Comment by OgsyedIE
2 days ago
The UK faces real structural problems with the inflating cost of living regardless of government, roughly halfway attributable to failing the lower-level challenge of continuing to import adequate quantities of diesel at affordable prices and the rest mostly coming from an aging population. Spot diesel has come down from the price spike of covid to approximately 1.3x the 2019 price.
Almost all physical goods have diesel prices contribute to their sticker price in a significant way. The diesel exporting countries are all incrementally increasing their domestic consumption, leaving less for the world market year on year.
The UK government isn't trying much policy for tackling the causes or the symptoms, largely because the government is disproportionately drawn from a class of people who don't want those policies. The media of the upper middle class of the UK has sincere column after sincere column of hating the rest of the population and calling for better controls over the cattle.
Tens of millions of people, held hostage by a clique of crabs in a bucket.
I would say "so diesel uses should be encouraged to transition to electric where feasible", except the government has also dropped the ball on electricity prices and is now looking at increasing taxes on EVs.
> The UK government isn't trying much policy for tackling the causes or the symptoms, largely because the government is disproportionately drawn from a class of people who don't want those policies. The media of the upper middle class of the UK has sincere column after sincere column of hating the rest of the population and calling for better controls over the cattle.
This is spot on, though. I joke that instead of state controlled media we have a media controlled state.
> The UK government isn't trying much policy for tackling the causes or the symptoms
It doesn't know what it wants, nor how to prioritise between conflicts from vague pre (and post) election statements. It certainly doesn't want to make the hard compromises that are actually required.
That said...
I wouldn't want the job of trying to balance the books, fix the housing backlog, modernise our energy infrastructure, integrate social and medical care, address social cohesion, manage persistent inequality, improve our global competitiveness etc etc etc
I would, because despite having no idea how to accomplish any of that, I know how to delegate to people who do.
Any one of those goals is probably accomplishable merely via delegation, assuming you can pick the right people (good luck!). To achieve all of them likely isn't. It may well be we cannot have all of them at once. Note that I just grabbed a subset of things that seem relevant, certainly not all of the things the government should care about.
I'm not saying nobody could run this country more effectively. I do strongly suspect the market for that kind of skillset is out of our current price range
Costs are inflating because they have more money than things to invest in. Same thing happened to Spain after the new world was found and exploited.
All that gold and silver just went to paying off foreign debt and inflating local markets.
Same thing is happening because the UK only have the London Financial hub going for it.