Foreign
KEITH Baker, a United Kingdom (UK) economic expert has warned that the country could face its worst peacetime crisis since the General Strike of 1926.
Baker, a research fellow in fuel poverty and energy policy at Glasgow Caledonian University said millions of people in Britain are facing the prospect of escalating bills.
“For many British families, food prices were already rocketing.
“Extra dollars to weekly food bills and planned rises in the cost of electricity and gas due in the fall would add to the misery.
“Many people are going to be struggling to keep roofs over their heads, or to pay their mortgages and rents.
“ I honestly don’t know what households can do about it that wouldn’t be either illegal or futile,” he said.
Since the winter of 2021, Britain’s inflation has kept rising and successively hit new highs.
The latest data from British Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rose by 10.1 per cent in the 12 months to July 2022.
This was far above the two per cent target set by the Bank of England (BoE).
The 40-year-high inflation has eaten into the value of people’s wages at a record pace.
Baker said more than half of the British population is likely to be drastically hit by the cost of living crisis.
“We are now into really quite scary, unknown territory. We don’t know how much mortgage rates will go up; we don’t know how much food prices will go up.
“ We are seeing a trend that is certainly heading in that direction, and there’s no sign of it changing. In fact, there’s every sign it’s going to get worse,” the scholar said.
Earlier this month, the BoE, Britain’s central bank, expected the consumer price index (CPI) to keep growing in the near future.
The BoE said higher energy prices are expected to push inflation to 13 per cent in the fourth quarter of the year and inflation is likely to remain at very elevated levels throughout much of 2023.
In early August, the energy regulator Ofgem in the UK confirmed the energy price cap would be updated quarterly rather than every six months, warning that “customers face a very challenging winter ahead”.
A typical household is now predicted to pay the equivalent of 4,266 pounds (5,034 U.S. dollars) a year for energy in the first three months of 2023.
This is according to new forecasts for the energy price cap from the market research firm, Cornwall Insight.
“We are looking at households spending 30 per cent or 40 per cent plus of their incomes on fuel bills.
“And that’s just energy bills,” said Baker, warning that up to 12 million people in the UK have gone into fuel poverty, and the situation will get worse in the future’’.
He said a substantial section of people who consider themselves as the middle class would find their cost of living was really ratcheting up. (Xinhua/NAN)
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