Why are BT workers going to food banks?
Because 6 months ago Mr Putin decided to declare war start a Special Military Operation to invade and subjugate liberate Ukraine in a short victorious war that would only last 3 days.
He then released his victory speech early which said that his easy victory in Ukraine showed the collapse of western civilisation, and that the east part of NATO was next and we wouldn't care enough about them to do anything about it which would lead to the end of NATO and the domination of strong countries and leaders like Putin.
Everybody in Europe promptly decided that they'd really rather not conscript all the millennials and send them off the fight in places that most of them couldn't find on a map because it might not be a vote winner with those millennials, and started emptying out storehouses of old military gear to the Ukrainians, who despite lacking training and trying to master equipment with instruction manuals in a hundred languages have used it to wipe the floor with the numerically superior Russian Army.
Putin then fell back on Plan B, and basically said "give me Ukraine via stopping giving them weapons and pictures from your satellites etc and i'll give you cheap food and gas again" and then stopped exporting fertiliser, food or gas to Europe in the hope that it'll cause social unrest and revolutions. The price would of course just be to give him Ukraine for the moment, and once we'd thrown one country under the bus this would of course expand to most of Eastern Europe further down the line bite by bite.
As a lot of political activist groups have been arguing that doing anything but buying gas from Putin is terrible, too many countries have done that and left themselves reliant upon Russian gas. The same people have also been promoting "rewilding" which means reducing food output by turning fields that produce food we can eat into nature parks and buying food from Russia etc.
Hence natural gas prices have risen by 6x as demand radically outstrips supply, while food is also becoming more expensive because we aren't producing enough of it. This means that most people are finding their pay packets squeezed hard as the cost of living rises wiping out their disposable income.
The solutions involve:-
1) Stop adding 10% bio ethanol to fuel, because this means growing things we could eat, and then turning them into booze to pour into petrol. If we eat it instead, we'd have less of a food problem.
2) Reverse energy policies which encourage covering fields that could grow things with solar panels.
3) Stop rewilding and any other form of policy other than promoting farmers growing food to eat.
4) Produce our own gas instead of importing it.
5) Open up mines for coal and start feeding it into the coal plants and the "biomass plants" that are just old coal plants anyway.
6) build nuclear on a large scale to replace coal and gas in the longer term.
My view; the greens will successfully block any attempt to do any of these for the moment, and aggravate the problem until their public support gets eroded away as people see how idiotic their energy policies are, a process which will take effect after huge energy bills start hitting home.
I'd imagine that we'll start talking about some of these probably January or February because the Russian desired alternative of the British public overthrowing our government in favour of somebody who wants to give a dictator Europe chunk by chunk won't happen because nobody wants to conscript a generation to go and die in Europe's fields again.
Unfortunately, it's probably already too late to do anything about this winter and it's going to take several years worth of pain to resolve afterwards.