The Winter of our discontent?
The David Vance BriefingRead More
Brace yourself. Energy bills are heading back towards £2,000 — and perhaps beyond it. Millions of British people are going to struggle to heat their homes this winter and, if it is a particularly cold one, I fear some vulnerable people may die as a consequence. Energy Policy really can be a matter of life and death..
Remember the great energy crisis of 2022? Back then we were told that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was responsible for sending our bills through the roof. Four years later, Putin can’t be used as quite such a convenient excuse, now can he?
The worrying news is that wholesale gas prices are surging again, just in time for winter. They are back around levels we haven’t seen since 2022.
This matters enormously because gas doesn’t just determine what you pay to heat your home. Thanks to the odd way the British energy market operates, gas prices also feed through into electricity prices. So when gas goes up sharply, we all end up paying for it one way or another.
Here are some hard numbers.
The current energy price cap for a typical household is £1,663. In October that rises to £1,723, following the 12.6% increase we already suffered in July. And then comes January. Current forecasts suggest another substantial increase. Some are pointing towards bills of around £1,950, while others are forecasting more than £2,000.
So yes, we really could be staring at typical annual energy bills of around £2,000 again.
Heart warming, isn’t it?
The “price cap” itself is one of those contrived phrases politicians and their advisers love. Remember, there is no cap on your total bill. Use more energy and you pay more. If you live in a large or an older poorly insulated house, or if you simply want to commit the terrible environmental crime of keeping your home warm during winter, your actual bill can be considerably higher. The cap restricts the rates suppliers can charge. It doesn’t cap what comes out of your bank account.
Anyone thinking they might escape the coming increases by fixing their tariff may also find that increasingly difficult. As wholesale prices rise, the attractive fixes tend to disappear and the new ones become more expensive. So do you gamble on wholesale prices falling and stay with the cap, or lock yourself into an expensive tariff now?
But there is a much more fundamental question.
How did Britain manage to make itself so vulnerable to this happening AGAIN?
After the last energy crisis we were told that “lessons had been learned”. Energy security became the buzz phrase, remember?
Yet here we are, just a few years later, and another surge in international gas prices threatens to hammer British households all over again.
Meanwhile, successive Governments have spent these years whining about Net Zero.
This Labour Government boasts that exploration for new domestic energy supplies is restricted. Government seems positively proud of making domestic production more difficult and expensive. It refuses to contemplate properly exploiting shale gas. And successive Governments have failed over decades to build sufficient new nuclear capacity. It’s a Uniparty fail.
And then, as the ultimate gaslighting, politicians congratulate themselves on building more wind turbines and solar farms even though both obviously require reliable backup when the weather refuses to cooperate with Government energy policy.
Britain sits on substantial energy resources of its own while deliberately making it harder to use them. We are self harming ourselves as a Nation,
When international markets become volatile we discover that we remain hopelessly exposed to international energy prices.
The stupidity of all of this is quite incredible to me..
And it doesn’t end with the bill dropping through your letterbox.
High energy prices infect the entire economy. Shops use electricity. Factories need electricity and gas. Farms use energy. Restaurants use energy. Transport uses energy. All businesses facing higher costs eventually have to pass those costs on to somebody.
And that somebody is usually you.
So higher energy prices don’t just mean higher household bills. They mean higher food prices, more inflation, struggling businesses and ultimately a poorer country.
None of this is difficult to understand. None of it is unpredictable.
We can all see it coming.
Yet Government energy policy continues to treat affordability as though it were some secondary consideration.
It isn’t.
Cheap, reliable and plentiful energy is one of the foundations of a prosperous industrial economy.
I don’t care whether that energy comes from gas, oil, nuclear, wind or something else. What matters to me is whether it is reliable, plentiful and affordable.
Government policy should be based on those three things rather than politicians competing with each other to announce ever more virtuous climate targets.
Because you and I know who ultimately picks up the tab for all that political virtue signalling.
We do.
This winter, a pensioner wondering whether to turn the heating up doesn’t give a toss about a minister’s Net Zero target for 2040 or 2050. A family watching another £30 or £40 disappear from its monthly budget doesn’t care how many wind turbines Britain has installed. They care about what comes out of their bank account.
That’s human nature. And it’s entirely understandable.
We went through a major energy crisis four years ago and the Government has learned nothing from it.
As we trundle into autumn and then winter, wholesale gas prices are flashing a RED warning signal again and household bills are heading upwards. Instead of blaming events elsewhere in the world, our political and media class should be asking a much more uncomfortable question.
Why has Britain deliberately created an energy system in which events elsewhere in the world can hurt us so badly in the first place?
That’s the real scandal here. I don’t want to be a prophet of doom. I’m simply taking a cold hard look at what’s coming. This could very easily become the winter of our energy discontent. And when the bills arrive, politicians will reach for somebody else to blame. This time, don’t let them. We need to hold their feet to the (expensive) flames.
***If you think more people need to hear this argument, please Restack it!***
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