Vern retweeted
It is absolutely scandalous that the Budget leaks.
🚨 NEW: John Healey is set to announce the following in his Budget later
- The gas standing charge will be scrapped to save £27 a year on a typical bill
- Green levies on energy bills will be scraped "for good"
- NHS prescription charges will be frozen at £9.90 for another year
- Poorer households on benefits will receive extra help with energy bills before January's sharp rises
- The VAT cut on electricity bills, which was due to expire in April, will be extended (though it's not clear if this will be announced in the Budget or separately)
- The Government will remove the link between gas and electricity prices, which currently inflates household bills, "in the long term"
- Banks will face higher taxes, with the surcharge on their profits potentially rising from 3% to 8%, making it the Budget’s biggest revenue raiser
- HMRC will be given powers to seize money from the bank accounts of people who fail to pay their tax
- The freeze on rail fares will reportedly not be extended beyond April
- Online retailers like Amazon, eBay and Temu will be made responsible for collecting unpaid VAT from sellers to fund a cut in business rates for high street shops
- The thresholds for income tax will be frozen again so another half a million people may be dragged into the higher rate
- January's planned increase in fuel duty will be cancelled
- Pensioners relying solely on the state pension will see their tax-free allowance rise to £13,036, in line with the pension increase, so they don't pay income tax
- Billions in long-term borrowing to invest in defence firms and raise the share of GDP spent on defence (without breaking fiscal rules, as the investments are expected to generate returns)
- The upcoming "Your First Home" scheme will be made more generous to provide greater support for middle-income earners
- The Budget will also assume the Rosebank oil field is approved, which will generate "significant tax revenues"
Asian refiners view US crude premium as cost of stable supply, logistics security
#oott spglobal.com/energy/en/news-…
Oil traders are bracing for renewed U.S.-Iran hostilities after the Nov. 3 midterms, ING says. If the elections pass without new strikes, the market's risk premium could start to erode and prices would likely drop. #Oil #Iran #Crude #Midterms
oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-N…
Vern retweeted
I'll be LIVE at 7pm on GB News to expose just how disastrous a Burnham betrayal on free movement would be for Britain.
I'll be revealing numbers and figures you've never seen before. You won't want to miss this.
Italy’s Eni Expects More Gas Drilling Offshore Europe as Supply Concerns Mount
Chief Operating Officer Guido Brusco says the eastern Mediterranean is a very premium geography as energy companies seek to diversify supplies wsj.com/business/energy-oil/…
I wonder what the reason is behind this decision.
Why would France want to do this?
Questions I just cannot get my head around.
WTF is wrong with that company.
Bank of England orders review of Revolut product approvals - FT finextra.com/newsarticle/486… via @Finextra
India's oil buyers are getting squeezed: the Indian crude basket hit $123.29 a barrel last week, near March 2012 levels, and a weak rupee is swelling the dollar bill, pushing state refiners' fuel margins into the red. #Oil #India #Crude #Rupee
oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-N…
The feeble EU.
The EU is fighting Elon Musk's Starlink on at least five fronts.
From blocking access and boosting rivals to drafting new rules aimed at undermining the tech mogul's growing dominance in the space business.
vist.ly/5q5fk
I've heard Deloitte pay shit money.
CEO of scandal-ridden Deloitte gets 45% pay rise to £7.1m, 1,360 jobs cut.
CEO pay = 93 times median worker pay.
Firm doesn't pay employer NIC on profits shared by partners, worth £150,000 for £1m profit shared. £899m shared.
108 govt contracts in 2026.
cityam.com/deloitte-hikes-pa…
RT @TankerTrackers: Since a good number of folks still haven't discovered a World Wide Web beyond this platform, here are some good resourc…
In 2025 Britain lost two of its oil refineries in a matter of months.
Grangemouth, Scotland's only refinery, stopped refining, with 450 jobs gone. In Lincolnshire the Lindsey refinery, which made around a tenth of the fuel produced in this country, went bust and stopped production in August, taking about 625 jobs with it. A buyer was found for the site. It decided refining there was not viable.
So we import. In the 12 months to August this year Britain bought £13.1 billion of refined oil from abroad. And on Wednesday, so the story goes, John Healey means to tax it.
The plan is a "carbon charge" on imported petrol, diesel and other refined products, an extension of the carbon border tax that begins in January. The Energy Secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, is said to be keen. The reasoning offered is that British refineries carry millions of pounds in net-zero costs that their foreign competitors do not, so imported fuel undercuts them, and the fair thing is to charge the imports the same.
In other words, the government accepts that the costs it imposes on British refineries make them - and, by extension, us - uncompetitive. It accepts that they are losing to foreign fuel because of those costs. And its answer is to leave every one of those costs exactly where it is, and tie the same weight to every tanker coming into the Humber.
No British refinery becomes one penny more competitive by this. As part of Labour's longest-standing design, first put into immortal practice by that laconic colossus Clement Attlee, dooming one British arm of state capacity after another to scrofula and irrelevance, that is precisely the point.
These people don't want Grangemouth to reopen, nor for Lindsey to restart. They're certainly not bothered about the money in your pocket, either, given the only thing this new step will channge is the price at the pump, for a country that already pays tax on more than half of every litre, and for a motorist who was promised a fuel duty freeze until the end of December and has no idea what comes after it. The TaxPayers' Alliance called it "a shameless tax raid disguised as environmental policy", which is about as generous as it deserves.
This is the Metropolitan class's idea of industrial policy. When a British industry is crippled by the costs the state loads onto it, the state's remedy is to load the same costs onto everyone else, and call the result a level playing field. It is levelling, certainly. Everybody ends up lower. Call it The Labour Way.
If you understood that energy is the economy, not merely part of it or the engine under it, you might design a programme like ours that takes the weight off instead. Progress would abolish the Carbon Price Support on day one and strips every environmental and social levy off energy bills within 21 days, with a statutory guarantee bringing industrial electricity from 18 to 20 pence a kilowatt-hour down below 8, so that a refinery, a steelworks or a chemicals plant can compete on price.
Then we resume licensing in the North Sea, so that the oil under our own sea is ours to use.
And we cut fuel duty permanently to 45 pence a litre, cancel the planned rises, and require a vote in both Houses of Parliament before any Chancellor can raise it again.
Healey's refinery workers have already been paid off. His tax will be passed onto the working man, like it always is; the loser in this scheme is the van driver in Grimsby, filling up with imported diesel because the refinery up the road is shut.
Rystad says LNG importers will pay at least $39B more in 2026 despite buying 60.7M tonnes less, as Qatari and UAE cargoes stuck behind Hormuz push buyers into pricier spot supply. Total LNG bill: $256B, up 18%. #LNG #NaturalGas #Hormuz
oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-…
