Columns

Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson is mostly bluster, braggadocio and baloney. He has blundered along and right now he is brandishing his Etonian elitism around even as the country is on the brink of a crisis with sharply rising energy prices and cut backs in social welfare threaten to throw several millions of the country’s households into desperate struggles to survive the coming winter.

If at times his bluster and prevarications have sounded as though we have suffered these before from ministers and bureaucrats in other countries, one might perforce dispel such conduct as the recurrent infirmities of politicians with wide open mouths that could accommodate two feet at a time.

But there is no excuse for the dismissive rhetoric that this prime minister engages in. When told that a cost-of-living crisis would be upon us in a month or two, Johnson brushed it aside insisting that “Christmas is on”.

Johnson has been in public life long enough to know that this country has a vigorous and generally free media and he is wide open to public scrutiny unlike in some other countries where leaders wish that media freedom is just a bad dream and would like to end the nightmare by fair means or foul.

If the European winter turns severe as some expect, more people here will die not because they are stricken by Covid but for lack of heating and money to buy food.

Fortunately there is no winter in Sri Lanka and people there do not need to heat their homes. But many people in Sri Lanka are feeling the heat from sharply rising living costs with the prospect of food and gas prices going up further as the world faces an energy crunch.

Since early this year, gas prices in Europe have risen sharply by 250 percent while in Asia it is said to have increased by 175 percent.

For nearly two years now, the Covid pandemic that has spread across the globe has served several  political leaders and their associates with a reason, if not an excuse, to camouflage their policy failures, delays in acting expeditiously to correct ill-conceived decision-making and brazenly pushing ahead with decisions that are reversed a day two later, not to mention bureaucratic bungling.

Like in some other countries we know, Boris Johnson, too, has made errors of judgement over the spreading pandemic and how to deal with it effectively. But at least it might be said that he did not ignore the advice of medical specialists and experts and the National Health Service that bore the brunt of combating the pandemic.

That was also because Johnson and his Conservative government faced an active, alert opposition and even criticism from some of his own MPs though parliament did not meet as it normally does during the trying times when Covid was surging across the country.

The problem is more complex than it appears. There are those who think that by spring next year, prices will stabilise even though there would be a substantial hike now as gas reserves are depleted.

But the British Government and energy regulator Ofgem warn that gas price increases may not be temporary and more energy companies would fold up as some smaller companies have already done and stopped trading.

Some companies have warned that there would be more early deaths as several million households find it virtually impossible to meet their energy bills especially as winter approaches.

What is worse is that come October the Government will cut back on what it called universal credit and stop the £20 a week additional benefit it gave needy families during the worst days of the pandemic. In addition, there are some tax increases.

Overall with food prices rising and supermarkets running out of some food items for lack of carbon dioxide (CO2) used to keep some food items fresh for a longer periods and poultry also in short supply, households are faced with a stark choice. Do they divert some of their resources to keep the home ‘fires’ burning and their homes warm or spend that on food. What is it going to be — heat or eat?

In a scathing article in the Guardian last week, former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown bemoaned that 75 years after the birth of Britain’s welfare state, the UK’s poorest people are being cast aside with benefit cuts at a time the “world is dangling at the edge of an economic precipice”.

If some tropical countries such as those in Asia labour under the delusion that they will not suffer from these price hikes because they do not need so much gas for heating homes they are bound to learn a bitter lesson. If the prices remain high or escalate further they too are bound to be affected.

What producers such as Russia and Qatar, for instance, do — whether to increase or decrease production — will determine the global gas market.

When Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa comes to present his first major budget in November he will need to indicate how the Government intends to deal with the next costly problem. Already the increase in fuel prices recently caused a public furore that took time and effort to subside but not heal.

If the finance minister decides to keep fuel prices steady and make deep cuts or adjustments elsewhere, it would still have consequences. But at least some of more loquacious government politicians will lose their ‘gas’.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor of
the Hong Kong Standard before working
in London for Gemini News Service.
Later he was Deputy Chief-of-Mission
in Bangkokand Deputy
High Commissioner in London).