scotview wrote:AF62 wrote: with many suffering from insufficient heating,
I don't wish to come across as uncaring but there is another side to this equation. Rachel Reeves was on the telly demanding a windfall tax. Oil & Gas companies are fundamental to the provision of energy supply.
They are not charities, they are businesses like M&S, Glaxo, HBOS etc.
Oil & Gas isn't magicked up, there is huge risk in exploration, appraisal, ,development, production then decommissioning. The Oil Companies take all the business and safety risk. Their tax bill is also not insignificant.
If oil and gas prices go up then that is a market thing, supply & demand as it has always been. Alleviation of energy costs in not the oil companies' responsibility, it is the Government's. The only other path is the rocky road of nationalisation. Scary.
Sorry if this comes across as uncaring, it isn't meant to be.
The ‘windfall tax’ is just pandering to their core voters, and of course makes no sense - but political soundbites rarely do - £350 million a week for the NHS…
The windfall tax would obviously only fall on North Sea production as trying to tax anything else quite simply wouldn’t work, but of course they haven’t calculated their windfall tax numbers based on that production because they don’t actually know the level of profit on that production.
And frankly if I was an oil company that would be taxed to death on oil and gas sold into the market at the same price as non-taxed overseas produced oil and gas being sold into the UK - well I would just leave it in the ground until there was a more favourable political environment, and that isn’t going to help the UK to reduce energy costs.