A brief foray into twitter and I find this tweet:
‘In February we were paying £130 a month for our gas & electricity. It’s now £443. In October it will hit £798. January 23 we are facing £1,211 PER MONTH. How do we suddenly & magically find an extra £12,972 a year? How?’
I’m not shocked about this because although I am not the world’s greatest mathematician, I still believe in experts, including Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis. He’s one of many experts who have warned about the economic catastrophe facing the people of our country in the coming weeks and months. And the enormous hikes in energy costs are but part of a worsening situation. We’re likely to have price inflation at something like 20% by the New Year. For some, these will feel like the end of days.
Finding an additional £12,972 a year will be very tricky indeed for senior citizens who have no occupational pension or other income given that the state pension is only slightly over £9200 a year. Even someone on the UK average wage, which for full-time workers is £38,131 (slightly higher in England), is going to notice having to find anything like £12k of already taxed income. Unless you are very wealthy, say like a politician, this winter will be tough and many of us will be making difficult decisions about what to do and more importantly what to spend. Yet the very same politicians barely seem to have noticed, certainly not the two woeful candidates campaigning to succeed Boris Johnson as PM.
Incredibly, the disgraced Johnson appears to be one of the few senior government officials who has grasped the seriousness of the coming months and perhaps years. He has stated repeatedly that the government will have to intervene, quickly and generously, to help people get through the winter. Rishi Sunak at least recognises what’s ahead while his opponent Liz Truss is still banging on about her priority of giving tax cuts to the better off at the expense of poor people who don’t deserve, in her word, “hand outs”. In fact, for a month or so – it feels much longer – Truss and Sunak have been trying desperately trying to out do each other by promising they would be nastier than the other if they win. Johnny Foreigner, the “workshy” sick and disabled (AKA benefit claimants), lefty lawyers – all of them are the enemy within and there’s barely a word about the coming storm, never mind the NHS which we can all agree is currently on life support. This cannot hold for much longer.
It’s still summer until next Thursday when everything will get darker and colder, especially if we can’t afford to put the lights and the heating on and I still feel very strongly that if we’re not yet in denial then we haven’t grasped the seriousness of what lies ahead. The recession might not last months, but years, perhaps many years unless major action is taken. Yet there is no evidence to suggest Truss or Sunak are on the same planet as everyone else. Certainly not Sunak, whose combined wealth with his wife is circa three quarters of a billion quid, whereas poor Betty Truss is supposedly worth a trifling £8 million. On the street where I live, people could die. Obviously, friendly neighbours would do their best to ensure that doesn’t happen but there is no promise that many people won’t.
If you run a business that uses power, good luck with that one. The energy price cap doesn’t apply to businesses. Truss’s cuts in corporation tax will benefit the giant already wealthy companies, but small businesses already struggling with falling sales and rising costs will do well to survive. That’s your local pub, chip shop, barber shop, post office, corner shop; that’s every kind of small business you can possibly imagine. 20% inflation, rising energy costs, soaring interest rates. This, I’m afraid, is all coming down the line and soon.
If it transpires that Truss isn’t up to the job, what price she is ousted by Christmas and replaced by…Boris Johnson? Because if Johnson had been on the current leadership ballot paper for Tory members only, he’d have won by a landslide. And Tory MPs, with their party facing carnage at the next election; who would they turn to as their saviour? A renowned liar, lawbreaker, narcissist, chancer, shyster, bullshitter and election winner? But the one senior Tory who has grasped the situation we are in, even if his motives are entirely cynical. Desperate things and all that.
That’s the mess we are in. Your everlasting summer and you can see it fading fast. Much faster than you think, too.
