The latest IMF forecasts show the UK economy going from being the fastest growing economy last year to be the slowest of the advanced countries next year. The IMF is more pessimistic than the OBR/Treasury for 2023 and is more likely to be right. The OBR/Treasury model usually underestimates the impact of permissive monetary and fiscal policies on the upside, as it did last year, and is too optimistic about the resilience of the economy to tight money and tax hikes on the downside. Last year I predicted a much lower deficit and higher tax revenues than the official estimates at the time of the budget and was pleased to see that happier outturn come to pass.
The IMF says the UK economy will be slowed from 7.5% in 2021 to just 1.2% in 2023. That should be no surprise to anyone watching policy developments. Last year the Bank went on printing extra money all year, long after it should have stopped. This year it will be printing none. It is in danger of hiking rates too high to contract things more. Last year the Treasury planned for a lax budget deficit. This year it is trying to get a lower one through large tax rises. This will sandbag growth which in turn reduces buoyancy of revenue. The OBR model still does not capture the full sensitivity of tax revenue to growth rates. Both these policy tightenings come on top of the large hit to real incomes being administered by energy and food price inflation. The high inflation is both the result of past laxity in money growth and the global supply hits to the world economy.
The collapse of the GFK Consumer confidence index to minus 38 should be a final warning to the Treasury. This takes it down to a level lower than it hit in 2020 over lockdown, lower than during the Exchange Rate Mechanism recession and almost as low as the great recession and banking crash of 2009.
One of my critics wants clarity about my forecasts. I am always clear about them. I do not have a model of the economy myself, but study the official models and offer adjustments to their results as they are flawed in ways I have described. Just as last year I forecast a lower deficit and more tax revenue, for 2023 I forecast a lower growth rate for GDP and a worse situation on revenues and deficit than the OBR figures. I urge the government to abate its large tax rises which are the main reason the IMF figures put the UK in bottom place next year. The other main advanced economies have the same pressures from higher inflation as us, and the US, Canada and some others will have a substantial monetary tightening to contend with but do not have the big tax rises. The European countries need tighter money to curb their inflation and may get it later this year.
April 23, 2022
Good morning, and happy St. Georges Day.
Usually around this time our kind host does a piece on England and Englishness. But no more.
I think your services and talents would be better served as Chief Deckchair Arranger on board the SS Titanic, because the Captain / Leader of your party is clearly more interested in Ukraine and others than those who elected him.
Someone please remind me when the next General Election is ?
Johnson’s final words before the next GE will be; “Go back to your constituencies and prepare for opposition.” Those that are left that is.
April 23, 2022
Yes, the recession should be bottoming out just as the next election is scheduled. Not a good plan.
However, if Bank and Treasury move fast, kick the plan for QT and interest rate rises into high gear, there’ll be a shorter, sharper recession BEFORE the next election and recovery on the way.
Fat chance under Bunter…
Recession IS coming, how long it lasts is the question.
April 23, 2022
Indeed it is. With all the tax rises and energy bill rises. It’s a perfect self induced storm by a useless Government.
April 23, 2022
Dissolve the climate change committee, repeal the climate change act and reverse the policy of net zero…..problem solved
April 23, 2022
An excellent start but it seems the deluded, green crap pusher, Theatre Studies graduate the Carrie might object!
April 24, 2022
+1
April 24, 2022
Johnson doubled down on his green agenda yesterday smearing those against his views. Where have we heard this before? Cameron!
April 23, 2022
+100000
So brilliant.
And Happy St George’s Day!
April 23, 2022
And to you 🙂
April 23, 2022
Opposition? To who? Not labour surely, they inspire no one. Reform? Who knows? That’s the problem, they just don’t get their message across.
Unless you’re woke, green religion and socialist you’ve no one to vote for.
April 23, 2022
ain’t that the truth
April 23, 2022
You do know that St. George wasn’t English, and that he is also patron of a number of non-English-speaking nations around the world?
April 23, 2022
Which proves we are not racist in the UK, and we even honour some foreigners! Oft times though, we welcome a lot of bad people into our country, along with the good.
April 23, 2022
Well, doesn’t that just demonstrate how pleasingly diverse and open-minded England was, even in 1350 – when King Edward lll made St George the patron saint of the nation?
April 23, 2022
Why does that matter? It’s only England and Englishness that isn’t celebrated for some reason. We must either inspire envy or appear to be threatening, to some.
April 23, 2022
Next you’ll want the English flags on English state buildings……..that would be nice
April 23, 2022
Jesus wasn’t English either but it didn’t stop us taking to him.
April 23, 2022
Why should that make any difference?
Are you saying we can only have a Patron Saint that is a pure blooded English person NHL?
April 23, 2022
Yes.
April 23, 2022
So what!
April 24, 2022
we did, thanks.
April 23, 2022
Mark. Happy St George’s day to all and yourself. Can anyone clarify on the subject of Ukraine please? I’ve been told today that France and Germany have been using an EU loophole to continue selling arms to Russia. If true it is despicable and I’d like to know how Nato and other European countries feel about this.
April 23, 2022
And you, FUS.
April 23, 2022
+1
April 23, 2022
Fawlty Towers
‘’You’re looking very spruce this morning, Major’’
‘’Saint George’s Day, old boy’’
April 23, 2022
Que ?
April 23, 2022
Happy St. George’s Day Mark and to everyone on here. Disgracefully not much in the media about it today except on GB News. Politicians must be so glad it’s Saturday and they’re not in the House and therefore don’t have to mention it. Shame on them all.
April 23, 2022
Good morning
With all due respect, the entire bureaucratic infrastructure put in place to collect and analyse data produced by the real economy needs to be dismantled.
Oxbridge bureaucrats who feed off hard working private sector employees and entrepreneurs are damaging to our economy. Their Keynesian, interventionist mindset encourages constant State involvement and meddling in the real economy and this alone warps the efficient use of capital that firms strive to achieve
Whitehall and Parliament do not feed the nation nor power its economy, the private sector does. They have a role to play, a minimal one
April 23, 2022
Exclude Oxford Chemists please.
April 23, 2022
DOM, +1, neat and to the point, thank you once more.
April 23, 2022
+many
It is all so utterly appalling.
April 23, 2022
The private sector does not defend, police, nor offer emergency services to the country. Nor does it administer justice, intelligence, diplomacy, nor co-ordinate infrastructure development.
It doesn’t – in the main – heal the sick nor educate the people’s young.
That is all quite proper, and without its being done by the public sector there would be no modern private sector at all as such.
Unfortunately it has also been trusted to do things which it should never have been, such as to treat and to dispose of sewage and to operate a monopolistic rail system. There are more examples too.
April 23, 2022
The private sector pays for it all. The public sector just spends it.
April 23, 2022
No, the whole economy does, of which the public sector is a part.
The clue is in the word “sector”.
April 23, 2022
I disagree. The private sector provides the money that the public sector puts into the economy.
April 24, 2022
so which areas of the public ‘sector’ contribute the profit required to finance other spending? Health, Education, Defence?
April 24, 2022
Shirley, just think.
April 24, 2022
Your theory worked well in USSR Venezuela N Korea and Cuba didn’t it NHL?
A huge state sector creating endless wealth, not.
April 23, 2022
NLH, neither do the governmental departments, they just run psy-opps to push the lemmings as far as possible. Non are to be trusted from the top to bottom.
I’ll just ignore them as much as possible as I normally do, I continue to live my own life as I see fit and to hell with everybody else.
April 23, 2022
It’s about the balance between public and private sector.
The private sector could do more.
Education and health for example.
The State is growing to half.
That is too high
April 23, 2022
I absolutely agree with your first line.
The private sector is unbeatable for the supply of goods and services where there is easy competition, and the quality is readily regulated and self-evident to the purchaser, e.g. food, drink, pubs, clubs, restaurants, clothing, cars, white goods and so on.
It is appalling where it is handed monopolies, and where wrongdoing can easily be concealed, and clearly immoral in some instances such as the operation of prisons, however.
It also appears that we have too many doctrinaire fanatics in government who do not accept the second point.
April 23, 2022
But the Government isn’t very good at managing monopolies either.
April 24, 2022
Thanks Mr. Binary Brain again.
The CEGB for instance, not the then government, did reasonably OK as I recall.
April 24, 2022
Sad you resort to cheap abuse when you lose the argument.
With no sense of irony you call others doctrinaire fanatics NHL
April 24, 2022
An interesting placard (from opponents) on Friday when Macron was speaking in Figeac:
‘Si tout devient prive, on sera prive de tout’
(If everything becomes private, we’ll be deprived of everything).
Comment in 1000 words 😉
April 24, 2022
Ah Professor Hefner gives out his essay order.
PS
Go back to the top heffy and re read my opening sentence
“It is about the balance between public and private sector”.
Yet NHL calls me binary and you join in misinterpreting me as wanting everything to be private.
Ridiculous both of you.
April 23, 2022
The private sector pays for it all. Why do we have to point out such basics to those who live in a factual vacumn.
April 24, 2022
That’s about as fundamental a misunderstanding of an economy as is possible to have.
April 26, 2022
If ‘the private sector pays for it ALL’, how comes I as an individual still have to pay taxes, income tax, VAT, community tax, road tax, …?
commonslibrary.parliament.uk 21/12/2021 ‘Tax statistics: an overview’ shows £196 bn collected as income tax, £144 bn as NICs and £117 bn as VAT.
I think the tax situation is a teeny weeny bit more complex than what you think, agricola.
Who does not have even the ‘basics’ right, I wonder?
April 23, 2022
Well they would but the state sector is unfair competition hard to compete wish free at the point of use.
April 23, 2022
DOM. I agree with your analysis of what is wrong with the way our economy is being run except for one point.
You call it a KEYNESIAN interventionist mindset.
Perhaps it is because I only read one of Keynes’s books, probably the first, but I did not think he advocated interventionism.
Of course we have far too many Bureaucrats feeding off the people. They meddle in every area of our lives.
As for the Parliamentarians – well they are supposed to be our democratically elected representatives.
They are supposed to ensure that what is done is what the people want to be done.
We elected the so called Conservative Party into office with a huge majority. Presumably because we believed they would conserve what is good about our country, when the alternative parties would continue to destroy it.
WE WERE FOOLED. Weren’t we.
There is no Main Party that will work for the ‘Freedom and Prosperity’ of our country that Sir John claims to stand for.
Also this is one of the few sites left now, where we are FREE to speak our minds.
April 23, 2022
Not quite free. Some posts are censored on here. There are some topics that are not allowed …. anywhere … or maybe it’s the way I tell ’em!
April 24, 2022
+1
April 23, 2022
Steve Baker ‘ I am sick of the Cabinet sitting there fat dumb and happy’. I would add the rest of those ‘on the books’.
So say all of us.
April 23, 2022
+1
April 23, 2022
+many
April 23, 2022
yep +1
April 23, 2022
Even the 1.2% will only be because of mass immigration. Per capita we will all be poorer.
That’s what you get when you have a socialist chancellor and civil Serpents.
Roll on the great reset. Build back better my arm.
April 23, 2022
Open the Cumbrian coal mine, get fracking and sink some more Wells. Reduce the balance of payments and create well paid jobs.
But that will never happen.
April 23, 2022
I doubt Wells (sic) will be sunk in our lifetime.
April 23, 2022
Ian quite right.
April 23, 2022
It’s to obvious to do this for our ecoloon Government. Who will vote for this bs going forward. No one. It’s the economy stupid.
April 23, 2022
We continue to appreciate all of your efforts to restore conservatism, including urging the abatement of the large tax rises. But the utterances of the PM in recent days give no grounds for optimism. He says he’s sorted the care crisis, presumably by the so called hypothecated tax increase he’s refused to reconsider. He’s also described the kind of review of energy policy and subsidy taking place elsewhere in Europe as ‘prejudice’ against green energy. So I fully expect Michael Gove to refuse permission for the Cumbria coking coal mine, and Kwarteng to refuse a resumption of fracking. Both would bring sector specific and broader economic benefits that would be reflected in UK business and IMF confidence indices. It’s difficult to see how Labour under Corbyn and McDonnell would have been worse than this.
April 23, 2022
Agreed. The Net-zero-at-breakneck-speed is going to be a disaster because it relies on technology (especially storage) that is simply not there at the moment or in the near term either.
April 23, 2022
If Boris wants to save him premiership and indeed the party at the next election he has to do a massive reset however distasteful it might be . Accept the progress towards green and that it now has a momentum that does not need, in the short term anyway, subsidies in the form of our higher taxes to drive it, so cancel them. Plenty of space off shore so put on long term hold, on shore wind farms. Turn off the megaphone shouting at us about heat pumps, hydrogen boilers etc. Drive energy self sufficiency, I see Karteng is already beginning the reset.
Hit Brexit benefits hard, NI is a metaphor for his willingness to run away so stop bs ing us and trigger the Protocol. Similarly hit foreign super trawlers and support for our fishing, in economic terms not great but again meets on of his early promises that he has broken. Drive through divergence especially re the City.
Get Rwanda working now, prove that all the Patel talk has not been BS.
Overall his supporters seem to think confronting Putin shows his strength. May I remind them I voted for someone to show their strength in the U.K. To date he has failed on key issues.
April 23, 2022
Indeed Boris need to revert to his small government, climate realist, low tax, bonfire of red tape, small government, libertarian self – before he met Carrie.
An excellent video by David Starkey – Boris was telling the truth on Party Gate – the real culprits are some senior civil servants.
What a dire list of people to replace Boris in the betting odds on Oddschecker a very depressing list of largely remainers and green crap, lockdown enthusiast, socialists. Boris must be retained and the old pre Carrie Boris restored.
Even the appalling Neil O’Brian attack dog in the list – who appallingly & wrongly attacked the delightful, gently spoken (and perfectly right) Prof. Gupta and the Barrington Declaration supporters.
April 23, 2022
The Barrington Declaration has been totally discredited. It failed to correctly define “vulnerability”. The evidence now available is, there is no herd immunity to Long Covid.
April 23, 2022
Indeed – life is like that.
Facts must be faced.
April 23, 2022
Sure and discredited by whom exactly? Vulnerability is defined as people who are vulnerable to serious illness or death from Covid (to a lesser or greater extent). So rather easy to define. So what exactly is your point?
April 23, 2022
+1 a reset pre Carrie Boris is the only hope of avoiding Starmer/SNP.
April 23, 2022
LL, presumably you have looked at the actual figures, record and fact that the socialist Tories have a worse debt, deficit, tax and worse disposal income than any recent Labour govt. Worse than Gordon Brown FFS.
Having read your repeated comments for years it is difficult to understand your logic.
April 24, 2022
His main concern are what Labour might do to his own personal wealth. To that end he see the Tories and the lesser of the two evils. Alas he cannot see that the Tories are in fact no better but hopes that they will be just that little bit less worse.
That Hope is the logic behind his thinking.
IMHO that is.
April 24, 2022
anyway, when you are facing two roughly equal disaster parties -one in power the other not, why continue with the one in power? End it and create an example that power will be withdrawn.
April 23, 2022
Nigl, +1, excellent comment, but it fails because of its overload of common sense, therefore anathema to this ineffectual rotting government and posturing PM
April 24, 2022
fish start rotting from the head.
April 23, 2022
Indeed, if we were subsiding renewable energy suppliers to the tune of £100MWh when wholesale energy prices were at £50MWh , why are we subsidising them with energy prices at £200MWh? What is the Government’s argument for us to be helping renewable energy suppliers to windfall profits on the back of the poor in our country?
On Rwanda , the Government should be buying space for their policy with warnings to the Human Rights Lawyers, Judiciary and NGOs that if this policy is not allowed to work, and brought down by vexatious legal cases , then they won’t be going back to business as usual for the Government will not accept the anarchy we have in our border control, instead more hard line policies will be considered , like withdrawal from the UN Refugee Convention. Make these operatives in the Asylum circus buy into the policy lest they lose the lot .
April 23, 2022
agree in Spades
April 23, 2022
I agree that Boris Johnson and events around Partygate are the big issue. Everything else is something of a distraction.
There is now more talk of a hardline on the Northern Ireland protocol. Rees-Mogg is the current man wheeled out for this purpose. We have been here before many times.
It’s just talk and the public need to see action before they believe there is any change in the government’s approach to anything.
Illegal immigration and Rwanda is more of the same.
Net zero and great reset are something Johnson’s future benefactors will look for him to deliver. So ditching these ideas will be a tough choice for him.
April 23, 2022
Well put, NigL.
April 23, 2022
+1
April 23, 2022
NigL
And what about our military losses in Ukraine ? There may be no British coffins but they are military losses in ordnance bought for the protection of our territories and which will not be replaced soon.
We are at war with Russia. Putin thinks we are, therefore we are. Does anyone seriously think that his woefully undermanned expedition was the beginning of a wider invasion of Europe ?
April 23, 2022
NLA, I don’t know what Putin thinks, but I know what I think. When this war ends, the defeated rump of Ukraine will be landlocked, shorn of its heavy industries and economically unsustainable without billions in financial aid. The EU will probably offer that assistance, and it will bankrupt itself in doing so. We in this country would do well to keep out of this long-term disaster in the making. Of course Putin doesn’t intend to invade Europe. He doesn’t need to bother – it’s bent on self-destruction already.
April 24, 2022
Clough
The self destruction is actually been done by Putin and he needs no help
April 23, 2022
Nigl. You have made some very good points there.
Boris Johnson following your advice???
No chance!
B.J. is not only interested in pretending to be Churchill defying Hitler, (Ukraine). B.J. has also ensured he will be comfortably absorbed into the Global Dictatorship of the near future, (W.E.F. etc.).
Or on the other hand, he might actually be an idiot.
Either way, hardly suitable Prime Minister material.
April 23, 2022
So we have manifesto ratting tax increases (from an absurdly high base already), large regulatory increases (from another v. high base), deliberately caused high inflation, restrictive planning, very expensive intermittent energy, absurdly complex taxes and employment laws, poor roads and public services, a dire NHS and a vast & largely unproductive state sector, deluded net zero socialists in power and even worse in waiting. Yet we still expect economic growth and good productivity?
April 23, 2022
L/L. Mad isn’t it and defying common sense.
April 23, 2022
Happy St George’s Day.
You seem to have a knack with this forecasting and the incumbents at the OBR do not. Perhaps post theirs versus yours on a graph and get them to answer?
Also further analysis please of why successive Tory governments since 1992 seem to have strangled the population economically? From Major’s ERM debacle to cancelling a triple lock just when it became relevant to flinging money at the NHS and a pandemic then pulling it back from the public in massive taxes. Ridiculous behaviour when we reflect and compare with 2006 Labour’s A-day maximum £262’000 p.a. into pensions, 10% CGT rate and general relaxation about economic growth and people making money.
April 23, 2022
What a depressing economic future you outline JR, however I fear you are correct, far too many costs and price rises have already taken place. with more in the pipeline, to come to any other conclusion.
Some people can work harder and smarter to try and increase their income to mitigate increased costs, but for the majority, income in the form of wages and salaries are set by employers, who are now desperate to keep costs down.
Any gains that could have been won with a sensible Brexit have failed to materialise, because the Government has lacked vision, courage and dragged its feet.
The ever more complicated and all encompassing tax system has grown to ever more greater levels, and the increased tax income has simply been wasted by Government policies and Departments, who seem not to care less.
Aware the government cannot control everything, as World events influence some matters, thus even more important that it controls what it can at home.
April 23, 2022
Absolutely correct, Alan.
April 23, 2022
Happy St Georges Day.
I note our national broadcaster is not mentioning it, no celebration of Englishness to be found there, the Today programme spending their time in Northern Ireland.
April 23, 2022
It looks like an attempt at creative destruction. “Build Back Better” will only be possible when you’ve previously destroyed everything.
The Great “Green” Reset requires a collapse in the economy.
Polls are showing that Labour now has a slight lead on running the economy. With their track record, that’s almost funny ….. but under the circumstances, understandable.
The muppets sitting on the CON benches are obviously all too young to remember what happened in the late ’90s after Major crashed the economy with his ERM obsession.
April 23, 2022
@ Donna – But the sitting muppets can find out Sir John gave advance warning of the actual outcomes of Major’s ERM foolishness and so be encouraged to listen to him now, before the Sunak Slump (as now spotted even by the IMF!) is the outcome of today’s foolishness.
April 23, 2022
Indeed. Many of us haven’t forgotten his rank stupidity.
April 23, 2022
Off topic:
https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2022/0422/1293789-ni-protocol-latest/
“On 30 March, Maroš Šefčovič wrote to British foreign secretary Liz Truss asking her to “urgently” address the EU’s concerns over a lack of access to the full set of UK data on what was entering Northern Ireland, access which, he said, was supposed to have been granted a year ago.
A test of the system on 25 February, revealed shortcomings which meant that EU officials working on the ground in Northern Ireland were unable to make a proper risk analysis on goods coming in, nor were they able to impart such information to EU institutions or member states without the UK’s consent.”
Why on earth did Boris Johnson agree that the EU would have “officials working on the ground in Northern Ireland” to monitor “goods coming in” to that part of the United Kingdom, when the legitimate interests of the EU do not extend beyond the goods that are leaving Northern Ireland for the Irish Republic?
April 23, 2022
So Denis, what happens if Sinn Féin and the “designated nationalist” parties win the election and the “designated unionist” parties refuse to take up the Deputy First Minister post.
Does Boris repeal the 1998 Northern Ireland Act? Go back to eleven District Councils under the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland? Plus, now we have “The UK will “reform” the Northern Ireland Brexit protocol if the EU will not, Jacob Rees-Mogg has warned, raising the possibility of a dramatic intervention after the assembly elections in a fortnight’s time.”
April 24, 2022
Why are you asking me to predict what Boris Johnson may or may not do?
April 23, 2022
Net zero is going to cripple our country, regardless of how well or how badly our economy does.
Someone should ask Boris if he gives a higher priority to global virtue signalling or the wellbeing of the UK! I suspect we already know the answer, but Boris should be confronted with his disregard for the UK and it’s people. We want action to protect and help the UK, not words and more broken promises.
April 23, 2022
+1
April 23, 2022
Good article in The Spectator (Ross Clark, if I recall correctly). With his Eco Lunacy, “Johnson has decided to make the British people poorer.”
As if we hadn’t already worked that out for ourselves.
April 23, 2022
+1 and to not benefit to the climate or CO2 either.
April 23, 2022
Bunter and the truth are very distant cousins!
April 23, 2022
I wonder *why* the government is so keen on tax rises ? And why they think if tax rises are a good thing I wouldn’t just vote Labour ? It is a new form of the old mystery of why so many Conservative politicians were so keen on staying in the EU – the top 4 in the betting to replace Boris for example.
April 24, 2022
They’ve pumped too much money into the system.
April 23, 2022
Sir John,
I wonder whether you trust the IPCC climate model more than that of the Treasury?
April 23, 2022
Fiscal modelling and fiddling with fiscal policies is like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
We have far more serious issues caused by a self-perpetuating ruling class of politicians (our kind host excepted), civil servants, educational and judicial establishments and head of institutions who not only believe they have a divine right to rule but hate the country, its people, its culture and its history.
Rather than looking after our country and people they prefer to save the planet.
They have therefore forced upon us – without a referendum – the unnecessary and economy crippling policy of Net Zero to curb our 1% contribution to global CO2 emissions and the social cohesion/nationhood destroying plan (the UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and REGULAR Migration (CGM) signed by Mrs. May without ANY Parliamentary vote let alone a referendum) to import large numbers of economic – but not cultural – migrants in order to reduce world poverty.
I hope that one day I will have the opportunity to be able to vote for a candidate/party that supports the UK and its people.
April 23, 2022
In relation to my earlier query regarding selling arms to Russia.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10745115/France-Germany-sold-230million-military-hardware-including-bombs-missiles-Moscow.html
April 23, 2022
Dear Sir John, I don’t see the point of using 2021 as a comparator for projected economic growth in 2023. The 2021 growth figure was artificially high because the economy was (sort of) recovering from the damage caused by lockdowns. Of course the prospects for 2023 are bad, but in my view the tax rises are the least of our worries now, thanks to the prospects of galloping inflation and material shortages across many sectors of the economy. The government’s first duty is to its own citizens, and in its irresponsible foreign policy actions it is failing in that duty. The damaging consequences of the sanctions war need to be addressed now before it is too late, and we are cut off long-term from sources of raw materials and energy in Eurasia.
April 23, 2022
Whats the point of a economic forecast when this government, under Boris will do his own thing, ignoring his voting mandate, manifesto and backbenches…He’s a rogue PM, his answer to everything is more wind-turbines !
April 24, 2022
+1
April 23, 2022
How’s this for a 3.6 GW inter-connector from Morocco. Slightly larger than Hinkley Point C, with an unsubsidised CfD (Contract for Difference) strike price of half that of Hinkley. https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
PS. Would it be cheaper or practical to (a) convert it to Hydrogen in Morocco and pipe it to the UK. (b) HVDC cable it to the UK, converting it to Hydrogen in the UK for storage. (c) HVDC cable it to the UK invert to AC and plug it directly into the UK power grid. It looks like they have chosen the latter.
April 23, 2022
acorn :
I couldn’t read of any costs or prices in this article although I can see the project’s attractiveness to BEIS/the Government as it off-shores the CO2 emissions for its construction and provides insecure energy in the control of a foreign country.
BTW, Hinkley Point C is a poor comparison to use as according to Sir Dieter Helm, Professor of Energy Policy at Oxford, it would have cost nearly half had the Lib Dem Sir Ed Davey, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition, used the UK rather than the Chinese to provide the finance.
In addition RR have quoted a price for the electricity from their SMRs which is nearly one third of the estimated eventual inflation related price of the electricity from Hinkley Point C when it finally becomes operational.
And it’s uneconomical to ship hydrogen because it has a very low energy density by volume – conversion to ammonia would be better – and the electricity to hydrogen and back to electricity has an efficiency of only 25-30%.
April 24, 2022
Richard, the cost is £16 billion (£4,800 per kW installed capacity). The Strike Price circa £48 MWh but that was a while back. Nobody in the UK wanted to get involved with finance for Hinkley C. The construction CO2 will be minuscule compared to the lifetime CO2 saved per MWh.
Agree about H2. IMO it will only ever be an energy carrier and store, I don’t see it being an end user fuel in any transportation mode. The Russian floating SMR is guessed at £8,000 per kW installed and the Argentinian version £16,000 per kW installed. Stand alone 300 MW SMRs will be uneconomic, they would have to be built in clusters of five or six to make sense.
April 23, 2022
Just two prominent articles noticed today -Interesting story Belfast Telegraph 23/4 – incoming refugees / orphans programme etc., Somalian teenager, mother died, he & father left, crossing Ethiopia, Sudan, Sahara to Libya. The pair decided to travel by dinghy to Italy. Father sadly lost his life en route. The teenager then moved from Italy before moving on to Germany living there on the streets before travelling to Sweden. After Sweden, returned to Italy then managed to travel to Dublin before taking a bus to Belfast where he applied for asylum. Obviously very capable & seems to be doing well, now being fostered in N I, but to my mind raises a lot of questions. The second case being a resettled Syrian family in South London unhappy in a small flat, parents working but having rent paid by the state of around £20.000 a year but they are in dire straits due to the cost of living.
April 23, 2022
Diane
1) How did the Somalian teenager aford to travel all over Europe before eventually applying for asylum in the UK ?
2) The Syrian’s. If they are unhappy they can always go somewhere else, either somewhere in the UK or Planet Earth. The £20k does not come from the government, it comes from taxpayers ie people who work for a living and have to find the money for their own rent / mortgage etc. And I know ytou said they are working, but they are clearly not earning enough to pay their way.
Both cases have sanctuary. They are safe and reasonably well cared for. They are lucky.
April 23, 2022
Diana. If they are working and cannot afford life in London then tough . Get out of London and move somewhere cheaper like the rest of us have to.
April 24, 2022
nail, hammer – hit !
April 24, 2022
FUS
+1
Indeed did that myself 50 years ago, its not a new situation, but when I moved out everyone had to pay their own Mortgage or Rent, no help available for those who could not afford to, it was simply a fact of life, you move to where you can afford to live/work.
April 23, 2022
I still believe that the next General Election is the Conservatives to lose :
Whoever leads the party into the contest, they will not be signed up to as extreme a Green Crap agenda as Labour, SNP, the Greens and the Libdims. A relaxation of the policy would put clear blue water between the party and 100% of the opposition.
My view of Partygate is that it is a fuss about very little but clearly the feedback from MPs is that the BBC and other anti-Boris media have turned it into a really serious issue. As a result, and despite his previous election-winning campaigns, I am not sure that the party will be able to sell Boris to the Country in 2023-2024, despite an excellent record on Ukraine and vaccines.
It looks very doubtful that Sunak will have the money to reduce taxes to be lower than before the 2019 election. That is the minimum he needs to do to reclaim their reputation for being a low tax party – normally another clear differentiation to Labour and all the other opposition parties. His NI increases threw that away.
April 24, 2022
Johnson did nothing on vaccines, support, research funding, scientist development, production in UK.
What he did – as he does on every subject is throw £bns at it. Praise for that? Remarkable.
April 23, 2022
The government needs to give some quick thinking to the problem of Moldovan security.
April 23, 2022
I’m sure the government of Moldova has been doing that, SW. It’s their responsibility.
April 24, 2022
+1
April 24, 2022
+1
April 23, 2022
Not only do we have to put up with the British establishment not recognising our patron saint day, but we also have to put up with the race baiters trying to rubbish it. If I was as antagonistic to other people’s identity, like a certain Dr’s , I would be arrested for a hate crime, yet it seems she has free rein to inject her poison into the event, and as usual we have to put up with the left making all sorts of claims that are just plain wrong, starting with the claim that St George was Turkish, when it was 500 years after St George that the Turks migrated into the area.
When we are made to walk on egg shells around ethnic minorities , why should we have to put up with this rubbish from them?
April 23, 2022
Two tier legal system. Only ‘whites’ can be racist.
April 23, 2022
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a government that actually fights for the majority of the people that put them in power
April 24, 2022
The stupidity of their arguments is thus:
If St. George was indeed Turkish, and the English with to celebrate a Turk, then how then can we be racists or St.George’s Day a racist day ? Can’t have that both ways.
Many of the Patron Saints of the other home nations do not come from the places they are venerated.
St. Patrick was British.
St.Andrew came from Palestine, now Israel.
These people are just anti-English bigots !
April 24, 2022
Being anti English is flavour of the month…and has other cash benefits and opportunities
April 24, 2022
+1
April 23, 2022
Johnson
April 24, 2022
We should consider that UK economic policy is not driven by our needs but by instruction of the WEF that Boris is so enthusiastic to follow.
April 27, 2022
[…] say voices on both the Left and Right, including Richard Murphy (from the former) and our columnist John Redwood (from the […]
April 27, 2022
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