Interest rates v inflation

I agree but the Politicians will never want to be seen to be reversing part of the referendum vote although that part might be easier to sell now that people have seen the damage and additional costs brought by Brexit. What would it cost us though?

I think we need a change of attitude in the UK. There seems to be a stalling of support for the BritVolt battery factory and I don't see anyone rushing to open a new chip making facility in the UK. Why not: these are the essentials to becoming self sufficient and being able to export. We probably also need more restrictions to prevent UK owned companies being purchased by foreigners in the same way that many other countries operate - we have been far too flexible and amenable to foreign takeovers with flimsy guarantees.

We need to gain financial and military strength. Without the UK's military capabilities (diminishing with every budget cut) people like Putin might decide to try to take a much bigger chunk of Europe and the US may not be so willing to intervene if we are not able/prepared to help ourselves and we are 3,000 miles away.

As Michael says we need to step up now or we will be in serious and potentially terminal decline.

I live in the area of the proposed British Volt factory and it will be a tremendous boost to Blyth Valley if it happens but it's a £4 Billion project and the Government is only supplying £100 million in seed capital. If the project is commercially viable and has really secured long term funding and customers then the Government should give them the money. At the moment I think they have only received letters of intent from prospective customers and no firm orders so there's a danger that the Government will throw good money after bad and I can understand them insisting certain criteria must be met.

As if we’d open a mine!

Agree with the theory but we won’t do it. Same reason it’s too stressful to open the cosl mine in Cumbria to support steel making or start fraking and getting the revenue from our own gas.

Apropos the climate change point, I studied this for my degree course (1995-9) and frankly we knew a quarter of a century ago what we know now, broadly speaking. It revolves around sustainable behaviour.

I just remember my tutor saying that it would never become a topic of serious debate until the money caught up.

And now the money has caught up. The point being that, whether voters or politicians like it, access to capital is starting to drive behaviour. And thus the business imperative is starting to align with positive action to mitigate the impact of climate change (which includes trying to reduce anything we do as a species that aggravated climate change).

People used to talk about a “greenium” (green premium) for doing capital raising in an ESG-compliant manner. Perhaps in some quarters, a degree of this exists but it is niche. Now, it’s much more a case of if your company historically was able to find itself at x% over treasuries, then if you want to continue to be able to fund at or close to that level, you need to put in place a sustainability (or similar) framework and show how you will adhere to that in terms of use of proceeds and KPIs, or else you risk your borrowing costs going up or potentially being shut out of the capital markets completely.

And sustainability in this context is not about saving the polar bear etc, it’s about is your company being sustainable in the face of climate change (howsoever caused). We spend hours talking to boards about the need to future-proof as part of their responsibility to shareholders.

This is driven in large part by the big pension funds and the like, who have to invest on a 30+ yr outlook - they are focussed on sustainability and climate resilience because they need to invest our pension funds on companies that will still be around and valuable when we retire.

That’s probably a hopelessly high-level summary but hope it helps. I could (and do) talk about this all day.

I find this a very positive development. Never mind the activists who glue themselves to the motorway gantries. The real activists with the real power to change are now where you perhaps least expect it, in the City and other centres of monetary power, and they are quietly but inexorably getting on with it. It can feel Sisyphean but there has been a sea change (if you’ll excuse the pun) in levels of engagement in finance and business in just the last 3-4 years. It is the global mega-trend in finance.

Who could have imagined a world where the city and financiers were those with influence?!

I’d argue financiers primary responsibility is to make money as otherwise they’re failing their shareholders, investors and backers.
Pursuit of money via the green agenda does not equal sustainability or good decision making.
An example would be Drax power station, now running on biofuel and considered green energy under the insanity of green thinking. This green fuel, harvested from virgin forests in North America, dried, shipped thousands of miles across the Atlantic and then burnt at Drax has a higher carbon footprint than coal, is vastly more destructive to ecosystems, is worse for the balance of payments and is ultimately worse for the taxpayer and planet. It’s good business though.
The case for the green agenda is these clown decisions are made because people dare not challenge them - you’d get called a denier, cancelled or accused of killing the planet. Like the NHS , this idiotic agenda is wrapped in a fuzzy blanket of woke that protects it of scrutiny.
The most immoral aspect of the green agenda is that it’s usually government money so those financiers, who tend to be at the more affluent end of the spectrum, get rich at the expense of tax payers who are generally aren’t.

I think you are perhaps at risk of being blinded by your own prejudice whether or not you are prepared to admit it. Nobody thinks Drax’s business model is a shining example except perhaps Drax. And the issue here is sustainability, not impact investing. It’s worth looking up the difference.

Plus the extremists are just that and to be treated accordingly. You wouldn’t accept assertions that the extreme right of the Tory party is representative of the whole party. Why not extend that same perspective to what you term “the green agenda”.

Remember, I’m hardly some Greta-worshipping leftist hobgoblin. Just someone who understands the science behind climate change and is prepared to accept that some change is required without wholesale swallowing everything that is put forward. After all, I’m no fan of electric cars.

We’re paying a hefty price in carbon taxation, affordable transportation and soaring energy bills thanks in part to the enormous taxpayer subsidies for ventures like Drax (billions) and other biomass generators.
The move to unreliable energy has resulted in higher dependency on gas which has resulted in household energy bills spiking for many. I’d be curious to hear an example you consider sustainable.

Ref Drax, if only we hadn't had some hideous leftist Government pursuing some "idiotic agenda that is wrapped in a fuzzy blanket of woke that protects it of scrutiny." for the last 12 years


I'd imagine the majority of people would be happy to challenge this kind of stupid decision of they were given even a little bit of background info.
I suspect that the most likely reason that doesn't happen is less down to woke than the fact that it's very good business for some people/organisations that have a lot of influence.
If you had the contract for Drax I'm sure a few £000s spent wining, dining and donating to Government ministers would be money well spent.


There's another of these stupid wood pellet burning facilities in Glenrothes.
Supplied by an endless train of artics, its built on the site of a former papermill.
The majority of the remainder of that site is now being turned into a massive housing estate that's downwind of said pellet burner. I expect there'll be some health related claims from residents in the future.

You are looking at this in the wrong way. Sustainability is absolutely not simply about energy generation. Sustainability is something that every single business has to deal with, irrespective of their business line.

Are you talking now about environmental sustainability or economic sustainability? You suggested the financial sector had taken a new interest in Green issues so the assumption was the environmental use of the term. Economic sustainability is nothing new.

Companies having to sign up to environmental plans and setting grandiose targets reminds me of the BS5750 religion that was all the rage in the 1990's. The great public believed that BS5750 was a sign of quality products and services. No, it was a sign that the company could do processes and keep paperwork records. Whether your products actually worked or your services were top quality was not even on the radar. The old joke was that even Gerald Ratner could get BS5750 with the right paperwork. BS5750 became a "must have".

Now everybody is getting the environmental religion certification or plan and these are the new "must have". Don't get me wrong, I think that damaging the environment is a bad thing, but when I go to Sainsbury and see big advertising about them going to be net zero by 2035 I just think "how?". But if they had a placard that said "look this is complicated, we're not even sure what net zero really is, but we'll aim to minimise our damaging effect on the environment by 2035" they'd get pilloried in the press and by the green community.

The point is that economic sustainability of a business is becoming inextricably linked with environmental sustainability. And as Jeff says, this isn’t about rampant loony greenism. It’s actually about maintaining a planet that we find a pleasant place to inhabit. Not sure that many people ought to have an objection to that, if they sat down and properly thought it through.