupboards for the next few weeks before I do a shop. We've stopped eating fish, I've cut down the amount of meat we're eating, I'm only having one kind of fruit. It's depressing that I can't afford to feed my child a healthy and varied diet.

The most annoying thing is we have a bulk fuel delivery at work for our work vehicles. I know what the supplier charges us so I am fully aware of the massive increase we are charged at the pumps and that’s before the supplier takes their cut.

Other countries manage it. In Malta the government determines petrol prices and they’re uniform across all outlets. Petrol here went up 10p a litre last Tuesday, it’s obviously profiteering.

I’m so cross I had to turn the news off last night.

Things are such a struggle already and I could cry at the cost of fuel, Asda put their petrol prices up 3x in a week last week. It’s profiteering. Surely the petrol in the tanks last week was already bought and paid for?

We definitely need to be forward thinking in terms of energy.

No more moaning about wind farms being "ugly' or people not wanting them because they spoil the view.

We need to take more steps to become independent in terms of energy production & take every opportunity we can to do so.

I know I’m catastrophising but I keep worrying we’re going to be living in a Mad Max type world before long.

Im trying to set up by myself after divorce and it’s absolutely relentless, I’m needing to borrow more and sort out my energy accounts so this is hitting me hard. I earn a good professional wage but it isn’t reflected at all in the kind of lifestyle available to me. I don’t eat out, I don’t go on luxury holidays. It’s just constant take take take. It feels like there is always some crisis that hits at the worst possible moment.

I used to be so pro labour but this pathetic govt have no ideas and I’m sick of hearing them say “growth” is the solution. That’s just a way of telling us all to work harder. How? Half of us are exhausted and burnt out, and the other half (young people) can’t find work. The economy traditionally relied on a balance between experienced wisdom, and new ideas and new energy. While the middle aged are being made redundant , the remaining ones have no energy to exercise wisdom, they just fire fight. The young people are locked out by “efficiencies” so there are no jobs going for them. Everyone is either ill, depressed, bored, exhausted, unemployed, or all of the above. Fuck off with “growth”, starmer. You work for us, not the other way around. We’re all doing our best and we need systemic change that we can’t effect as individuals

(The “efficiencies” locking young people out of work are: making everyone redundant except one middle aged person who has to do everything and pretending that tech will cover half the work load that a whole team used to do. That person will go off sick in the end and then we have to hear whining about the “benefits bill”. Stop making us ill and saying it’s our fault!)

I'm hoping for warm weather. I bought heating oil (live rurally) just as things kicked off and the price has since doubled so what we have will have to last. I feel like the world is burning and the only answer is to be as frugal as possible but bloody hell, it's so depressing, working really hard for most of it to go on bills, which have gone up significantly. Thames Water, I see you.

Its things like and on car parking charges and fines, in other words peoples lived experiences that could, over night make Labour more popular but instead, they are no different from the Tories.

So short sighted, all these fuel increases will be paid for in higher inflation, higher NMW and Benefit increases, less for infrastructure etc.

I'm not sure what you mean by "invested properly" ?

"Green energy" has been subsidised by the consumer for years.

The total subsidy cost per unit of renewable electricity generated has risen by nearly 50% in real terms since 2005 and now stands at approximately £200/MWh. This contradicts government and industry claims that renewables are becoming cheaper but is consistent with expectations from the physics of energy flows, the empirical study of the capital and operating costs of both wind and solar, and the grid expansion and reinforcement and system management costs known to be imposed by renewables.

One can conclude that these costs in large part explain falling electricity consumption in the UK, which has declined by 23% since 2005 when the cost of the subsidy schemes first became salient.
These findings shed valuable light, it is believed, on both the cost-of-living crisis and the stagnation in UK productivity growth.

To say nothing of the Carbon Foot print left by decommissioned wind turbine blades, that can't be repurposed and have to go to landfill.

Just watch 'Dirty Business' quite eye opening and the scumbag thatcher not caring how the future would be. As long as you could sell it off, the tories did then blair did the same as thatcher was his hero. Nationalisation is much more cost effective than having to pay off shareholders for piss-poor services.
I don't know why we don't have more anaerobic digesters for energy that deal with our effluence.

By the time Blair got in, all the major stuff had long been sold off.

But Blair still set about privatising the NHS 🙄

The war will be used as an excuse for as much profiteering as the bastards can get away with.
It’s constant; food, utilities, council tax, petrol. Every single entity trying to get another pound out of our pockets. This country is absolutely fucked.

If we had expanded renewables more, we could at least fix the gas part of the equation. We could all have heat pumps and not need gas central heating. Net Zero isn't the reason for this. Corporate greed and global shocks due to wars are. Reform have started using this argument but it isn't to help the people. They are funded by fossil fuel companies!

Benefits cuts won’t suddenly give everyone else more money. Like it or not, as a society we take care of our most vulnerable. And sick/unemployed people actually make up a very small portion of those figures.

On the link you shared, there were around 11 million people in total classed as economically inactive. That includes everyone aged 16-64 years of age - I don’t know about you, but if someone isn’t working at age 60 then I’m not going to give them a hard time. At the opposite end of the spectrum, it can be really hard for our young adults to find work. With so many applicants per job, it’s not so easy now to just “get a job”.

I’m attaching the graph from your link - you can see again that the bulk of economically inactive people are very young adults or those aged over 60. Certainly for the 24-50yr old groups, the figures are much lower for economic inactivity.

Out of the 11 million people on the link you shared, 3.5 million people are either sick or unemployed.

Five million people are either carers, students, or retired.

That “one in five people are economically inactive” headline is incredibly misleading because it includes all the people that are either contributing in other ways - such as carers - or retired/students.

As per usual though, no one delves into actual figures and it’s back to benefits bashing again.

Incidentally, if they made it easier for disabled people to work with reasonable accommodations, the rate of employment would significantly increase. Cutting benefits first and promises to put fixes in afterwards is a recipe for disaster which is one of the reason’s Labour was forced to scrap its plans, at least for now.

This country isn’t struggling because 3.5 million people are sick or unemployed.

I’m actually really glad they scrapped the benefit cuts. It was poorly thought out and attacked our most vulnerable people.

Boris and his pals pissed away billions of pounds during their tenure - handing out lucrative deals to their pals for literally doing nothing during COVID. Their shoddy financial planning and lack of long-term economic strategy has contributed to this mess. Aided and abetted of course by mega-rich companies that are seeking to profiteer every time there’s any kind of global issue.

Wasn't academisation under blair? or privatising education.... also wanting everyone to go to university.... that meant a lack of people that probably shouldn't have gone and who would have done better/less debt gaining more physical type apprenticeships.

Unfortunately, until Electricity prices are no longer tied to gas, then more renewables don't bring down prices.

But that wont happen because it would then mean much higher prices for gas users.

HP's don't work for all houses or heating systems and many people cannot afford them either, Solar? good if you have a suitable roof.

We need better regulation, esp in fuel and food basics, the profiteering is very obvious, yet still allowed - Why?

You’re not alone OP, I have had to turn off my gas early this year as I can’t afford it god knows what im going to do next year if it near enoughs double. Probably freeze to death.

The oil price only surged for 24 hours and it's not back to where it was.

The cost of living crisis is due to high taxation, something we very much can do something about.

I'm 35, single mum, on 40k a year and having to move back in with my dad. 20 years ago people would have laughed at that.