Keir Starmer and his lacklustre team of ministers are super keen for us to realise that, thanks to their brilliant energy policies (as they'd have it), the annual household fuel bill has fallen by £117 this month to an average of £1,641.
In fact, it's down only because the Government has switched some of the costs of its net-zero zealotry from our fuel bills to general taxation.
We're still paying for it, just in other ways. And it's only worth £10 a month, which is hardly a king's ransom. But enjoy it while you can - which is not for long.
For what ministers skip over (surprise, surprise) is that come July 1, fuel bills will rise again, by around £300, taking average annual household energy bills to almost £2,000. Unless there's a speedy end to Trump's War against Iran, there’ll be even steeper rises in the autumn and beyond.
Before then, the average British householder and taxpayer will be hit by a tsunami of rising charges, many of them landing with a thump this month, which is already being dubbed 'Awful April'. So ignore the ministerial soft soap. Living standards are about to take a battering.
For a start, council tax is to jump by an average of five per cent, raising the property tax on an average band D home by £111 to £2,394 a year. That alone almost wipes out the temporary cut in energy bills.
Come renewal, your TV licence will cost £180, up £5.50, even if you hardly watch the BBC (or don't watch it at all!). Your water bill will increase by an average of £33 to £639 a year, road tax by £5 to £200 a year and passenger air duty for domestic and international flights is increasing too.
You’re already paying over 20p a litre more for petrol (up from 133p a month ago to 154.45p on average now) thanks to Trump’s War - and much more for diesel (currently 185.23p a litre). Brace yourself for bigger rises: oil and gas shortages will worsen as April progresses.
Starmer and Reeves regularly claim to have the back of working people. In practice, it’s welfare recipients they spend most money protecting.
Drivers already paying over 20p a litre more for petrol at the pump (up from 133p a month ago to 154.45p on average now) thanks to Trump’s War.
Households on a mortgage will also be shelling out more. The average rate on a two-year mortgage has risen a full percentage point to 5.84 per cent. There’s every chance it will be higher than that when you renew your mortgage.
That’s because, if energy prices spark a general rise in inflation, the Bank of England is likely to dampen it by raising interest rates, which increases borrowing costs across the board.
And remember: Britain already has the highest inflation and borrowing costs of any major market economy thanks to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s profligacy when it comes to borrowing and spending. Expect more pain to be piled on top of that.
Not, however, if you’re on welfare benefits. These are generally linked to inflation, which means even when prices rise your income rises in line with it. So those in work might struggle to keep pace. But those on benefits will generally do just fine.
Starmer and Reeves regularly claim to have the back of working people. In practice, it’s welfare recipients they spend most money protecting. While working people struggle to make ends meet, those on low incomes with more than two children are about to enjoy a major boost.
Yes, the two-child cap on benefits is being lifted today, so that poorer families will be given an extra £300 per month for each child over the first two. Families that have more children than they can afford will now be bailed out by families that responsibly limited their children to the number they could afford. Regard it as socialist ‘justice’ in action.
The cost will be over £3.5 billion per year. The rest of us are paying for it. On top of all the extra charges families will have to meet, many will face being dragged into higher rates of tax.
The government continues to freeze the various income tax thresholds. So those on low incomes currently not paying tax will soon find themselves on the basic 20 per cent tax bracket. And those on middling incomes will be forced into the 40 per cent bracket, originally designed for only the highest earners.
The working people that Starmer-Reeves profess to care so much about -- at low and middle incomes -- are finding that inflation is pulling them into higher tax brackets never designed for them.
Rising inflation - which is what is in store with Trump's War - makes all this worse. Let's take a minute to spell out exactly what it means. Those on benefits are largely protected, for their welfare is usually index-linked to inflation. But the working people that Starmer-Reeves profess to care so much about - at low and middle incomes - are finding that inflation is pulling them into higher tax brackets never designed for them.
So: the welfare class benefits; the working class (let's call it by its proper, proud name) does not. It is penalised. Families on benefits will gain even when inflation rises. Working families will lose especially when inflation rises.
Regard it, again, as Starmer-Reeves socialism in action. For the sake of truth in politics, the Labour Party really needs to rebrand itself as the Welfare Party - or risk prosecution under the Trades Descriptions Act.
It gets worse. Britain's labour market is a slow-motion car crash. The 5.2 per cent unemployment rate is at a five-year high. Almost two million are unemployed, up about 325,000 in a year under Labour's supposedly tender care for 'working people'. But that's not the half of it - because the unemployment rate these days gives you nothing like the full picture.
Including the unemployed, there are now almost 11 million working-age people not in work, many of them on various types of sickness benefits. That includes almost one million 16-to-24-year-olds not in work, education, training or employment (the 'Neets') - and we know that if you're not working when you're young you'll probably not work for the rest of your life.
It's a social time bomb in the making, and the cost of 11 million people not working but living on welfare is clearly unsustainable in terms of the burden on working people of all classes. Yet, incredibly, Labour is in the process of making it even easier to be paid for doing nothing.
We learned during the pandemic that those who claimed sickness benefit remotely via Zoom and other devices were more likely to get it than those who had to turn up for face-to-face interviews. Those who pleaded stress, anxiety, depression and other mental issues were often granted benefits automatically.
Now the government will allow you to claim sickness benefit online. A controlled test allowing online claims resulted in a one-third increase in those seeking benefits. So naturally, the government has decided to roll it out across the nation.
Bad as it will be, Awful April is just the start. The fallout out from the folly of Trump's War has barely begun. The assault on our living standards from rising charges is just underway. We risk a prolonged period of stagflation - no growth but rising prices. We're run by a bunch of know-nothing numpties whose default position is to penalise the strivers and coddle the feckless and the indolent.
Our only consolation is that this will all become blindingly apparent before the nation goes to the polls in various ways come May 7 - when the Labour powers that be will be struck down with a force more decisive, more brutal than they currently contemplate.
'We have no idea the thumping we're in for,' a Labour cabinet source told me this week. She's right. For the country, it can't come soon enough.