Sounds like Mercer has had enough. I don’t agree with him on everything but he does seem to have been very committed to his brief.
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A lot of these veterans come across as very authentic. Mercer, Tugendhat, Stewart, Wallace, Ellwood etc. There will be the odd dick, of course, but on the whole they seem to get what it means to serve the country rather than self-interest.
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It’s his pointless manner. It’s like being mauled to death by an arthritic mouse with no teeth.
Mad that these people are far more anti-Semitic in their word, thought and deed, than the man they labelled and destroyed
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When you find out the ultimate budget holder for the industry you work in is Rees-Mogg
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the swedish PM getting the meatballs ready…
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Let’s just burn this world down, why don’t we?
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Any gas produced from fracking will not make any difference to current wholesale prices. This is merely an excuse to run roughshod over genuine environmental concerns. They’ll be pouring shit into the sea next. Oh, hang on…
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On the face of it that has about as much logic as believing that gravity isn’t a thing.
I bet this is about fracking needing larger private institutions to do the work while your farmers field doesn’t need the same level of input. Or something daft like that.
Truss’s argument on a windfall tax discouraging investment in the UK is weak at best imo. You could time lock that the tax making it clear that it’s only for the duration of the crisis. It wouldn’t surprise me if these profits would wangle their way back to Putin somehow.
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Re solar panels. I’ve been contemplating getting them installed on my roof but its pitch isn’t oriented to provide for efficient capture of solar energy. Does anybody (@rupzzz or @Noo_Noo maybe?) know if that’s a consideration in the orientation of new builds?
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Unlikely. New builds are generally set up to maximise property numbers within a given space. The whole energy thing is purely an afterthought.
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I don’t like windfall taxes because they’re like “gotchas”. Corporations don’t like the thought that taxes on profits earned can suddenly be subjected to additional taxes on top of corporation tax.
I prefer incentivising behaviours. You could raise corporation tax but provide rebates dependent on companies demonstrating x amount of investment into green energies/environmental improvements etc.
The German scheme does involve a windfall tax and is on anyone who has benefited as a result of the cost crisis - specifically that includes anyone who is getting higher payments for energy production but is unaffected by input costs. That mainly includes wind and solar firms.
Now that struck me as a bit odd as surely this is the sector that you would want to encourage. However I did hear a discussion on the radio last night (and I may have got the wrong end of the stick as my German isn’t that brilliant) that the idea would be that new investments would be excluded from that tax - hence encouraging more non-fossil fuel based power production.
What governments need to decouple, is helping their populations survive the immediate problems on the one hand and long term planning to stop it in future on the other. There are very few countries that have adequately planned for this crisis but some are worse than others. The UK specifically went backwards about 10 years ago and have relied on a series of market-led initiatives all of which have suffered from market failure.
The worst thing about not using a windfall tax now is that they are limiting the funds available for future energy security. Effectively Truss is throwing the entire country into a poverty trap.
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