THE bad news is that the typical yearly household energy bill in Britain will rise by about £150 from this autumn.
Just as the nights begin to draw in and domestic energy use for heating increases, so will the price we are compelled to pay for it.
Ten million pensioners in England and Wales will face these bills without the winter fuel allowance that Chancellor Rachel Reeves ripped off as soon as she sat down in the Treasury and in doing so gifted the Tories a stick with which to weaken Labour’s claim to better represent pensioners.
(It is a well-kept secret but over 800,000 pensioners are eligible for pension credit worth on average £3,900 a year but don’t claim it!)
Although Britain itself is a substantial energy producer, the rise in the price cap announced today is attributed to raised prices on the international energy market.
The way the politicians and the monopoly media talk about prices you might think they are fixed by supernatural forces beyond human reckoning or the result of random and unpredictable factors.
But the simple fact is, like all markets under capitalism, they are fixed in the interests of the rich and powerful.
The first fix is built into the system. These people own and/or control — as the Labour Party clause four used to say — the means of production, distribution and exchange.
Extreme weather caused by climate change is, of course, the entirely predictable consequence of energy policies pursued for generations but its day-to-day manifestations are unpredictable. The energy regulator Ofgen says, truthfully but without explanation, that “increasing geopolitical tensions” are driving demand and competition for gas in these international markets and that this determines the price of electricity.
The first weasel word in this presentation of the situation is “competition.”
One thing energy suppliers barely do is compete on the price they sell energy.
The second is “determines” because the geopolitical tensions are themselves the product of decisions by powerful actors in global politics. It is they who do the “determining.”
A United States regime wedded to the oil and fracked gas monopolies finds a willing partner in successive British governments that are no less in thrall to the big players in the energy business
It is precisely the sanctions imposed on Russia that have reduced the supply of relatively cheap Russian energy — helped by the sabotage of the pipeline supplying much of that gas.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, who should know better, put a superficial gloss on the situation by arguing: “The rise in the price cap is a direct result of the failed energy policy we inherited, which has left our country at the mercy of international gas markets controlled by dictators.”
The first part of that statement is spot on in as far as Labour has made a few steps to reverse the Tory barriers to a more sustainable energy policy — although not as many as Miliband would like. And Russian President Vladimir Putin is an unsavoury character but actually he wanted to keep on selling his cheap gas to the Germans and us.
Western oil and energy monopolies have long been in partnership with dictatorial regimes in the Middle East who lack even Putin’s pretensions to democratic accountability.
Labour could tighten up the regulatory regime to control consumer prices, could tax energy profits more, could use the sovereign powers that leaving the EU confers by asserting domestic controls over wholesale energy prices.
But the quickest and best way to put the energy industry at the service of the people is to take it into public ownership, use the profits to retrofit our housing stock to save energy, invest in renewables and keep consumption and prices down.
