As the Guardian is reporting this morning:
More than 2 million people across the UK will be cut off from their gas and electricity this winter because they cannot afford to top up their prepayment meters, according to Citizens Advice.
The charity said it had made the estimate for what is expected to be its busiest winter ever for helping people who cannot afford to top up, after last year 1.7 million people were disconnected at least once a month.
They added:
In addition, more than 5 million people who are billed by their supplier are in debt, putting them at risk of debt collection or being forced to fit a prepay meter.
These are real measures of a country out of ease with itself. Some within it - our energy companies - are clearly trying to extract more for a basic commodity that is essential to well-being than those who are in need of it can afford. The state is clearly not doing enough to help those in need when figures on disconnections and debt reach the levels noted in that report.
And yet, we hear this morning that the Chancellor has sufficient fiscal headroom (an utterly meaningless term) to consider tax cuts in March.
Those in fuel poverty will not gain much from any tax cut; the poorest never do.
What this country needs is a massive redistribution of wealth so that everyone has a chance to thrive within it. If the country is in trouble - and it is - it is because we systematically deny that opportunity to millions, as this data shows.
That is why the £146 billion that I now suggest that the Taxing Wealth Report might raise - or some part of it - must not be used to pay for the transition that our economy needs to sustainability or to provide better public services but to simply redistribute income and wealth in this country so that all have a chance of flourishing within it.
I will never understand those who might disagree. Why do they hate those without the means to meet basic needs so much?
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Let me get this right………………….
Increasing the tax take through market exploitation so that there is ‘headroom’ to bribe the same people you are allowing to to be ripped off – with tax cuts ?
Is this a new low in Tory party ‘development’?
I think so.
If you fall for this, you are beyond help in my view.
An interesting project for you next year could be to write about arbitrary government targets.
That 10% of income spent on fuel definition for fuel poverty is pretty daft, it could bring in big energy users in large houses who aren’t struggling at all. The number of disconnections or the number of households with mold are meaningful.
Other arbitrary targets:
0.7% foreign aid by government
2% inflation
Net Zero
£11.44 national minimum wage
60% of median income
All numbers seemingly plucked from someone’s fundament, where did they really come from and what metrics would be better.
Thanks, but not for me
And I sense trolling going on here
Errr. no. Carbon accounting is not an arbitrary target.
This is somewhat more sophisticated than the work of the BoE Monetary Policy Committee
I’ll just refer you to Prof. Myles Allen’s 2006 IPCC Carbon Accounting report, which first outlined the principles and procedures, and which have been much refined since.
This is the approach that calculates the point at which stability in global temperature rise ought to be achievable, by balancing levels of emissions with carbon sinks and carbon cycle absorption.
“Net zero” is not mere guess work.
Nor are IPCC scenarios which take a multivariate approach. .
.
It depends on what you mean by carbon accounting
All the political parties in the UK appear to accept right-wing Market Fundamentalist ideology as a basis for running this country despite clear evidence it isn’t working in the interests of a large proportion of the population. This ideology has become so engrained in individual’s thinking there’s nary a peep from the leader of the main party Labour pointing out this out! There has to be a reason for this outside of personal corruption and that has to be the failure to recognise that human societies have evolved to run on a basis of both self and common interest. In other words there has to be constant balancing and this is why understanding how a monetary system really works and how capital ought to be controlled more democratically are critical to aiding in this process
“Evolution of Parental Caregiving”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247759661_Evolution_of_Parental_Caregiving
“Explaining Society: An Expanded Toolbox for Social Scientists”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3471369/pdf/nihms401950.pdf
Abby Innes hits it on the nail when she points out on page 93 in her book “Late Soviet Britain” that both Market Fundamentalists and Leninists believe in the “withering away” of the state the very arbitrator of what should be in self or common interest!
“Both argue that the state should be transformed with a view to its ultimate ‘withering away’, so that the self-regulating freedoms of their ‘true’ economy may abide.”
Agreed
Now reading it
“I will never understand those who might disagree”.
I do disagree. Taxation is addressing an element of the system design (price gouging). What should happen is addressing e.g. – who actually owns the gas & how is gas priced – erm…….the UK does (gas fields in the North Sea) – the oil&gas mob are licensed (note that word) to extract the stuff. Let’s address costs.
Cost to extract a MWh of gas from the north sea, circa £2 (we can argue it up and down but it is around that). Dutch TTF prices today circa Euro27/MWh (oh look a zero has been added to the production cost). Henry Hub prices in the USA are around Euro7.5/MWh – which suggests the £2 is not far off the mark. But lets take the Euro7.5/MWh. Push that through a CCGT and add carbon costs and you are looking at circa £20/MWh – or 2pence/kWh for electricity vs circa 7 pence /kWh wholesale (or … 0.7pence/kWh for gas). residential gas prices Uk? Use to be 4.5pence/kWh God knows what they are now. Retail electricity? add a zero to the 2pence and you start to get close (30 pence anybody?)
Moving back to the oil n gas companies. Making money hand over fist (ditto National Grid and the DNOs). Thus do UK subjects go into poverty or debt to keep the oil&gas majors and NG and the DNOs in the style to which they have grown accustomed. Solution? Tell the gas mob that gas will be landed in the Uk and it will be priced @ £2/MWh (or £3 does not matter).
How does a UK serfs elec bill break down (source: SSE 2021)?
Elec Cost:36%, Network Costs: 24%, Billing Costs: 20%, Subsidies: 13%, VAT – 5%, Retail supplier profit: 2%
The 36% would reduce, network costs look high as do the billing costs (given one never can get anybody to answer the phone) . There is plenty of fat in the bill to strip & there is little reason why a kWh to a person could not look more like 10pence rather than 25 or 30. Indeed, the cost breakdown is living testament to Ofgem’s 3 decades long incompetance (yes I know they were called offer in the 1990s).
Now everybody repeat this: “privatisation makes everything more efficient” – The Gospel according to St Margaret Chapter 1, verse 3.
Or according to the market fundamentalists only the market can ensure everyone has their needs adequately met. Very obviously it should now be very clear to anyone with moderate intelligence you need to wear a set of blinkers to believe this guff in the UK!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k5_2EzqtQc
Weownit on buying back British Gas.
Mike Parr, well said: ” the oil&gas mob are licensed (note that word) to extract the stuff. “…………………..Domestic Gas in the UK is currently around 9p/KWH equivalent & electricity 28p/KWH equivalent to households. So the energy companies are ‘gouging’ UK consumers big-time, if wholesale costs are 0.7p/KWH for gas & only 2p/KWH electricity. A good reason for Keir Starmer to look at removing ‘licences’ & operation reverting to the State?
As one of the ‘serfs’ (low income) the costs don’t quite break down like that. The ‘flat tax’ daily charge represents a far higher proportion of spend. As also the next ‘flat tax’ proposed, to cover costs incurred from all the failed ‘suppliers’, to be added to all householdshouseholds bills equally over a period of months. This is like having to pay going through a turnstile every time visiting a supermarket – to cover their admin, storage & delivery, warehouses, etc. It’s simply obscene.
Agreed
And the latest additional injury and insult is adding a surcharge to fund the next nuclear station, since the costs have gone up so much on the current build at Hinckley.
France has always been ahead in nuclear power generation of electricity, hence French electricity prices only rose by 5%, when those in the UK more than doubled. France is now planning a series of new modular nuclear reactors & has attracted UK’s Newcleo, who develop small nuclear reactors powered by radioactive waste. Newcleo initially sought to tap the UK’s vast stockpile of nuclear waste at the former Sellafield site to power its reactors.
But after two years of delays in securing the permits for the factory — along with some wooing from the French president — Nucleo is now planning to set up shop across the channel. https://thenextweb.com/news/newcleo-uk-nuclear-startup-to-build-its-first-factory-in-france