Kick out the profiteers
Many people will be relieved that chancellor Rachel Reeves promised in the Budget a reduction of £150 on average from our energy bills. But to pay for it, she is scrapping an energy efficiency levy which funds things including home insulation – which would bring down our bills!
Due to the sky-high cost of bills, in the sixth-richest country people are forced to ration heat. Families living hand to mouth are pushed further into destitution due to our current crisis, compounded by political betrayal: the Labour leadership chose to uphold the Tory two-child benefit cap for their first year in power. Not only did Labour maintain and defend the policy, they punished MPs who opposed it.
Labour also looked to pick the pockets of pensioners, removing universal Winter Fuel Allowance rather than taking the money from the super-rich. Only after the campaign led by unions and campaigners did Labour reverse its decision. Had the cut stayed, Age UK estimated that 12,000 people would have died prematurely this year.
GB Energy: public con, not public ownership
And now we are being sold ‘GB Energy’, a government-owned investment vehicle backed by £6 billion, thrown into a private sector worth over £250 billion. It won’t even touch the sides. It’s not a nationalised energy company, there’s no democratic control, no workers’ representation, and no structural power to lower bills as it will operate in a huge capitalist market.
To bring down our bills and protect the environment we need real nationalisation, with compensation paid only on the basis of proven need. This means seizing the energy giants, and placing them under the democratic control of the working class. It means wrenching the vast profits from the hands of the super-rich shareholders and reinvesting every penny into our grid, for cheaper bills, a greener future, and warmer homes.
Keir Starmer’s Labour serves the bosses, we need a party that will fight for this in the interests of the working class. No more bailouts to private profiteers.
As someone who works in the sector: too fucking right. Although it will be hard, there's a lot of mess to untangle, and frankly the government needs to compete with the private sector on pay in order to get anywhere.
But it is ludicrous that the government haven't at least invested in the country's own renewable generation infrastructure. It would be such a money maker - especially if they cut out the middle man and sold directly to consumers. The segregation of the generation and consumption markets has not benefitted the people in any way. Instead, we have foreign businesses owning our generation and making record profits, the network operators making even more, and the cost to the consumer keeps going up while the cost of production has fallen through the floor as renewables have zero fuel cost.
GB Energy could be a small step in that direction. It's just focused on the generation market, with the possibility of selling directly to schools and the like, but doesn't really tackle high bills in as significant a way as they imply.
Also FYI when making a quote in true Markdown (not reddit Markdown) you need to put a > on the lines in between paragraphs to make a continuous quote.
I know someone who works in the south west for the grid, he has a very similar opinion.