Blain’s Morning Porridge 13th Jan 2025 – Come Friendly Bombs… can’t get any worse can it?
“Hah, they couldn’t hit a barndoor at this dist…..”
The UK chattering classes are delighted. They’ve finally got something they can all agree on – it’s all Labour’s fault. However, that leaves one itsy-bitzy problem? We all agree this lost are useless. The last lot was even more useless. How and who is actually going to fix the UK? I prescribe a course of pragmatic reality and primal screaming….
There are times when I feel I just ought to say it like it is… but… who would listen… Screaming into the face of a howling gale is a sure fire recipe for a sore throat..
Alternatively… Imagine there is an extinction level meteor on collision course with Slough – possibly the UK’s least distinguished everyman town.
The space rock will wipe out life in the British Isles (excluding Southern Ireland) completely – yet will curiously avoid collateral damage anywhere outside the UK’s 12-mile offshore limit, meaning the international community has other things to worry about. If we all pull together – a maximum national effort to deflect the damn thing so it lands somewhere more-or-less irrelevant (like Brussels) – we could actually avert the crisis completely.
Instead, the whole country is blaming the government. Why did Sir Keir Starmer not foresee this…? After all the rock was first spotted in the heavens way-back in 2010! Apparently, the Sun has uncovered the fact a Labour Minister cancelled her subscription to the Sky at Night magazine in 2014, demonstrating the whole party’s callous disregard to elevated celestial risks.
Efforts to kickstart the meteor deflection project through increased corporation taxes to buy some sightly used America rockets have spurred the loyal opposition to scream incompetence, demand a new election, subsidies for the creation of a national rocket industry, while the rest of the world shakes in head in disbelief. Capital flight is the reaction. Politicians of the opposite hue are arguing for tax cuts ahead of the imminent wipe out. Elon Musk has tweeted Labour invited the Meteor to hit Slough to cover up the arrest of “innocent” rioters freedom fighters…
In my Yacht Club, one earnest member is telling me King Charles ought to arrest the Labour government for treason and put someone competent, like Nigel Farage (?!?), into Downing Street. (Yep.. that was a seriously made argument over the weekend…)
You have to laugh…. except, things, of course, can only get worse.
It’s now common knowledge the UK narrowly avoided a series of rolling power outages last week. (That would be called “demand-management” because it sounds… marginally less incompetent than we’ve “run out of electric”.) The lucky owners of a 30-year old Gas Fired power station got paid 50x the going rate to make up the shortfall.. apparently.
Can you imagine how the Gilts market would have handled a series of outages? Not with joy I imagine..
I am assured the fact we were less than a few hundred MW away from the power equivalent of a (very small) meteor-strike is entirely 100% due to Labour’s net-zero policies – and its certainly true that cold winter days when the sun doesn’t do diddley-squat for Solar Panels, and the wind ain’t blowing, don’t stack up well for renewable energy – so yet another reason to sack the incompetent fools… except of course.. it’s taken decades for the UK energy infrastructure to get this desperate and ineffective, resulting in the UK power being the most expensive on the planet! Gosh? What am I saying? That a properly thought out transition and power grid strategy might have avoided crisis.. Gosh? Who knew?
Quick perusal of GB News this morning confirms it: Former Tory Leader Ian Duncan Smith calling Rachel Reeves China deal pathetic is about as close to anything real as it gets. Read it in the papers.. must be the truth..
Things are unlikely to get better for Labour or Gilts this week. The strength of the soar-away US economy demonstrated in Friday’s Non-Farm Payrolls report says it all. Strong economy. No need for further interest rate cuts – says Bank of America (confirming what I said back in November!) Bonds sell off. UK Gilts swept up in the landslip… all the fault of Rachel Reeves. Is she in the Tower of London yet?
Now some folk are actually thinking it might be time to dial down some of the rhetoric blaming Labour (who, lest we forget have only been in power for 6 months), for everything wrong with the economy. After all, the most recent Gilts auctions have shown there is still plenty of demand out there. The millennium high in the Gilt rate… (which it isn’t btw) is pretty much in line with other global bond markets. They say the UK is actually in better shape than Yoorp and much of the rest of the developed world – except, of course, it doesn’t feel that way..
Who are they trying to kid…? It’s just easier to Blame Rachel!
Back with more… later..
Bill Blain
Author of the Morning Porridge
2 Comments
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All good points Bill.
I know I sound like a broken record, but your points re electricity generation are telling!
I think most people would agree that the availability of electricity is a “public service”. As such one would expect that “the government” would in some form or other ensure that it is available to industry / the public.
However, some bright spark decided in 1990 to privatise the entire UK electricity generation and distribution network (gas having gone 4 years earlier; if you see Sid, shoot him!).
Allegedly this would make the public service “more efficient”. Really?
So, even ignoring the elephant in the room that it takes a very long time to plan, design and build a generating station which makes ROI “challenging” for a private firm both in financial and time terms, we ended up with what we have now.
Which is private firms controlling the (now very limited) means of generating and distributing electricity.
What does the law of supply and demand say about the price of something which becomes “scarce”?
In what way will that incentivise private firms to make that thing “less scarce”?
I think that your tale of the ageing gas fired generator raking in 50 times the (already massively expensive by european standards) going rate answers these questions succinctly.
What is the only “rationa”) solution?
For the state to (as rapidly as possible) build a number of generating stations that use “unclear” power (the state being the only body capable of obtaining cheap finance for such ventures rather than promising EDF 5 times the going rate for 35 years or whatever nonsense is happening at Hinckley Pointless).
How could we do this?
I refer you once again to the Labour manifesto from 2017.
A document that contains many costed solutions that would be considered “rational and middle of the road” in most of europe, but due to vested interests in the UK is seen as communist at best.
All the best for the meteor strike!
To be fair, Bracknell is also a sh£thole