Brace brace brace
The dirt is flying. The fan is on.
Dear lovely people,
Let’s start today with a little celebration.
The name Abrar Ahmed might not mean much to you.
If it does, it might make you shudder with the memory of him ripping through the England batting line up, taking nine wickets in his debut match in Punjab in December 2022.
His legbreak googlies are, when he’s on form, utterly formidable.
That’s not the good news. If you’re interested in that, you probably already know. If you’re not, and find yourself a little alienated and confused by the term ‘legbreak googly’, you probably don’t really care.
Here’s what matters: yesterday, he was signed by the Hundred side SunRisers Leeds. Yes, that is the same SunRisers as the SunRisers Hydrabad. The Indian owned SunRisers. Yes, Ahmed is from Pakistan.
There was much talk of Indian teams not picking anyone from Pakistan. I wrote about it in this very email. It was a sign of the times. A divided, broken world politics, played out in English cricket.
Reports of the death of English decency were greatly exaggerated. An Indian Premier League team paid £190,000 for a player from Pakistan. I can’t tell you how good that feels.
A small moment of hope. Tiny, perhaps. A moment of hope nonetheless.
Peace and love,
Tatton x
He’s there everyday on the corner,
the Bad News Vendor. The latest editions
hot off the press, te blood not yet dry.
The headlines scream again of murder.
A six year old girl. Part of a city. A small
civilisation. In vain he cries out:
‘Don’t read all about it! Don’t read all about it!’
Roger McGough
Gosh. We may be in trouble here.
Right now, oil is at $101.06 a barrel. The counter on my screen is a gleeful green, showing it’s gone up by 0.59% today.
In February 2022, when Putin invaded Ukraine, the price jumped from $91.77 on 21st to $114.34 on 28th. It would stay above $100 until July that year.
That triggered an inflation surge topping out at 11%.
Oil prices impact everything. We know this. It costs more to heat our homes and drive our cars. It costs companies more to make things, it costs them more to transport things. That extra cost is passed on to you, the customer. You have less money in your pocket because of bills, the things you want to buy cost more.
We have never fully recovered from that Cost of Living Crisis. Our wages simply don’t go as far as they did before that.
This time round, it’s different; we saw it coming. The world knew that Donald Trump was planning action in Iran. We saw a bump in the price of oil on 26th February. We saw another the next day.
A very quick Geography lesson for those who need it…
There are lots of oil producing countries around the Persian Gulf. Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq and the UAE’s only coastline is in the Persian Gulf.
To get out of those waters, a boat needs to go through a thin bit of sea between Oman and Iran - the Strait of Hormuz.
Roughly 20% of the world’s oil goes through the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran is at war with America and Israel. They are outnumbered and outgunned. According to Donald Trump, they have no airforce left at all. They can not hope to win any kind of anything in open warfare. They have to use what I keep hearing referred to as ‘unconventional means’.
One of these is to ensure that nothing can pass through the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off that 20% of oil from the world. We know that if supply decreases and demand stays constant, the price goes up.
As I say, the world saw this coming. At the start there was some question as to what Iran might do, so the price rose slowly. By 4th March - Day Five of the war - the price had gone up from the stead $70ish it had been at to $80ish. Slow and steady.
It wasn’t until 9th March - just four days ago now - that it spiked at $115. It was clear by this point that Iran is absolutely targeting global oil prices.
World leaders reacted pretty quick to that, releasing 400 million barrels of oil to make up the shortfall. That is, apparently, 3 weeks or so of the 20% that’s missing from world supply.
You know what? Oil markets liked that. The price came tumbling down. Just three days ago, oil was back down to $84.
It wouldn’t last long. Iran made it clear that it would be hitting the Strait as hard as it could. They said that they would push the price of oil up to $200 a barrel.
Now, $200 a barrel is fighting talk. It is extremely unlikely. It doesn’t have to go to anything like $200 to be extremely problematic, though. The peak of the 2022 crisis was $119.
This morning, we got the official GDP growth figure for January. I say growth figure, it was zero percent. We didn’t grow at all. Nadda. Zip. That’s where our economy was before any of this. Unemployment up and growing.
Our economy might, maybe, possibly have been improving. Rachel Reeves certainly tries to paint that picture. It is absolutely not in a place where we can soak up a jump in inflation.
What, then, can we do? First off, companies are being warned of consequences of bumping up prices right now and pretend it’s about Iran. There is a meeting in Downing Street and everything.
Ultimately, there aren’t many buttons for Reeves to push. We are fortunate that this is happening as the sun begins to shine, fewer dark hours, fewer nights with the heating on.
The USA are weakening sanctions on Russian oil. If Russia sells oil cheaper, it will be hard for the committed ‘Coalition of the Willing’ to prevent other, poorer, countries from breaking their own sanctions. Russia will get richer. I’m no foreign affairs expert, but that can’t be good for Ukraine, or European stability.
I think we just have to hope.
Hope that Reeves has used the warnings we’ve had for the past two weeks to have some plans up her sleeves.
Hope that the prices don’t go up as much as is feared - and they have gone up to $100, but been steadily there for a couple of days.
Hope that we can deal with any shock better than we could in our post pandemic 2022 world.
And, hey, when I started this bit, oil was $101.6. As I finish, it’s at $100.42. Perhaps all we need is for me to keep writing and it’ll be down to $70 again before you know it.
Monday - MPs will sort out the funding and other bits and pieces for the Grenfell Tower Memorial.
Tuesday - Expect some controversy… MPs will be voting on Ministerial Salaries.
Wednesday - PMQs then a day for the Conservatives to choose the topic. Expect to hear about the fuel duty rise coming in September.
Thursday - Backbench Business debates on climate change and ‘tackling online harms’.
I spoke to a government minister this week and was chatting to the press guy about it after. He was on the tube back from deepest darkest East London with the minister.
I feel like a few years ago, there would have been a ministerial car. These days it’s the tube. That’s better, right?
Be well x