Protestors in Berlin have been holding up placards suggesting they’d sooner shower in cold water than use Russian gas, others however are more concerned about how they will keep warm and cook their food while still others are wondering how they will for to fill their cars with fuel for the commute to work, or buy food with the prices of both fuel and food rocketing.
Meanwhile in Britain Boris Johnson has called on the public to make sacrifices, solemnly telling us that we need to drop cheap Russian energy and ‘accept that such a move will be painful’.
Telling voters that the spiralling inflation we are now experiencing, and the effect on living standards might sound like a politiian trying to be honest for once . Or might it be the case that Boris Johnson, never a man known for plain speaking, is preparing us to be told that Russia’s war against Ukraine, rather than the follies of 'net zero' policies and transitioning from fossil fuels to intermittent 'sustainable' energy sources are to blame for price rises that coming down the lione long before the first Russian boot stepped over ~Ukraine's border?
Managing without Russia’s energy supplies will hit the Germany economy hard. German industry and domestic energy supplies have relied heavily on imported Russian natural gas since Germany's influential but idiotic Green lobby pressured Angela Merkel into abandoning coal and nuclear in favour of wind and solar electricity generators. Germany imported 32 per cent of its gas from Russia in December and wants to reduce that by two-thirds over the next year but has no viable alternative and even Germany's brilliant engineers cannot conjure current from wind turbines when the wind does not blow or from solar panels when the sun does not shine.
Energy prices throughout Europe were skyrocketing before any economic sanctions were impised on Russia. The energy crunch caused by the failure of green energy policies, and exacerbated by economies restarting after lockdowns, saw UK energy regulator Ofgem raise the energy price cap by 54 per cent, but oil and gas price increases throughout 2021 had already driven dozens of companies out of business by February, 2022.
Higher prices would normally be hard to explain for a governing party committed to the traditional Conservative principle of keeping living costs in check. ‘But the war has changed the narrative in a number of ways,’ says one Conservative lawmaker, ‘the cost of living crunch can also now be blamed on something out of our control.’
Debt servicing payments are increasing by billions of pounds month by month, as nations, already half buried under the mountain of debt they incurred in order to fund the insanity of their pandemic responses now have to flood their economies with even more fiat money to stave of the effects of global price inflation. That, for Johnson and Biden, has meant trying to blame their economic woes on Russia. It might work, but rising prices aren’t a recent phenomenon: they were being shaped by government decision-making long before sanctions hit.
In Britain, inflation has been outpacing official forecasts for months – and was expected to hit 7 per cent even before Ukraine was invaded. One Secretary of State expects the headline rate to hit double digits before the end of the year. In Joe Biden's America runaway inflation is running even faster with the year on year increase in consumer prices having already topped 8 per cent.
Blaming their economic woes on Russia's conflict in Ukraine probably seems an easy way out for political shtsters like Johnson and Biden. It would have worked too (to borrow a phrase from Scooby Doo villains,) but for that pesky virus interfereing. No doubt Russia’s war is a serious, and increasing, problem, prticularly when we consider the likely effect of the ban on Ammonium Nitrate (fertiliser) exports to the west. But two years of relentless scaremongering propaganda used to prop up the pandemic narrative have almost destroyed public trust in politics and the madia. Rising prices aren’t a recent phenomenon: they were being shaped by government decision-making, the economic damages caused by unnecessary and ineffective lockdowns and the suspension of commercial activity as entire nations were placed under house arrest, long before sanctions started to contribute to the latest spike in energy prices.
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