We have entered a death spiral in which oil prices can no longer increase to a point which makes further investment in production viable but nor can prices fall to a level at which a new round of economic growth can begin.

With that sort of political firepower – controlling the allocation of billions of pounds of public funds – on its side, one might anticipate that Ely would be booming. After all, if such powerful political figures cannot even look after the people who elect them, then what good are they?

The stark reality is that there are no more large and cheap oil deposits left to fill the gap between production and consumption.

Where 2021 was all about demand-pull, 2023 and 2024 are likely to be about demand-push, as consumer spending crashes, causing the discretionary side of the economy to collapse.

Sunak and his supporters will no doubt argue that there was no alternative – just as Thatcher and Blair argued that there was no alternative to the self-destructive political economy of neoliberalism. But there are always alternatives.

After decades of experience proving that economists are wrong and that central bankers are the wrongest of all, how seriously should we take the latest IMF claims that the UK economy will avoid a recession?

For the internet providers, the gathering loss of corporate and government broadband contracts is likely to be as big a hit as the loss of millions of household consumers, since historically, these have been prepared to pay higher business rates for their internet connection.

The real risk though, is that we are on the verge of a new stagflationary era – which rising interest rates have accelerated – in which the cost of energy-dependent essentials remains high even as the prices of discretionary goods and services deflate.

This is the great unsung success of modern imperialism in its “stakeholder capitalist” disguise… it has completely neutered its opposition, even to the point of convincing its non-opponents that in some way it is on their side…

For more than a century, economists have speculated about what would happen when world oil production reached a peak.  The consensus view which has won out thus far is that the oil price would just keep increasing.  Indeed, there would not be a single peak of oil production, because each …