This is the month I thought I would get grumpy over fuel prices which continue to rocket due to idiotic policies from our gullible politicians who couldn’t spot a con if it flaps its arms and said: “I’m a con”.
But no. I went to Asda last night and suddenly the price of everything has gone up. £17 for a joint of lamb. Even mince at £4 is on the high side compared to the “normal” price. And cereal packets were overwhelmingly over the £2 and even into the £3 bracket. If this continues, I’m going to be feeding my kids on chocolate (joke – it’s probably gone up as well).
Up till the banking crisis, I used to worry what would happen when the crisis hit and was even known to hoard a bit of excess food just in case we got some general strike or something. Somehow it just “seemed” the right thing to do, but never having been through a real national crisis I didn’t really know what I was doing.
But, now I really do think the UK is heading that way. It’s taken a lot longer than I thought, and it’s happening so slowly that you can’t hedge your bets by stocking up on food because it will have gone off by the time it hits. But we are heading that way. Here’s why:
- Oil stocks are running out, and we are increasingly being forced to high cost reserves and I can’t see oil prices ever dropping below $100/barrel i.e. petrol prices will never go down to their old prices.
- The UK economy is a mess. It’s not that we are having problems balancing the books, as in matching debt to assets, it’s that we are having problems saving enough money to stop us borrowing more money on which we are going to have to pay more.
- The UK is now suffering heavily from carbon taxes. Unfortunately, because they are stealth taxes paid direct to renewable energy industrial parks, no one talks about the billions going to these bird mincers. But it is already doubly hitting consumers: first we get hit directly via our electricity bills which as a consequence have gone up enormously, secondly we get hit by higher bills for everything we buy as shops and (UK) companies have to put up prices to salve the conscience of our stupid polliticians.
- The failing UK economy means our exchange rate continues to take a hit, so that now everything imported costs more.
- We still have a heavy anti-manufacturing bias in this country: through absurd health and safety regulations, through anti-carbon (i.e. anti energy use = manufacturing) and through the hostile politics and BBC, which have together ousted engineering from public life (e.g. the old Science and Engineering committee of the House of Commons became: the Science and technology committee)
- Population is increasing. Since the 1980s there has been a belief amongst the political elite that immigration is good. Personally I think this was largely selfish and a way of saying: “plumbers cost far too much” and “why don’t the lower classes thank us any more for giving them jobs changing the nappies of our parents we can’t be bothered to look after ourselves because our job in the BBC is far too important to give up to look after my parents”. Unfortunately, that covert policy promoting immigration has been far from free. We’ve had to massively increase expenditure on schools, on transport, on housing. We’ve also got a population bubble coming through as those “young” immigrants turn old and add to the problem of an aging population at a time of national debt brought about by massive spending on infrastructure to accommodate all those foreign plumber and nurses. More population, less farm land because of more housing, means less food/person grown in the UK and higher prices.
As for “free range” chickens, they only had organic and whilst I think you are what you eat (and if you eat animals that get overfed and underexercised don’t blame me if thats what your kids turn out to be like — cause it’s the hormones that keep them docile that get into the meat (wink)). Anyway, I worked on a chicken farm, and never bought anything but free range since (it was disgusting!)
But, I’m not buying stupid organic, and certainly not at those prices.
Which left nothing much but expensive mince and some rather flacid (un free range??) pork in the basket.
There’s a more frightening aspect to the rise of prices, it’s the fall in value of money. Life’s an Opera! This is the point when everyone starts to cry.
http://dollardaze.org/blog/posts/2009/January/07/1/British_Pound.jpg
Whatever the circumstances I think that resourceful people will manage. Living in a rural village means that my thirteen mile commute might become too expensive despite my economical diesel car. I can trade in my Daytona 900 for a 125cc bike or even go back to riding a push bike. Living in a rural village means that my garden is big enough to grow vegetables and keep chickens. The internet means that it is really easy to teach yourself to cook by downloading recipes Cooking skills make you less reliant on expensive pre-packaged food. I know how to brew wine and beer from raw materials. No matter how badly the Government that I didn’t vote for screws up, I will get by.
It’s hilarious that an organisation would think that a self commissioned report exonerates or justifies them. It carries about the same weight as hiring a lawyer to say “My client will be pleading not guilty”.