Gas & Electricity

kaz7 said:
Windfall tax should be covering it not us in our taxes for years to come , cant be upsetting her mates she used to work with at shell
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Agree a tax of some sorts should be helping but this windfall tax is a bit like the Coutinio money that is going to pay for everything for years to come when in truth wouldn't even cover the current support levels for much more than 2 months.
 
Alan Harper's Tash said:
This crisis should have been averted by us having enough power to be independent.

That‘s not just on this government, but all of them.
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Sitting on a sea of gas and oil it takes a special kind of stupid to fuck that up.

This is a pretty good article that explains the UK approach vs Norway. Although it points the finger at Mrs T, every government from the mid 70's onward could have cried stop and moved the strategy from spend to save. Of course when you bake the revenue into our future plans that is difficult but not impossible to do.

Anyway, current oil prices will at least change some of the conversation from Indi ref 1 to Indi ref 2 as long as Nicola gets her finger out ;-)

eandt.theiet.org

North Sea oil: A tale of two countries

The North Sea oil boom of the 1980s created colossal revenues for the United Kingdom and its neighbour Norway. Today, as both nations move towards a fossil-free future, we examine how the aftermath of the boom has unfolded on both sides of the North Sea.
eandt.theiet.org eandt.theiet.org


I have extracted some for those that don't want to read the whole thing. A lovely example of spend vs save.

Back in the 1980s, for a whole golden decade, it seemed that the sun would never set on the prosperity North Sea exploration brought to the United Kingdom and Norway. Both nations gratefully cashed in on a new gold rush ushered in by the alignment of two factors. First, the price of oil had rocketed since the global political shocks of the Arab-Israeli War of 1973-4 and the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9. Second, while consumers sought an alternative to dealing with the inflated markets of the Middle East, rapid exploration of the North Sea’s continental shelf meant that economically viable oilfields were coming on stream at considerable pace.

With the energy crisis of the 1970s a thing of the past, Time magazine reported that “the world temporarily floats in a glut of oil”. The Institute of Fiscal Studies stated that “the growth of North Sea oil revenues is the most important fiscal development in the British economy in the 1980s”. In fact, during the 1980s, taxation on oil from the North Sea delivered to the UK’s Treasury (when adjusted for inflation) an average of £18bn per annum, or 10 per cent of its entire income. As a direct result of tax revenues and state investment in oil generated from the North Sea, Norway was able to consolidate its economic independence and resist joining the EU.

What the two countries did with their surplus revenue has effectively mapped their economic futures for half a century. As the UK’s former Secretary of State for the Environment (and later Defence) Michael Heseltine said recently, Britain under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher “squandered the windfall” on short-term consumerist policies such as subsidised housing and mortgage tax relief policies. Heseltine says he would have preferred to see the money invested in a ‘sovereign wealth fund’, a state-owned financial instrument for securing long-term benefits for the nation’s citizenry.

This is exactly what Norway did, investing its surplus revenues in the so-called ‘Oil Fund’ which owns 1 per cent of the world’s stocks, is valued at more than US$1tn and, according to The Economist, is the largest fund of its type in existence.

Today, the economic fortunes of the two countries differ vastly: in terms of GDP per capita Norway is currently the second wealthiest country on Earth (after Luxembourg), while the UK comes in 20th, with a GDP per capita of almost exactly half of Norway’s - US$52,291 (£38,961) compared with $102,907 (£76,686) (projected figures for 2022).
 
Bigga said:
I REALLY don't want to qualify this post, but I'm doing it because I know shit loads won't have this on their radar. Judge me if you want, I'm not arsed, but if you can put aside hatred of the poster, just have a listen to what this content is about. It's 5 mins.

Can someone involved in a problem not speak a truth?

Who's lying to whom...?

Click to expand...

Ok, you’re Bluemoon’s equivalent of Lord Haw-Haw.
 
kaz7 said:
Windfall tax should be covering it not us in our taxes for years to come , cant be upsetting her mates she used to work with at shell
Click to expand...

Truss's decision is a classic example of barking mad neoliberal policy-making in action but is also arguably a perversion of it.

According to Milton Friedman, a neoliberal economist much admired by Thatcher, the sole responsibility of a corporation (or the corporate executives running it) is to make profits for its shareholders. They have no social obligations whatsoever except to operate within the boundaries of the law.

It is that kind of philosophy that Truss believes in.

The perverse element here becomes apparent when one takes into consideration the fact that neoliberal philosophy is crucially predicated on choice and competition in a free market. But no such freedom exists in this instance, beyond choosing which of these companies, which are all making obscene profits, to go with.
 
The price rises that we are likely to see not just in energy, but in every day products - food, drink, takeaways, haircuts off the top of my head - will they ever come down again? I highly doubt a normal persons wages will ever increase to reflect them, meaning standard of living will be permanently impacted. This really is a mess of a country, can’t understand anyone sympathetic to the evil b*stards in power, always more important to line the pockets of the billionaire businesses than to look after those that need it and the only reason they have on this occasion is that they’ve been forced into action.
 
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