The idiots trying to tell us that the current energy crisis can be solved by drilling for shale gas in the UK are out in force. The obvious response is, if pumping your own oil and gas cuts domestic bills why wasn’t fuel free in the 1980s and 90s?
But it makes me think about the link between North Sea oil revenues and our current crisis. Not the energy crisis but the fact that the government has raised taxes and still has nowhere near enough money to invest in the NHS, schools, courts, defence or anything else.
As many experts point out tax cuts are only affordable if you can afford them permanently, now North Sea oil and gas is in irreversible decline it turns out we couldn’t afford those cuts permanently.
Norway became one of the most advanced, harmonious, wealthy countries in the world with a sovereign wealth fund that will keep it going for years. The UK spent decades pretending it was a low tax, dynamic economy, when in fact it used the North Sea revenues as a crutch.
If it didn’t, where are the huge infrastructure projects to make life better and easier for people and business, the high speed rail, the new hospitals, state of the art schools, the well functioning courts, the insulated housing, the sovereign wealth fund?
30 years of the Thatcherites telling us we had reformed the economy and could have low taxes and good public services have brought us to this. We wasted all that money, the once in a thousand years jackpot, on what?
Lower taxes, which we are now told pay for themselves. We need to wake up and grow up.
Like the lottery winners who are back in the mildewed council flat after 2 years of spend, spend, spend, we have to now balance the books without oceans of free money.
Those billions have gone for ever, with nothing to show for it.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
I first heard the comparison between Norway and Britain in a pseudo-documentary in which Richard Baker's script made the point that Norway chose to invest its income, while Britain used it to fund its social services