IT CAME as no surprise that Britain’s rip-off private energy companies planned to cash in on last week’s winter weather by raising gas and electricity prices as demand soared and supplies came under threat.

Supplier Eon slapped a 2 per cent rise on tens of thousands of customers yesterday by changing discount schemes and pricing structures.

Energy analysts say other companies were already planning price increases of around 9 per cent to offset government plans to introduce a price cap on charges to 11 million worst-off customers.

Then came last week’s snowstorms and freezing temperatures, leaving households with no choice to but to turn up the heat in their homes and the threat of more price increases.

What must not be forgotten is the inevitable long-term effect of the Tories’ abandonment of Britain’s biggest indigenous energy source, coal.

It hit home in recent days as available energy reserves dwindled to dangerous levels and the country’s dependency on overseas suppliers was highlighted yet again.

Government failure to invest in more gas storage facilities also contributed to the problem.

Britain sits on at least 200 years worth of known coal reserves, but they were abandoned when the Thatcher government shut down Britain’s coalmining industry after the year-long miners’ strike against pit closures of 1984-5.

The government attack on the industry had been plotted years before to destroy the industrial strength of the National Union of Mineworkers.

In 1972 and 1974, strikes had won deserved pay increases for the miners, whose wages had fallen far behind comparable workers.

The 1974 strike led to power cuts and the introduction of a three-day industrial working week by a Tory government led by prime minister Ted Heath.

Heath called a general election with the question: “Who runs Britain?”

The electorate replied by kicking him out and returning a Labour government that reached agreement with the miners.

Later, in preparation for the 1984-5 attack on the miners, the Thatcher government ordered the building of dozens of gas-fired power stations to burn North Sea gas instead of coal when coal stocks dwindled during the ’84-5 strike.

The project became known as the “Dash for Gas.”

Burning gas to create electricity uses vast amounts of gas which could otherwise have maintained domestic and industrial supplies for more than a century.

As a result Britain’s North Sea gas supplies were hugely depleted, leaving the country increasingly dependent on imports, as has been highlighted over the last week.

Before the Tories implemented the pit closures programme, Britain was the world leader in developing technology to burn coal cleanly by capturing and storing the carbon, sulphur and other emissions from coal which damage the environment.

There were even plans to build pipelines from coal-fired power stations to the east coast to pump the damaging gases into empty oil and gas fields beneath the North Sea.

The industry’s advanced clean coal technology research department was at Grimethorpe in Yorkshire and was linked to the colliery of the same name.

But the Tories shut both Grimethorpe colliery and the adjacent research centre in 1993, setting the seal on any hope for an energy future in Britain based on the development of clean coal technology.

The last deep coalmine in Britain, Kellingley, closed in December 2015.

Not that the British industry and power stations and industry stopped burning coal. More than 50 million tons a year are still imported from countries which include Colombia, where child labour is exploited in the mining industry, from Russia and from opencast quarries in Australia.

In the 1960s, coal generated more than 90 per cent of Britain’s electricity needs. In 2016 it produced 9 per cent, against 42 per cent from gas, 21 per cent from nuclear and 24.5 per cent from renewable energy sources including wind, wave, marine, hydro, biomass and solar power.

The energy supply crisis which hit Britain’s gas and electricity supply industries last week will be repeated in the future.

The predictable response from profit-hungry energy suppliers is to increase prices.

In the eyes of the energy companies, last week’s weather conditions are simply another opportunity to gouge the customers for more cash.

Under the Tories Britain does not have an energy supply strategy. Only a publicly owned energy industry can achieve that.
Prior to privatisation Britain’s energy industry was under public ownership from source to delivery.

The coal industry was publicly owned. Prior to the discovery of North Sea gas, gas was produced from coal.

The power stations that burned the coal to make electricity were run by the publicly owned Central Electricity Generating Board, which was also responsible for distribution. Publicly owned industries, including steel, a vast consumer of energy, were interdependent.

The system worked. The Tories destroyed it.