Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolhurst.

This week, with a conflict in the Middle East showing no signs of abating, we'll look at what impact

it might have on the UK. With everything from energy bills to government debt and mortgage rates

potentially affected by the spike in all prices, stock market

downturns and global uncertainty. Women to discuss what support ministers might give to mitigate

rises in petrol prices and gas electricity bills and the politics of government intervention.

I'm delighted to be joined by Labour MP Bill Esterson, chair of the Energy Security and Net Zero

committee. Alongside him is Paul

Johnson, Provost of Queen's College Oxford, and a senior advisor at Frontier Economics,

along with Neva Regan, senior researcher at the Think Tank, the Social Market Foundation,

and Dr Simon Cran McGeehan, head of analysis at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.

So, Neve, going to start with you. We're recording this on Thursday morning. Just talk

us through where we are in terms of the impact on kind of global energy prices of the conflict

in the Middle East and kind of how it relates to the UK currently. So I suppose we've got a

situation where oil prices are very volatile at the moment. They're spiking, it's kind of coming up, going down.

Yesterday, the IAA elected to release a lot of oil into the market to try and help the situation.

Mitigate somewhat, but we still have that great fluctuation in place.

And then in terms of, I suppose, the UK then, the UK doesn't import a huge amount of oil itself from the Middle East, but it is a global market.

And so we are affected by those global trends and changes.

And what we're seeing, at the moment, we're seeing heating oil prices, I think, seem to be going

up and petrol prices at the pump is where consumers are feeling it. Longer-term effects, I suppose, we'll have to wait and see how long the war goes on, because it could do things like infect inflation, impacts on food prices with other trade, not passing through the straight form. Short term. We've got like some some increases.

Long term, I think we'll really have to wait and see how long it goes on for and how long,

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