ENERGY Secretary Grant Shapps trumpets a drop in energy prices as a victory for the government and a relief for households.
It is neither.
Shapps distracts with the best of them, warbling that prices have fallen “even further” than they were limited by the government’s energy price guarantee — itself misleadingly marketed as a maximum bill of around £2,500 per household, when in fact it applied to unit prices, so those with higher than average energy needs, such as disabled people, could end up paying far more.
He trills that they are “two thirds down from their peak,” studiously avoiding the fact that typical bills falling to £2,046 a year from July still means they have doubled in 18 months, while average wages have risen a mere 4 per cent.
Like boasts about “slowing inflation,” which does not mean prices aren’t rising but that they aren’t rising quite as fast as they were, energy price fluctuations are presented as evidence Britain is weathering a bad patch and the worst is over.
It’s not. As Unite’s Sharon Graham pointed out this week, “in the real world there’s no end in sight to the cost-of-living crisis.”
Food price inflation is still running at almost 20 per cent; and nobody is betting on the fall in energy prices continuing or even being sustained.
Ministers trying to take credit only draw attention to their abdication of responsibility over inflation, treating it as an act of God when the levers to control it clearly exist.
Energy prices are already regulated by Ofgem. But the regulator is a plaything of the energy giants, with bumper profits reported by suppliers like British Gas as well as extractors like BP and Shell, an unearned bonanza that adds insult to the injury of real hardship rising prices impose on millions of us.
Claims that prices must reflect fluctuations on international markets ignore the reality that natural resources like oil and gas do not “naturally” belong to the crooks currently monopolising them.
Research by Unite shows that had the £45 billion in energy sector profits in 2022 been used to reduce bills — as it could have been if we owned and controlled the sector — it would have saved the average household £1,800 over the course of the year.
And as activists who stormed the stage at Shell’s AGM earlier this week pointed out, leaving the energy sector in private hands has longer-term consequences too. Shell’s business plan — like the other fossil fuel giants — rests entirely on the search for new oil and gas reserves to exploit.
It is absurd to imagine companies whose revenue streams rely on our continued dependence on fossil fuels will do anything to hasten a transition to cleaner energy, yet the fiction is one our entire political class connives at.
Nor are the political choices being made at Westminster designed to do anything but keep prices rising.
Though war in Europe has driven fuel prices up, Britain continues to oppose ceasefire proposals (with Jeremy Corbyn, the lone advocate of a ceasefire as a starting point for peace talks, howled down from both sides of the Commons for this heresy last week).
As for food prices, much is down to criminal profiteering by suppliers and supermarkets, but its origins too lie in the disrupted crop yields caused by climate chaos.
Other countries are trying to reduce emissions — Germany through fixed-price unlimited rail travel, France through a ban on short-haul flights. Britain continues to do nothing.
The solution, to tackle both long-term transition and immediate pain, is public ownership of the energy sector.
Labour claims it is unaffordable: Unite has calculated it would cost no more than two years’ worth of British energy sector profits. Every politician trying to justify our continued robbery by the energy barons should be confronted with that fact.
