![\"\"](\"https:\/\/newsubnormal.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/London-taxi-300x192.jpg\")
TAXI DRIVER: Where to guv?<\/p>\nTAXI DRIVER: Where to guv?<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: Piccadilly Circus please.<\/p>\n
(A few seconds pause)<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: This energy crisis is a turn up for the books isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: Indeed, no-one saw it coming did they?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: \u00a0Ah yes, but no-one could have predicted the severity of it. That\u2019s all down to Putin and his sudden invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: Yeah, well that was a surprise. Very out of character wasn\u2019t it? Very unpredictable. That\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: He invaded Ukraine in 2014? I don\u2019t remember that.<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: Funnily enough the government don\u2019t seem to remember it either.<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: So why didn\u2019t we impose sanctions on him back then?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: What did we do?<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: Well, William Hague was the foreign secretary back then and he didn\u2019t mess about at all. He was very quick to retaliate with severe moral outrage and condemnation.<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: Was that it?<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: Yeah, of course it was. After all, Putin might be an evil dictator but he\u2019s never attempted to kill anyone on British soil has he?<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: Well he attempted to kill the Skripals back in 2018 didn\u2019t he?<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: Yeah…but he never actually killed them though did he?<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: No but he killed someone else by accident \u2013 that Dawn whats-her-name…<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: True…but he\u2019s never deliberately killed anyone on British soil though has he?<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: Well he killed Alexander Litvinenko didn\u2019t he?<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: Well okay, fair point but that was all just a bit of spy games wasn\u2019t it? You know a bit of John le Carr\u00e9 jiggery pokery. The British public weren\u2019t under any direct threat so the most appropriate reaction to all of those things was moral outrage and condemnation.<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: So why isn\u2019t the government just doing a bit of moral outrage and condemnation this time round?<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: Well I suppose we\u2019re all in the right frame of mind for some more turbulence and personal hardship at the moment. Since Covid we\u2019ve 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\u2019s finished now we\u2019re in the aftermath of lockdown, so what have we got to lose? In for a penny in for a pound.<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: That\u2019s ridiculous! There must be more to it than that!<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: Well who knows? Conspiracy theorists would tell you it\u2019s a deliberate attempt to crash the economy so that they can bring in a digital currency but I\u2019m not a conspiracy theorist. In fact I don\u2019t even like being controversial \u2013 it\u2019s not good for business, so I\u2019m happy to blame Putin for the energy crisis. It\u2019s 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\u2019s all Putin\u2019s fault and now we have to do our bit again. Just a little bit more of that Dunkirk spirit, that\u2019s all we need, to help our friends in Ukraine.<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: Well that\u2019s all very well but I\u2019ve got a wife and family to support. You\u2019re beginning to make me wonder if moral outrage and condemnation would have been a better policy for us all.<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: That\u2019s 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\u2019re not having bombs dropped on us. Not yet anyway.<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: You\u2019re not really selling it to me. There must be some way out of this. What I don\u2019t get is how we ever became so reliant on buying our energy from a hostile nation like Russia.<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: Well actually we didn\u2019t. 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.<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: Whoa there! Slow down! Did you just say we have a glut of it?<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: Yes that\u2019s right.<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: Why can\u2019t we use what we\u2019ve already got then?<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: Well we are using it but there\u2019s too much of it for us to store so we have to pipe it over to mainland Europe.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t even produce it?<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: Well I s\u2019pose we must have bought a bit too much of it not realising we wouldn\u2019t need it when the country was shut down for two years.<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: So let me get this straight. We\u2019re both buying it from Europe and selling it to Europe at the same time?<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: That\u2019s right. It all gets cooled down to liquidise it and then it\u2019s 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\u2019t have to worry about storage. It\u2019s a remarkable feat of engineering when you think about it.<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: I give up! You’ve lost me now. It\u2019s the most unintelligible load of gobbledygook I think I\u2019ve ever heard. I say the sooner we produce our own energy the better. Fracking, nuclear, coal, solar, wind…I don\u2019t care let\u2019s just get out of this mess and get the prices back to a realistic level.<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: Too right mate! It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
PASSENGER: Thanks very much. How much do I owe you?<\/p>\n
TAXI DRIVER: That\u2019ll be \u00a3273 please, guv.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019t 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-7"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsubnormal.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsubnormal.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsubnormal.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsubnormal.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsubnormal.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/newsubnormal.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114,"href":"https:\/\/newsubnormal.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions\/114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsubnormal.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsubnormal.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsubnormal.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}