like the queen this thread will never die: in which we ALL resign (ourselves to disgusting miseries to post-boris politics 2022)

It’s not looking great pic.twitter.com/VeaL41CD03

— Cobie (@cobie) August 29, 2022

Absolute morons thinking five days in the office a week again will be a moneysaver for most.

This is assuming the office can afford to pay the heating. Ditto the vaguely-defined 'elsewhere'.
Let's see if the Tories propose some govt-funded 'energy mortgage' wheeze, where everyone pays back the shareholders over the entire course of their natural lives.

A lot of companies have gone into a remote working model, and they won't be going back so they can supply a communal shower.

In London you see quite a few Offices for Hire, so I wonder if some of those companies will go bust as well.

oh, you have free shower places? nice.

If that piece affects anyone's thinking at all it'll be to make employers more keen on WFH, as buildings are expensive to light and heat and on top of that your employees will be scrounging all your leccy lol

brb going to walk 40 minutes to Newham council and ask if they have a shower I can use.

iirc the longer context of the shower thing was "at your gym" which is even more, well y'know

how much is gym membership these days? just asking for a friend who hasn't been to one since high school

The winners out of this will most likely be coffee shops. Employer gets rid of the office, home is too expensive to heat and light while I work so where am I going to go?

In London you see quite a few Offices for Hire, so I wonder if some of those companies will go bust as well.

Some will def survive as many companies want to have hot-desking hubs which they can also use for team meetings, training etc.

At least we own our building, and plan to sell it, so it'll likely be demolished and be used for a supermarket, housing or a warehouse facility - it's right next to the local (albeit, tiny) airport. One of my old employers is in a far worse situation. It took on a 5-year lease on a building that holds 500 immediately before the pandemic. On one of the three floors there are only two people working regularly and I know both of them. One lives in a flat so tiny he can't comfortably work there.

I pay £21pm for a gym membership in zone 3 London, it's much more expensive to go to the same chain closer to central tho

It costs me about £7 a day to get to and from the office, so my (half) share of household fuel bills would have to hit that before I was saving money by going to work just to shower and be warm

If you are someone on benefits or with caring responsibilities or you’re at risk to develop certain health conditions, your GP may be able to refer you for cheapo gym membership and/or the council-affiliated gym might have certain options that don’t require a referral. Good luck, Calz!

That probably would be a good move Suzy, but I don't think I could deal with the embarrassment of being the knocking on 50 loser guy with the beer-gut surrounded by young, healthy looking people! About 8 years ago I was doing 1-2 hours a day on the exercise bike and it really made a difference, probably need to get back to that routine, at least as a starting point.

Oh, don’t worry about that - you wouldn’t be alone and there’s always a de facto old person in the gym going verrry slowwwwwly on a treadmill.

"The winners out of this will most likely be coffee shops. Employer gets rid of the office, home is too expensive to heat and light while I work so where am I going to go?"

A coffee shop near me started charging extra to warm up a sandwich a few months ago. Think a lot of the local ones could be fucked like pubs. The chain ones will have pressures placed on them too.

Yes a lot of these small business places pay over five times that of a household energy bill. Times THAT by five and they're probably the most fucked of all.

It's fucked how "let's kill WFH" is being used now, as if there aren't a lot of people who have never had that option.

From October, central heating will cost at least £3.60 an hour (based on a 24kW boiler costing 15p/kWh). Running a computer will cost £1.25 a day. Boiling a kettle will cost more than 10p.
Expect to see a lot more people in the office. https://t.co/wRS7ASUJZQ

— Will Dunn (@willydunn) August 26, 2022

Meantime..

Germany’s three-month experiment with super-cheap public transport reduces carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to powering about 350,000 homes for a year https://t.co/kxD5dTie31

— Bloomberg UK (@BloombergUK) August 30, 2022

Someone tweeted the other day about their mum's caff in Leicester where the leccy bill is going up from £10k to £55k p/a so the cafe culture renaissance might be on hold. Think all hospitality looks doomed tbh. More likely to see us all fighting for seats in the local public library, where they haven't already been closed.

xxp why would that kill WFH lol. All these fucking dunces writing as if it's the employees who are making the decisions here

In Europe I get the sense of help being offered or a serious debate on options (correct me if I'm wrong I'm not looking closely).

Here the so-called silly season continues.

Truss calling off that BBC interview is a sign (I'll take anything) of some sort of move from mouthing off rubbish about this on national TV till she gets made PM.

praying for a mild winter. Aside from small businesses how are NHS trusts and schools going to be able to afford to power extremely energy hungry industrial kitchens and heating systems. They don't have the option to shut up shop or even use money-saving *top tips* like turning off life support or letting kids get circulatory diseases while they learn and will have no choice but build up huge debts and wait for a Truss bailout ..lol. Before all this NHS trusts were already paying an over half a billion in energy bills every financial year.

radio 4 the other day had someone on who had arranged Warm Banks in their area - places to go to be warm during the day

but another this morning pointed out there's no price cap for businesses so they are likely to be hit harder. pubs closing etc.

haven't heard about my £150 council tax rebate at all yet. it's been a month (nearly)

Might need to run the contest again lads

This morning, we sent a letter to the Conservative Party to seek a Judicial Review of its conduct of the election of Party leader and the UK's next prime minister.

This is because we believe it is undemocratic and unlawful.

THREAD ⬇️🧵https://t.co/raw3csBNNu

— Tortoise (@tortoise) August 30, 2022

looks like melt shenanigans to me but

Wd be very on brand for melts to accidentally keep boris johnson in office by trying to clown the process

Backdoor privatisation is going to come back and bite the hell out of the BBC, NHS etc when Atos, Arqiva etc all say “sorry lads, our energy costs have risen and you’ll find our contract entitles us to ask you for the difference” which is exactly what they are doing

An unexpected £40m bill will put business under, but what about services that can’t go under?

The tragedy is that the immediate crisis can be sorted quickly for people.

A thought. The task that faces Labour today as a potential govt is more daunting than what faced Attlee in 1945. In effect he only proposed making permanent or expanding policies that had been in place (& were seen to work) for 5 years. Starmer is almost starting from scratch.

— Steven Fielding (@PolProfSteve) August 30, 2022

that fucking clueless cunt, the Atlee government nationalised anything that moved and people like him and the right-wing press didn't like it then either.

re poster Gimbel's post: one of my local libraries has reduced from 3 floors to 1 over the last 4 years. Last week I emailed a manager to note how bad this is and the email does nothing but bounce.

I do happen to have a second, very small local library which is run by a charity and volunteers since it became too expensive for the council.

re another post: "running a computer will cost £1.25 a day" - is that meant to sound like a lot? It's much less than the cost of getting to work or buying a cup of coffee for the office.

for any non-UK people in this thread (or people like me who have left and can no longer tell what is a big deal on the ground back home), i found this a useful explainer about the winter fuel stuff https://foreverwars.ghost.io/uk-fuel-crisis-greed-ofgem-russia/. afaict it gets things right, but please lmk if not.

https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/20848852.isle-wight-ferry-strike-red-funnel-deal-accepted/?ref=twtrec

xp, I’m not sure the piece is wrong, per se, but it is a partial truth.

The U.K. does get a very limited amount of gas from Russia but Europe, as a whole, doesn’t. There’s an argument over ways in which the government could use North Sea gas, which was privatised 40 years ago, to mitigate price increases but it’s not straightforward and if the majority of the gas we use comes from Norway and Qatar, and the countries who are heavily reliant on Russia, like Germany, are also bidding for it, the wholesale prices are going to go up.

Gas storage was scaled down massively a few years ago when site that held 70% of it was declared too unsafe to operate and too expensive to renovate. The argument that failure to replace it was neglectful is pretty strong, though idk how much of an impact it would have on prices in practice.

There’s also a lot of argument over how much impact nationalising the energy retailers (which would be fairly cheap and doable) would have when it came to reducing prices. The best case for it would be that the government might be able to negotiate a better deal with suppliers, but it’s not a slam dunk. The more significant question is whether, as the previous Labour manifesto asked, we should look at nationalising energy producers, which is imo a good idea but would be massively expensive and isn’t a short term fix.

There’s a danger in thinking that if we’d just made a couple of good decisions we’d be carrying on more of less as normal, when what’s really required is a massive shift towards renewables.

Yes, not mentioning renewables is a massive gap.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/aug/31/social-housing-rent-rises-to-be-capped-in-england-next-year

Waiting for Starmer to object.

Heating homes and food. Now Panini stickers. What next? Clothes?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/31/inflation-pushes-average-cost-of-filling-panini-2022-world-cup-sticker-album-to-870-pounds-football

GMB WIN 🥳: Windsor bin strike ends after one day with pay rise of up to 17% 👏👏

— GMB Union (@GMB_union) September 1, 2022

Boris Johnson - Buy a new kettle & save £10 a year on your electricity bill. 👀 pic.twitter.com/IMtIiwJk4k

— Haggis_UK 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 (@Haggis_UK) September 1, 2022

Solar powered wind up kettles, cold fusion kettles, that's how you knock 10 quid off of your 4k bill. You can save another 10% off your electric bill by never turning the lights on and stealing the candles out of churches.

how does he reckon a new kettle will save you money? don't make me have to watch the video.

tell you what would save heaps of money: decent insulation. and solar power. oh, but you removed all the incentives for those.

To paraphrase a joke about Italian revolutions, only in Britain could we have the collapse of the Soviet Union without having had any Soviet Union https://t.co/B6WpM11QZc

— DALL-E Parton (@AliceAvizandum) September 1, 2022

So fucked..

This dinner lady says she cries going into work - because she has to deny children school lunch. pic.twitter.com/ep0C8WKpQR

— Ava-Santina (@AvaSantina) August 30, 2022

On another board, poster Fizzles was expressing views about commentator Stephen Bush.

I tried to remember an article that Bush had written. Here it is.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/keir-starmer-cant-win-until-he-praises-the-tories-07xgd5z5h

it is paywalled but the cursed url and opening paragraph is more than enough Bush!

17 points ahead. I'm afraid that's not good enough, Starmer must resign.

Westminster voting intention:

LAB: 42% (+2)
CON: 25% (-1)
LDEM: 10% (-1)
GRN: 7% (+1)

via @PeoplePolling
Chgs. w/ 22 Aughttps://t.co/5ksWvd9Km0

— Britain Elects (@BritainElects) September 2, 2022

what a disappointing birthday present for Kieth - still NOT 20 pts ahead in the last of caretaker PM polls. At least he doesn't need to hide his bottle of single malt at the office today.

NEW 🚨: A bin strike in Windsor has ended after just 1 day - after workers accepted a pay rise of up to 17%.

— Trades Union Congress (@The_TUC) September 2, 2022