Are they taking us for a ride?

TAXI DRIVER: Where to guv?

PASSENGER: Piccadilly Circus please.

(A few seconds pause)

TAXI DRIVER: This energy crisis is a turn up for the books isn’t it?

PASSENGER: Indeed, no-one saw it coming did they?

TAXI DRIVER: No, it completely caught the government off-guard. No-one could have predicted it…apart from Ofgem of course. They predicted it a couple of years ago.

PASSENGER:  Ah yes, but no-one could have predicted the severity of it. That’s all down to Putin and his sudden invasion of Ukraine.

TAXI DRIVER: Yeah, well that was a surprise. Very out of character wasn’t it? Very unpredictable. That’s what I said when he invaded Georgia in 2008…and when he invaded Ukraine the first time in 2014. Who would have thought it, eh?

PASSENGER: He invaded Ukraine in 2014? I don’t remember that.

TAXI DRIVER: Funnily enough the government don’t seem to remember it either.

PASSENGER: So why didn’t we impose sanctions on him back then?

TAXI DRIVER: Well obviously at the time we realised that would be an extremely harmful and self-destructive thing for us to do. Cutting off our nose to spite our face – so to speak. But to be fair our response to the invasion in 2014 was very robust.

PASSENGER: What did we do?

TAXI DRIVER: Well, William Hague was the foreign secretary back then and he didn’t mess about at all. He was very quick to retaliate with severe moral outrage and condemnation.

PASSENGER: Was that it?

TAXI DRIVER: Yeah, of course it was. After all, Putin might be an evil dictator but he’s never attempted to kill anyone on British soil has he?

PASSENGER: Well he attempted to kill the Skripals back in 2018 didn’t he?

TAXI DRIVER: Yeah…but he never actually killed them though did he?

PASSENGER: No but he killed someone else by accident – that Dawn whats-her-name…

TAXI DRIVER: True…but he’s never deliberately killed anyone on British soil though has he?

PASSENGER: Well he killed Alexander Litvinenko didn’t he?

TAXI DRIVER: Well okay, fair point but that was all just a bit of spy games wasn’t it? You know a bit of John le Carré jiggery pokery. The British public weren’t under any direct threat so the most appropriate reaction to all of those things was moral outrage and condemnation.

PASSENGER: So why isn’t the government just doing a bit of moral outrage and condemnation this time round?

TAXI DRIVER: Well I suppose we’re all in the right frame of mind for some more turbulence and personal hardship at the moment. Since Covid we’ve got used to the idea of being in a state of emergency all the time. Being all in it together for whatever the current thing is. Anyway, the country’s finished now we’re in the aftermath of lockdown, so what have we got to lose? In for a penny in for a pound.

PASSENGER: That’s ridiculous! There must be more to it than that!

TAXI DRIVER: Well who knows? Conspiracy theorists would tell you it’s a deliberate attempt to crash the economy so that they can bring in a digital currency but I’m not a conspiracy theorist. In fact I don’t even like being controversial – it’s not good for business, so I’m happy to blame Putin for the energy crisis. It’s nothing to do with our lack of self-sufficiency, our dependency on hostile nations, our 12% inflation due to shutting the country down for two years, our obsession with net zero, our dilly dallying on nuclear energy and fracking or Ofgem’s reluctance to regulate the money-grabbing monopoly companies which run the gas and electricity networks. It’s all Putin’s fault and now we have to do our bit again. Just a little bit more of that Dunkirk spirit, that’s all we need, to help our friends in Ukraine.

PASSENGER: Well that’s all very well but I’ve got a wife and family to support. You’re beginning to make me wonder if moral outrage and condemnation would have been a better policy for us all.

TAXI DRIVER: That’s not the right attitude, old chum. We can do this if we all work together. Just go without a holiday this year…sell your car…get some thermal underwear… At least we’re not having bombs dropped on us. Not yet anyway.

PASSENGER: You’re not really selling it to me. There must be some way out of this. What I don’t get is how we ever became so reliant on buying our energy from a hostile nation like Russia.

TAXI DRIVER: Well actually we didn’t. We were only getting four percent of our gas supply from Russia. We get most of our gas from Norway, you see. However, the wholesalers are putting their prices up because the sanctions have reduced supply and increased demand which means they can charge pretty much what they like for it. Meanwhile Russia is selling their gas to India and China, who then markup the price and sell it onto various European countries who then markup the price and sell it to the UK. At the same time the UK is selling gas to Europe at bargain basement prices as we currently have a glut of it.

PASSENGER: Whoa there! Slow down! Did you just say we have a glut of it?

TAXI DRIVER: Yes that’s right.

PASSENGER: Why can’t we use what we’ve already got then?

TAXI DRIVER: Well we are using it but there’s too much of it for us to store so we have to pipe it over to mainland Europe.

PASSENGER: This is all quite implausible! You must be making it up now. How did we end up with so much of it when we don’t even produce it?

TAXI DRIVER: Well I s’pose we must have bought a bit too much of it not realising we wouldn’t need it when the country was shut down for two years.

PASSENGER: So let me get this straight. We’re both buying it from Europe and selling it to Europe at the same time?

TAXI DRIVER: That’s right. It all gets cooled down to liquidise it and then it’s sent over to Europe through one pipe and they send another load back to us through another pipe. That way it all goes round in a big circle and we don’t have to worry about storage. It’s a remarkable feat of engineering when you think about it.

PASSENGER: I give up! You’ve lost me now. It’s the most unintelligible load of gobbledygook I think I’ve ever heard. I say the sooner we produce our own energy the better. Fracking, nuclear, coal, solar, wind…I don’t care let’s just get out of this mess and get the prices back to a realistic level.

TAXI DRIVER: Too right mate! It’s always the fat cats that make all the money and the likes of you and me just get ripped off. Anyway, here we are Piccadilly Circus.

PASSENGER: Thanks very much. How much do I owe you?

TAXI DRIVER: That’ll be £273 please, guv.