Friday 17 September 2021

This is not a political post


So now we know what 'Global Britain' looks like. It means teaming up with a country which is as far away from us as geographically possible at the same time as shunning our nearest continental neighbour whose closest shoreline is around 30 miles from ours.

We had sold-off all our utilities to other countries years ago and spent the last ten in a dismal period of austerity because we did not have enough control over our own assets to kick-start the economy by investing in the infrastructure of our own. Just think what the billions that fell from the magic money tree to finance track and trace could have done to improve the prospects for everyone.

They will tell you that this is a time of record job opportunities and that wages are rising faster than ever before. In a way this is true, but the jobs are hypothetical and the wage rises are hollow promises to attract potential replacements for the Europeans who created the job opportunities by leaving or being thrown out. It costs about £4000 to be trained as an HGV driver, and when you get your licence you are expected to work very unsociable hours for low-skilled wages. This is why the supermarket shelves get emptier every day as prices rise.

When the 'wealth-creators' sold-off the national utilities, France got the lion's share of the electricity supply to the UK. There was a little fire in Kent the other day which destroyed  an undersea cable facility which allowed the import of power from France to here, and the cable will not be repaired, up and running as normal until the Spring of next year. 

OFFGEN will lift the current price-cap on domestic energy supply on the first of October this year - a couple of weeks time. Russia is squeezing the neck of gas imports to Europe, so we can only guess how much it is going to cost to stay warm, turn the lights on or run the computer this winter. The biggest  industrial electricity users (steel, etc) will have their supplies rationed, so this will mean a sharp drop in productivity.

Just when you think that the storm could not be any more perfect.

14 comments:

  1. Well Manchester Fish Market this morning interviewer BBC: She was paying pre-brexit £3000 for a box of bass from Greece, she now has to pay £14000 for the same box.

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  2. The UK nergy market simply isn't working. For the second year running I've just been told my energy supplier has ceased trading and I will be switched to another, no doubt from what was a reasonable deal to a much more expensive one just as prices have gone up and we enter the period of highr winter usage. Last year it was months before the new energy supplier would even tell us what they were charging, and when they did it was so high everyone switched again. Even if this time I switch straight away, it will still be a lot more expensive than I thought I was going to be paying.

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    1. And the comparison sites that are still operating (at least one had suspended its service) suggest that the three cheapest deals I can currently switch to will cost me £730 p.a. more than I've been paying!

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    2. Christ. We pay around £450 a year (at the moment) for everything.

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  3. Could you please do one of your cheerful (even slightly rude if you must) posts - the news everywhere is so dismal and I rely on you to keep my spirits up.

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  4. Not just teaming up with a faraway country, but undermining our neighbour's established five year old contract

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    1. Contracts these days are not worth the paper they are written on.

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  5. We all just have to ride out the storm. What's the alternative?

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  6. The rich get rich and the poor get poorer--all over the world. The great majority of us are not alone.

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    1. Sadly that is true. I have nothing against rich people - I have depended on them for most of my working life - so long as they made their money in ways that did not exploit the poor or crisis.

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  7. Deeply ashamed to have such a perfidious and incompetent govt here in Aust. Our oafish PM did not even contact Macron prior to the announcement. The corrupt govt negotiated with the French to retrofit Diesel engines in nuclear subs ( not ideal) then dump them for….nuclear subs without consultation with mostly anti nuke populous.

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