It’s cold here in London, and it’s getting harder to resist the temptation to turn on the heating. Which prompts the question: how much are these high energy prices costing the country?
Some data are now trickling through. The British government recently released figures on the state of public finances, and they make for grim reading. In December of 2022 the UK government borrowed more money than it had in any other December since records began in 1993.
Driving this borrowing were two things: higher interest rates and energy price subsidies. The latter are included in the line item ‘Subsidies (Other)’ on the government balance sheet. Here is that line item, in billions of £s, for the third quarter of fiscal years 2021 and 2022.
We can estimate from this that in the third quarter of fiscal year 2022, the government borrowed around £11bn to spend on the energy price guarantee. Taking the December numbers alone, for every £12 the government borrowed £1 was spent on the price guarantee.
Now, the Modern Monetary Theorists – who it must be said, with COVID-19 and the chaos in energy markets, are having a good decade so far – will tell us that since the UK issues its own currency, it can borrow as much as it likes. There is some truth in this. Nevertheless, if the UK borrows and spends and this money flows abroad it will (all else being equal) put downward pressure on the price of sterling. If sterling falls, the price of imports rise – and real wages fall.
With a little statistical manipulation, we can use the government borrowing data to estimate the current account – the amount of money flowing into and out of Britain.
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy informs us that without the energy price guarantee, the price of energy for the average home would be £4,279. Since the price guarantee ensures the average household pays £2,500, we can infer that the government is covering around 42% of the current energy price. This implies that for the £11bn the government spent on subsidies in the third quarter there was an additional £15.5bn spent by households. This means that the total spent on energy in this period was around £26.5bn.
Now we can use this estimate to estimate the current account. Britain imports around 50% of its gas. So let’s assume that around half of this £26.5bn was spent on imports. That gives us an estimate of the British current account in 2022 as follows.
It is easier to compare this data annually. The chart above implies that in 2022 the British current account deficit will be around 6.4% of GDP. This would be the largest current account in British history – the previous two largest being 5.5% of GDP in 2015 and 5.2% of GDP in 2013.
The country has managed to sustain this current account so far with only some disruption to sterling. But can it sustain another year of this? That is far from clear. Yet many are predicting that 2023 will be a worse year for energy prices than 2022, since Europe had access to six months of Russian gas last year and won’t have any this year.
Of course, these are all just estimates that require us to make various assumptions. What is clear is that the government borrowing data for subsidies implies a substantial increase in the amount of sterling flowing abroad to buy energy imports. Which doesn’t bode well for Britain’s finances.
Philip Pilkington is co-host of the Multipolarity Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter here and subscribe to his Substack newsletter here.
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The resume suggests that the book is an important work and deserves to be widely read. Regrettably, our society is now so polarised – reason and the culture of discussion are now so corrupted – that the book will chiefly be preaching to the converted: only those already sympathetic to the argument will be likely to buy the book. Those who need to read it will steer clear. Still, the book will provide ample material for individuals wishing to alert the silent majority to the fact that society is going through a revolution as radical and as destructive as the Communist revolution which took over Russia and China. It’s frightening, and it’s frightening that people don’t perceive that this urge to ‘deconstruct’ western (i.e. Christian) civilisation is essentially the destruction of civilisation tout court.
They don’t perceive it so far for the simple reason that their sources of information have been slanted and the institutions they trust have been suborned. Beyond that, the shadow of illegality hangs over serious dissent with a host of lesser, informal penalties – ie, “debanking” – in the wings.
With everyone afraid, moreover, dissent is an excuse for ostracism; and because nobody likes admitting to living like a cowardly louse, those still comfortably inside the tent pretend that it is just as big as it was and pitched in much the same place, whereas in fact it has become a narrow and marginal indoctrination space.
Snobbery is very helpful here, for the isolated dissenter – jobless, impoverished, lonely – is easily made out as a failure or a “low-life”.
Worst of all, the process is multi-generational; all the coordinates of who is “in” or “out” have been subtly tuned towards Marxist insanity over decades. Look at the progress made in selling perverted, deviant and sterile forms of sexuality. From toleration of abnormalities we have been pushed in fifty years – as Lionel Shriver notes in the Spectator – towards the promotion of those abnormalities and beyond – into the emasculation of little boys and the equivalent mutilation of little girls.
Nothing can better reflect the left’s basic premise that reality and nature are illusions fostered by “ideology” from which it will “liberate” us – with the surgeon’s pitiless scalpel if necessary.
And at a deeper level, this is what happens when the life of the mind is so privileged over reality, nature, culture, feeling, the mass, the nation, tradition and family that it seeks to live not only independently of those structures, but actively against them. To answer the question so often posed among right wing thinkers – what has fathered “woke”, Liberalism or Marxism? – the answer is BOTH, for Marxism is what happens when Liberalism runs to seed.
I shall certainly be buying a copy of this book. Well done for writing it.
But if I may offer my own in-a-nutshell refutation of “woke”, it depends on a trick, which confuses identity with “supremacy” where whites are concerned; and allows pretensions to supremacy to masquerade as mere “identity” where non-whites are concerned.
And the supremacy / identity confusion is just one of woke’s lies; by “whiteness” the wokestapo in fact mean whites, a people whom they aim to destroy; by “fragility” they mean any white person’s attempt to resist defamation; by “positive” discrimination they mean discrimination and so on.
Their poisonous perversion of language and morals has seeped so deeply into the minds of the idiot “bourgeoisie” and our corrupt establishment that vicious brutality – such as that taking place in northern town against white girls, or that taking place in South Africa against white farmers – is ignored or even excused.
The left, intellectually bankrupt and infiltrated by fourth phase Marxism, is now no more than a gnostic and narcissistic exercise in self-mutilation. In its vile decadence, it has taken control and unless it is swiftly removed from power we are finished. In short, we need a new 1989 to remove a corrupt, Marxist uniparty from office and start the rescue of our civilisation.
They (until it happens to them personally) would typically hand wave and excuse away what is happening now in South Africa as “karma” for the past injustices of apartheid and imperialism, of course. But two wrongs do NOT make a right. Evil + Evil = Twice the Evil.
“But those big bad white folks started it!” is basically their argument. One that would have miserable failed the kindergarten (Reception) test. It’s NOT about who “started” it, but rather it is who is mature enough to stop it. The onus is on everyone to STOP THE MADNESS!
Also, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”, according to the ultimate authority on very literal decolonization himself, Mahatma Gandhi. If you fight fire with fire, everyone ultimately gets burned.
“Decolonisation” has nothing to do with slavery or colonialism. It’s simply a war on white European people and culture, because white European people and culture have achieved so much more than everybody else, and continue to do so. I’m not saying this because I’m a white European, it’s just an observation based on people across the globe voting with their feet and coming to countries based on white European people and civilisation. “Decolonisation” and those who advocate it pose an existential threat to white European people and civilisation. The end of this will be ugly. I will be long dead, but it will be brutal and bloody.
I hate to agree with such a bleak and depressing outlook, but I’m afraid you may be right.
“Even King Charles argued that the history of transatlantic slavery should be given the same national importance as the Holocaust.”
Why? 6 million Jews and many others were murdered in the most callous and brutal way in less than 10 years. What is the similarity with the Atlantic Slave Trade? The Jewish populations of a few European countries was almost wiped out, while the black population on both sides of the Atlantic has only grown.
Maybe the 25 million Whites enslaved and murdered by the Musulmans can also be given the same importance as the Holocaust.
Can we decolonise the UK of Indians, Muslims, Asians and Africans? Or is that racist? Even if it is I don’t care. Why are Whites colonising parts of the world ‘racist’ and not the reverse? We can also conclude that decolonising curricula of whiteness is also racist given it attacks a skin colour and related culture. This is called a logical deduction.
Racism is the new anti-racism. Destroying your health is the new protecting your health. Abusing children is the new caring for children.
Self destruction is the new normal.
Who would want the west to self-destruct? That’s what we should be asking.
Follow the money.
As with Covid, Climate hysteria and transhumanist ideology, I don’t believe that any of this is organic. It’s an ingenious systematic disassembly of an entire culture by people who don’t think there’s any longer a place for western ideas.
This is what asymmetric warfare looks like.
We always believed that WW3 would be nuclear; in fact it’s biological and, as with critical race theory, psychological. Why bomb a country when you can get it to tear itself apart.
The figures and percentages quoted in this article come from the same provenance as all such – they chart the march of Puritanism. It’s a seesaw equation – for every extra percentage point of righteous indignation there’s an equal and opposite point lost to ‘having a laugh’. It’s a reminder of the famous definition of Puritanism: ‘the continuing suspicion that someone, somewhere, may be happy’.
Indeed, it is basically thinly-veiled, warmed-over Puritanism at best. With perhaps some neo-Victorianism thrown in for good measure as well. UGH.
White people are an invention of the American chattering classes, same as black people, by the way. Obsessed with their custom navel-gazing, they simply haven’t yet managed to understand that a world outside of the USA which is materially different from it exists and they wouldn’t want to know about, anyway. For an American university professor who genuinely believes US forces liberated Auschwitz where they found heaps of dead bodies, that is, who remembers that US forces liberated the starving inhabitants of some concentration camp after the people who had fed them were forced to flee because of said American forces, and who remembers that a concentration camp was called Auschwitz, hence, they must both be the same — Only small-minded people would worry about getting the names correct when the big picture is all that matters! — I may be a (privileged) white person. To someone from England, I’m an Are you Polish? guy, something the professor is quite unable to understand.
Decolonize the world! is a slogan of American and America-centered academics unwilling to accept the fact that the systematic American abuse of black Americans is their very own contribution to the history of human atrocities. The sons and daughters of God’s own country cannot be guilty themselves. They also certainly haven’t reintroduced aimless torture into the judical process and never burnt any witches!
BTW, has Puerto Rico meanwhile been decolonized? And how independent are the Philipines really? Asking for a friend …
There is only ONE race: the HUMAN race.
An inverted pyramid hierarchy of dominance is still a hierarchy of dominance, the same old “power over” dominator model of social interaction. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.