If there’s one person in this country who enjoys near total respect from nearly everyone, it’s Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis. And why? Because he tells it like it is, without fear nor favour, with no political axe to grind, sponsored by no-one; in other words, an independent spirit. When he says something, people listen and when he announces that the price cap for utilities is likely to increase by a further 77% in October, adding to the 54% increase we suffered in April, plus yet another increase in January, then it’s best to believe him. Are we heading into one of the worst economic crises of our history? You’d better believe it.
Lewis calculates that the average bill from September will be £3500 a year, although many will be under that amount and many over. That’s what a 77% increase means. On that basis, he estimates that some 10 million people will be thrown into fuel poverty. Now I don’t know if that means you, my loyal reader, but it will certainly have a detrimental effect on my life. We are already trimming certain spending, such as using hospitality, shopping more carefully and generally being more cautious, being even more careful to not overspend. £300 on your utilities bills will not be a little thing.
Worse still, what if we have a bad winter? What if we get a prolonged sub zero period of weather? Then, it is entirely conceivable that December, January and February bills could nudge £500 each. Lewis describes the 77% increase as a “disaster”. So what should the government do?
As of now, the government is doing nothing about it. All big decisions, we are told, have to be left until September when either Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss will take over from Boris Johnson as prime minister. Johnson is clearly far too busy pissing it up at Chequers or being flown around in a fighter jet at a cost to the taxpayer of circa £90,000 to think about anyone else. And by the time the new PM enters Downing Street, there will be four weeks until the new price cap comes in.
The government will need to help low and middle income groups unless it wants to have forms of disobedience on its hands. As well as vast increases in utility bills, inflation is running at over 9% and rising and most people are having pay rises of well below the inflation rate. For some, the choice will not be so much as heating or eating: it will be whether they can do either. Short of going into shops and stealing food – and I’d like to advise people not to do this – then what will people do? They’ll join campaigns, I suspect, where they don’t pay their utility bills, perhaps paying what they can afford. I can’t encourage law-braking on this blog which is read by millions (all right: at least one person) because I’d probably get banged up for it, but what if you literally don’t have the money to pay? Do you literally freeze to death?
Lewis calls on the three people at the top of the country, which is the existing PM plus the two wannabes to get their act together, to meet now and sort out practical means of helping people get by. Let’s put it this way: neither Sunak nor Truss will be of any help to ordinary folk if all they want to talk about is Sunak’s £3500 suit and Truss’s £4.50 earrings. Or hear Sunak talk about his parents’ sacrifices in sending him to elite private schools (annual fees at Winchester, £45,000) or Truss bashing the state school she went to that saw her education damaged so much she ended up going to Oxford university. None of that stuff will bother people fretting about whether they can buy food and if they can if they can afford the gas or electric to cook it.
It was Michael Gove who told us the country was fed up with experts but in truth it is fed up with lying politicians like Johnson and ambitious, out of touch politicians like Sunak and Truss who don’t even talk a good game, never mind play it.
Summer’s here, the time is right for dancing in the streets, said Martha and her Vandellas. By winter, people might not be dancing, but fighting. That’s how desperate things are going to get if people can’t afford to eat and heat. Especially if the same bloke, Nadhim Zahawi, who once ‘accidentally’ claimed government expenses to keep his horses warm, is still chancellor and doing nothing to help.
In unrelated news, Centrica and Shell have seen their profits soar. Hmm.
