UK is going to struggle with inflation for a while as we have effectively ruined our national gas reserves. There are 28 million homes in UK of which 22 million are heated with natural gas.

We are now importing gas from Texas, by cryogenically cooling it and shipping it across the Atlantic even tough we have decades of gas supply below our feet.

We did have a brilliant energy industry cluster around Aberdeen, companies from all around the world would invest in North Sea projects largely just to learn how offshore oil and gas production is done from a world class work force.

But that is no longer the case. Drilling is banned in practice via rollercoaster taxes and extreme interpretations of licensing conditions.

The government used price fixing to try and control the inflationary consequences of this but it’s very expensive fiscally and unsustainable for the government to hold that liability for too long so they will taper out of price fixing which is a big cause of the pernicious inflation.

This has bizarre consequences because the only way to tame the inflation is rising interest rates at the risk of the mortgage market souring and asset prices crumbling.

But hey, at least the gas we continue to burn wasn’t produced here. So we can take some satisfaction from that.