Budget: Sunak is tinkering around the edges
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Lower income families have already reached their breaking point
Budgets are always a game of giving with one hand and taking with the other. So much so that I long since gave up paying them any attention. The first quest question is whether any of Sunak’s measures provide any meaningful relief for hard pressed families. Tinkering with National Insurance thresholds perhaps has some merit, but the 5p cut in duty fuel will only result in a £3.30 saving on an average 55 litre tank of unleaded. This is hard to take seriously.
Elsewhere in the budget, perhaps more tellingly, Mr Sunak says he is doubling the household support fund for the UK’s poorest to £10bn with £5bn of new funding. Local councils will receive this funding from April.
This is actually no different from the Labour approach – using public funds to ease the symptoms of dysfunctional economic policies rather than addressing the central problems. Even if you could say that, on balance, most are marginally better off for this array of measures, it’s not going to last. Food costs are going up and up and so is the cost of home heating and power. The former consequence of the latter.
Here is should not be forgotten that a third of the cost of gas power generation is carbon taxes, and we’re paying massive subsidies to wind energy companies. Further incentives to build wind turbines shows that there has been no shift in policy despite skyrocketing bills. This is the rather large elephant in the in the room.
The Tory policy of massively expanding wind energy will only introduce yet more grid instability, forcing us to buy gas at peak prices at short notice, and puts us on the hook for battery storage, for which we need massive capacity if the Net Zero system is to work.
That puts us in a position of competing for Lithium on global markets at a time when prices are only going upwards. In the rush to dump Russian gas, we’re betting the farm on a commodity dominated by Communist China.
This is largely experimental technology, which is likely to see major delays, technical problems and massive cost overruns. If you thought HS2 was a white elephant, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Essentially, the green ideology has been put before the welfare of the British public, and we’re supposed to be grateful for the scraps from Sunak’s table.
This budget is more of the same meagre accountancy we have seen over the years, offering no real change in approach, oblivious to what is already a national energy emergency. As much as rising prices are biting hard, it’s only through luck, having a mild winter, that the light stayed on at all. Lower income families have already reached their breaking point.
As with so much else, our political class resides in its insular little bubble, able to blithely throw hundreds of billions at their hobby horse policies, knowing they can put home heating and fuel costs on expenses. The rest of us can go hang.
Energy is the number one priority for any government seeking to avoid a cataclysmic collapse in living standards. Absolutely everything is pegged to affordable energy. The first concern of this government should be to undo thirty years of policy neglect and get drilling, fracking and building nuclear power on a war footing – and while they’re at it, they should be seeking the quickest end to hostilities in Ukraine.
UKIP is the only party dedicated to scrapping the green crap. We will end subsidies and incentives for useless windmills. We will go hard on small modular reactors. We will abolish green taxes. We will sack overpaid diversity officers and council CEOs that drive up our council taxes. We will put people first and bin the fashionable cosmopolitan ideologies of our infantile establishment.
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on behalf of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) both at Henleaze Business Centre, 13 Harbury Road , Henleaze, Bristol, BS9 4PN