APOLOGISTS for Britain’s energy cartel explain whenever massive company profits are questioned that they are essential to provide investment and employment.

The falsity of this assertion is exemplified by the twin announcements by the largest of the Big Six profiteers, British Gas and its parent firm Centrica.

While British Gas boasted of half-yearly profits of £528 million for the first half of 2015, Centrica announced a jobs massacre, with 6,000 posts to go, most of them in Britain.British Gas was once owned by us all as a public corporation.

Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s propaganda onslaught relied on two lies to push privatisation in 1986 — that private investment would encourage efficiency and lead to lower prices and that offering shares at a discount would bring about a “share-owning democracy.”

Prices have risen inexorably, forcing greater numbers of families into fuel poverty, while most small shareholders sold their shares for a modest financial windfall, entrenching ownership in City institutions.

The Big Six members, which still control over 90 per cent of the domestic market, push constantly for higher profits, inflating bills when international wholesale prices rise and sitting on them when they fall.

They insult the intelligence of consumers by making a tiny gas price reduction of 5 per cent earlier this year and offering a similar token later this month, knowing that this will scarcely dent their massive profits. 

Successive governments, whether nominally Tory, Con-Dem coalition or Labour, spew out platitudes in response to such rampant profiteering.

They all claim to have confidence in so-called “regulation” to defend the public interest, but regulators have proven as effective as a chocolate teapot.

They talk tough and issue paltry fines, knowing that their role as a fig leaf for exploitative excess must not interfere with the political elite’s joint commitment to the right of capitalists to grow richer still on what they screw out of the working class.

It’s hard to believe that the aptly named Centrica chief executive Iain Conn was able to keep a straight face when saying that the company’s future would be based on “concentrating on being a customer-focused business. “Our principal job is to satisfy the changing needs of our customers,” he claimed, when everyone knows that the priority is driving up profits.

Even less credible was Which? executive director Richard Lloyd’s response to the Competition and Markets Authority statement that bills ought to be lower if the energy market was truly competitive.

“Following the CMA’s blistering assessment of this sector, we expect big suppliers to pass on falling costs to their customers quickly and fairly,” Lloyd declared.

Does he really? If he does, he really should get out more often and study the system we live under. Transformation of a natural monopoly into a private oligopoly is never about improved consumer service, lower prices or a mythical small-shareholder capitalism.

It is about reversing an earlier postwar trend of the working class gaining a larger share of the wealth created by its labour power.

Jeremy Corbyn has been alone among the Labour leadership candidates in pointing out that each home has just one gas pipe and electricity supply cable, making nonsense of any idea of competition between cartel members.

It’s time to set aside political pipedreams of helping energy markets work more efficiently or making regulation tougher.

As Corbyn says, in accord with most of the electorate, the only real solution is to return natural monopolies to common ownership.