A Weekend of Good News
For a liberal economist and Westminster-watcher — not to mention someone startled by rising household bills — the weekend’s business pages made depressing reading. For a start, the Norwegian state energy company Equinor, objecting to the government’s windfall tax on energy firms, says it’s re-thinking its planned new drilling in the Rosebank field near the Shetland Islands. Shell too — remember, they’ve just written off $1bn in Russian investments and now we’re going to hit them with a new tax — also seems likely to press on with the $2bn Cambo project in the North Sea. So that’s not so great for the UK, particularly Scotland.
Meanwhile we are still maintaining Richter-scale guidelines for fracking that are twice as high as those applicable to onshore oil extraction, and roughly equivalent to someone sitting down in a chair in the next room, so that potential bill-cutter is going nowhere.
And the other prospect, new nuclear capacity, seems far off. Hinkley Point C in Somerset, the first of the new generation plants, will not come online until 2027 — if we’re lucky. Thanks to the Blair government’s decision to phase out all the UK’s nuclear stations (made to appease the party’s anti-nuclear lobby rather than for economic or energy reasons), plus the Cameron government’s enthusiasm for wind farms and biomass (in the attempt to out-green the Greens), our existing nuclear plants are approaching retirement. So the ‘green levy’ on household bills now amounts to £153 per household, and with oil and biomass being disrupted by Putin’s war, we still face the prospect of six million homes facing blackouts this winter.
Another member of that dismal decade, the 1970s, is that rail and London Underground strikes are going ahead. Average pay with bonuses at Network Rail is £41,000 and that of train drivers if £48,000, far higher than the average of their customers, but still they are prepared to use their monopoly power to demand more and to resist modernisation and automation that would introduce better and more reliable services. Well, what do you expect when you nationalise an industry? A public monopoly encourages employees to focus on the deep pockets of the government rather than the needs and convenience of their customers. It’s perfectly natural and understandable. So why does the government think it can run trains better and more cheaply than competitive operators? And why did it not open up the system to more competition, with open access for example, rather than take the easy bureaucratic route of nationalising it?
The other thing we saw in the 1970s, of course, was inflation, which further encourages outlandish pay demands. Featherbedded by their monopoly power, unions demand settlements that reflect not just what their members have lost in the last year, but what they expect to lose in the next. It led to the miners demanding a 24% pay raise, something the rest of us might wistfully dream of.
On inflation, though, the Bank of England has completely bottled it. The Fed last week raised interest rates by 0.75 percentage points — though they are still historically at ‘crisis’ levels. Despite predictions of inflation hitting 11% by Autumn, the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee, dominated by Whitehall insiders, raised rates by only 0.25%, to 1.25%. In other words, interest rates are deeply negative, and look as if they are staying so. In the 1970s, I paid 17% on my student overdraft, but I didn’t mind, as inflation was 21%. In other words, the bank was paying me to take their money. And the same thing is happening now. The Whitehall suits, who have never run a business in their lives, do not seem to understand that inflation is far more damaging than any damper on growth caused by higher rates. Rising prices affect everything, and make it hard to see when real prices (like the cost of overdrafts) are high or low — so it leads to absolutely crazy investment decisions, with money being spent in unsustainable ways.
Then of course there are the interventions in the rented housing market. Yes, there are real problems there, caused by past policy mistakes. But further restraints will make property owners think twice about renting out their places. So rented accommodation will become even scarcer and more expensive. That is bad news for poorer people and younger people whose budgets are already stretched. And they have already been robbed of any prospect of owning a home because the population is growing at about 300,000 a year, but thanks to some of the most restrictive planning regulations in the world, we are not building anything like that number of homes. Rich homeowners get richer, poor renters get poorer.
The really depressing thing is that we have been through all this before, in living memory. There is no reason to make the same mistakes again. But when you have a government that caves in to media headlines and interest-group campaigns, rather than one driven by clear principles and economic common sense, that’s what you get. Sad, really.