Guest essay by Eric Worrall
If you read Willis’ excellent essay on energy poverty, you might think countries like Britain would be keen to address this terrible burden on the poor. Think again; the reality is British and European politicians just don’t seem to care.
Tax raid on your lifestyle! Boris Johnson is considering a new carbon tax that could see the price of mince rise 40% to more than £5, four pints of milk by 21% to £1.32 and push up cost of gas heating
- Downing Street asks all departments for plans for a carbon-pricing scheme
- One of the policies mooted is a carbon tax on high-impact food such as beef
- Could add up to £1.80 on a steak, £1.50 on lamb chops and 20p on milk
- Farmers believe there is a ‘heavy bias against meat’ in climate change debate
By MARTIN ROBINSON, CHIEF REPORTER FOR MAILONLINE
Tax raid on your lifestyle! Boris Johnson is considering a new carbon tax that could see the price of mince rise 40% to more than £5, four pints of milk by 21% to £1.32 and push up cost of gas heating
- Downing Street asks all departments for plans for a carbon-pricing scheme
- One of the policies mooted is a carbon tax on high-impact food such as beef
- Could add up to £1.80 on a steak, £1.50 on lamb chops and 20p on milk
- Farmers believe there is a ‘heavy bias against meat’ in climate change debate
By MARTIN ROBINSON, CHIEF REPORTER FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 20:23 AEDT, 4 February 2021 | UPDATED: 02:57 AEDT, 5 February 2021
Families are facing a tax on their lifestyles as Boris Johnson ponders new carbon taxes and charges for Britain that would see higher prices on meat and cheese at the supermarket and on gas for their hobs and boilers at home.
The Prime Minister has ordered Whitehall departments to look at how much greenhouse gas emissions produced by different sectors of the economy cost society.
At present, only airlines and power generators are charged for their emissions, but ministers want to extend the ‘polluter pays’ principle to all sectors. This could lead to a hike in prices for goods such as beef, lamb and cheese, or more heavily polluting forms of heating such as gas.
No costs have been mooted by Whitehall, but recent studies by a team at Oxford University have calculated that surcharges of 40 per cent on beef, 25 per cent on oils, 20 per cent on milk, 15 per cent on lamb and 10 per cent on chicken would reduce emissions and reduce consumption in the way the PM wants.
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Four pints of milk would go from £1.09 to £1.32, four lamb chops up to £7.50 from £6, six chicken breasts up 50p per pack to £5.50 while a whole chicken would increase in price by 28p to £3.78; Eggs would rise 5p to 94p and sugar would increase by a penny to 66p.
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The Irish potato famine, the mass starvation of Irish people in the mid 1800s, was caused as much by the cruel indifference of arrogant British politicians as by crop failure.
British politicians could have intervened and saved lives, and to be fair then prime minister Robert Peel attempted to intervene, but the interventionists were defeated by conceited politicians who refused to compromise their warped vision of free market ideals, even in the face of an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe. By the time politicians realised what they had done, it was too late.
Could something similar happen again? Fuel poverty is already a serious problem in Britain. According to the government’s own figures, as of 2018 10.7% of households make difficult daily decisions in winter about whether to heat their homes or put food on the table.
In human terms, this means millions of ordinary Britons are living on the edge, risking hypothermia, starvation, and serious long term health complications in their annual struggle to survive Britain’s cold winters. Occasionally some of them starve to death. A third of people admitted to hospital in Britain are malnourished or judged to be at risk of malnutrition.
Boris Johnson’s plan to force up the price of affordable energy rich foods like meat, milk, eggs and cheese, and to drive up the price of home heating, could push a lot of those poor people over the brink, and trigger an even worse hunger crisis.
In my opinion this cruel sacrifice of ordinary people’s welfare on the altar of carbon virtue signalling is an unconscionable betrayal of the millions of Britons who supported Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in the last general election, because they believed Johnson’s assurances that the Conservatives would make their lives better.
Update (EW): BAPEN Publishes Results of Biggest Malnutrition Survey Ever Undertaken (Scotland), last updated October 2020, shows malnutrition in patients admitted in English hospitals running at 30%.
Where the carbon tax on manufacturing electric vehicle batteries as well as the mining process? How about the carbon tax on the internet? Cell phone production? Recycling has a massive carbon footprint. How about taxing every m³ of concrete laid down. Concrete is one of the worst carbon polluters. Carbon tax on manufacturing and installing solar panels and wind turbines might be a good idea as well.
You get what you vote for. The US poor and middle class are about to find this out.
A lot of people believe US didn’t get what they voted for?
http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServlet
-23 in calgary
Alberta grid, 0% solar, wind 6%
Anyone advocating 100% renewable for canadian prairie should be executed
Thank you for being using Fahrenheit
And down the rabbit hole we go. Who knew stupidity was infectious.
What a disappointment Boris Johnson is. With a Conservative majority in Parliament he is acting like a radical lefty activist. From far away in Canada the only difference I can see between him and Canada’s PM Justin Trudeau is that Boris is actually moving harder on damaging the economy “because fake CO2 warming” than Trudeau is. Our Canadian Conservative Party’s stated policy is to totally remove Trudeau’s Carbon Tax.
Boris Johnson and Trudeau are both growing hunger, and hypothermia.
If the UK government ever does start taxing meat I would confidently predict that there will be a huge illicit meat trade conducted from backyard abattoirs. The supply of animals to this parallel meat trade will lead to a huge rise in sheep and cattle rustling. Both activities are already carried out widely within certain “communities” located in the UK’s big cities – a tax incentive will only make their endeavours more profitable at the expense of livestock farmers and animal welfare.
Unfortunately, we have had a lifetime of bad nutritional advice based on Ancel Keys badly designed, and fake studies, cherry picked data, and hiding the decline when results were opposite to what was expected. Nutrient free industrial seed oils replacement of nutrient carrying animal fats for cooking and baking over the last century have filled us with toxic fats our bodies can’t break down, leaving us hungry for calories that we can actually metabolise, and sick from the ones we can’t. The ready availability of those calories in (nutrient free) refined carbohydrates as well as in those artificial oils incorporated into processed foods, along with veggie fascists demanding they are provided for even in the steakhouse have left whole populations hungry for nutrition, but stuffed with calories.
The diet industry still considers any challenge to their orthodoxy – such as Atkins / low carb / high protein / high fat / carnivore / caveman diets as denial by heretics, rather than studying why such diets produce health benefits for so many people.
Animals can turn grass into food without fossil fuels much more readily than grain can be grown, harvested, milled, and refined. Yet the PTB want us to be consumers of industrial agriculture rather than of pastoral farming. Mind you, they have already blighted this green and pleasant land with a plethora of windmills that are paradoxically of no grist to the mill.
Which ones want to be plugged back into the (EU) Matrix?
Do they add in the cost of shipping in these food and fruits from around the world? Adding meat to the diet has improved the brain. And how healthier for a longer life. Taller in stature
Don’t worry. Bill Gates is buying up as much farmland as he possibly can. Since he appointed himself saviour of the modern world a few years ago, Bill will make sure that everyone on earth has plenty to eat. Just because it will come in a squeezable tube is a feature, not a drawback.
Since the Norman invasion in 1066 the English have been divided between those who believe in autocracy and those who believe in autonomy. The English who settled here believed in autonomy, the authority of the governmnet arising from the people. The rest of the world held on to autocracy. Only 80 years ago the majority of the world was ruled by dictators, as is still the case for much of the modern globe. The struggle for freedom against tyranny, autonomy vs autocracy, continues and, I fear, freedom is on the precipice.
Tyranny can happen in two ways – bloody or gradual. Bloody has been the norm and still is in the 3rd world. The rest is moving to tyranny gradually. The bigger government gets the more it becomes tyrannical, trying to control the people for the benefit of the Bureaucratic Hegemony. Look at the US and Europe. The watchword is “safety”. Government has to get bigger and more intrusive in order to insure *safety*.
Those who would give up essential liberty for safety deserve neither liberty or safety,
British and European politicians just don’t seem to care.
They are not poor. Is there a problem with career politicians?
Do we need them?