People will no doubt have seen the latest issue of supply of CARBON dIOXIDE CO2 which may have puzzled many people. It is a gas with a lot of uses including food preservation. We used to have ‘seasonal’ food but are now used to getting whatever we want whenevr we like and so the use of CO2 is critical to that. It is used in stores to preserve food in bulk, it is put in packaging to do the same (hence a lot of food stays good until the packaging is opened). It is also used to serve up beers although Guiness has switched to Nitrogen.
The current government has no real understanding of manufacture and just wants everything to be made somewhere else which means we are going to end up completely reliant on every other country.
It is something that has been going on for some time though. So I will give you another example. A previous government, again with few MPs who have any manufacturing experience, decided to cur back on these large power stations which provided a stable source of electricity. A victim of this was Eggborough Power Station. At that power station BOC (British Oxygen Company) prodused concentrated Oxygen for the plant to help it run more effectively. A by-product of that is Nitrogen an inert gas used in all sorts of industries that manufacture things. This gas is transported as a liquid at a very low temperature to a large number of manufacturing units. The closure of the power station meant the closure of the BOC works and so now we have BOC transporting Nitrogen to Yorkshire sites from down in Lincolnshire at a much increased cost. If that site closes a lot of other places will close and a lot of jobs will further disappear.
As it is the cost of gases to public houses has doubled in a few short years and this is making it very difficult in a lot of different sectors of the economy—but there is no one in Westminster who knows or cares.