Aibu it's not the Government's role to bail people out?

[Katypp]

The UK is massively in debt and money is short.
AIBU to think that families should be expected to manage their own household budgets instead of constant calls for Government subsidies every time prices go up?
It's coming up to summer. Surely it's not unreasonable to expect householders to manage their own bills by cutting back their energy use?
Surely adults could be expected to manage their own grocery bills? Obviouly covid was exceptional, but oil prices rising have happened many times before with no expectation of bailouts.
My question is, given the state of the economy, do we need to wean ourselves off expecting the Government to step in every time prices go up and learn resilience again?

It isn’t just a matter of ‘ cutting back.’
My utility bills would be quite low if it weren't for the standing charges. No matter how careful I am I can’t reduce those. It would be better if the government put a cap on how much profiteering utility companies can make. Other countries do this.
I don’t agree with certain people getting reductions on bills though. It’s never the working middle who are helped.
Why should working people always be the ones to suffer? How much more money do CEOs really need?

The Gov is borrowing money to pay this I believe just pushing more debt onto future generations we can barely afford the interest on borrowing as it is.

Absolutely correct.
If the government is supposed to be involved in individual’s finances then people need to start paying a lot more in tax.

maybe the 'too big to fail' should have failed. the banks never paid back.
they paid bonuses to themselves.
how about Thames Water?
how is that beneficial to the country?

Essentially yes as the cost of living is never coming back down. Our taxes will only keep going up because of our ageing population.

Unfortunately years. of little growth & underinvestment has meant we now have no wiggle room.

Agree. It’s easy to tell people to be resilient and budget wisely, but to have a 100% increase in oil just happen overnight is different.

I hear little mention of the difference in climate across the UK. I’m in the north of Scotland with no gas option so depend on oil. Apart from during rare heatwaves, my central heating is used all year round (much lower in the summer yes of course). Whenever I travel to the south of England I feel the difference, whereas locals say it’s cool I feel it’s lovely and warm. It’s just how it is. I bought 500 litres just before this illegal war, and will need to fill up again soon. That’s an extra £400 to find each time. Small mercy this didn’t all kick off in October with the coldest spell looming.

I think perhaps a scheme whereby priority support goes to those who need their 500 litres soonest. No idea how that would work but the price is so volatile that it is immediate help that is priority. I am sure most people using oil are already economising as I am, but there’s a limit and again where you live really does make another difference.

I’m interested in this - @Shakeoffyourchains do you have any more info?

If we’d kept oil wells running in the North Sea they’d be raking in a good profit due to the price jump and increasing greatly their tax payment to Gov coffers., they also would employ people who pay tax but no let’s cut off our nose to spite our face

It would cut out the middle man. Currently, we give our money to the incompetent fools in government and they waste a lot and give some back to us. We are then grateful and reliant on them.

The rest of the Gemini response is this:

”Summary: If you count "tax breaks to help companies drill" and "lower taxes for people to heat their homes," the figure is roughly £17.5 billion per year. If you only count direct cash handouts from the government to oil companies, the figure is effectively zero. ”

This is absolutely spot on!

It's the middle class who are going to be hammered by fuel price rises. The government are going to shell out a lot of cash to benefits claimants to subsidise bills and yes this is a bit falling as we are all going to be impacted. It's those just earning above any threshold the government puts in place that in reality will bear the brunt of this......

So do I.
The 80's were shit. I far prefer living now.

90's were good though. The country felt buoyant, optimistic, into the 2000s.

Government has been shit for the last ten years or more.

So what. I dont think we should pay if the banks knob about again. Which they will definitely do because what incentive is there not to?

They are already knobbing around they started knobbing around in 2020 whilst the rest of the world was struggling with this virus thing, their first thoughts were how do we kickstart the housing market and make a fortune out of the mugs again? Oh I know we let them off stamp duty which raises funds to help them survive this virus thing.

It is crazy to think that the public have been anything but resilient over recent years.

Very poor decisions by people in power at home and across the world have hugely negatively impacted people in recent years.

Economies only work well when there isn't much change.

I'm in my mid fifties and in a fairly fortunate position but never before have i seen such a constant barrage of attacks inflicted on people's incomes as in recent times

Oh I see now

You didn’t understand the point made by the PP

🥴 Seriously? A 2003 commentary ( ie opinion piece) written about poverty research done in 1980 on urban US that found that poverty was associated with dropping out of high school, children of unmarried partners and less than full time work but portrays them as root causes rather than the associations they are. This antiquated opinion has been long discredited.

You would need to magic up 1.2 million jobs out of nothing to do this.

There are 2.6 unemployed people per job vacancy in the UK by the latest data available: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/jobsandvacanciesintheuk/march2026

This doesn’t even look at skills mismatch where the primary issue right now is we have many older and recent graduate unemployed workers that are over qualified for the zero hour, no-skill/low skill job vacancies.

In addition, despite advertising vacancies many organisations have implemented hiring freezes due to the uncertain economy. So while they are post job vacancies to refresh their CV bank they aren’t actually hiring anyone to fill the vacancy. The number of vacancies advertised is always a higher number than the real number of jobs available.

Well I think you are wrong. I woiuld expect any government to help those in need in times of crisis.
So many benefit bashers everywhere atm who would happily see people starve and freeze and who are convinced that single mums ( mostly) are cruising roundcthe Carribean 5 times a year on universal credit.

People do die with very little heating.
Loughborough University study into excess deaths caused by fuel poverty found that 120,000 people in the UK died in 2024 alone.

You mentioned heat being a fire in the living room. Left for heated buildings for school/work, then came home and had heat.

You did not have very little heating.

How do you keep an oil well running when all the oil has been extracted?

https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-nine-false-or-misleading-myths-about-north-sea-oil-and-gas/

”The North Sea is a “mature basin” where production has been falling for decades, because most of the oil and gas it once contained has already been extracted.”

Below, Carbon Brief factchecks some of the most common claims about North Sea oil and gas.

• FALSE: ‘Reopening the North Sea would lower bills’
• MISLEADING: ‘Energy from the North Sea generates a lot less CO2’
• FALSE: ‘Britain is a resource-rich nation that has chosen dependency’
• FALSE: North Sea is ‘best way to protect us from volatility and provide energy security’
• MISLEADING: ‘The head honchos of the green lobby say we should drill’
• FALSE: ‘The UK is the only country in the world banning new oil and gas licenses’
• MISLEADING: ‘With new North Sea licences would come thousands of jobs’
• MISLEADING: North Sea drilling ‘would secure a rush of revenue into the Treasury’
• FALSE: Ed Miliband is an ‘anti-North Sea’ climate change ‘fanatic’