Utilities

Water, gas, electricity...

Alan Bates is wrong about Amazon

Alan Bates, a leading campaigner on behalf of over 500 fellow sub-postmasters who were wrongly blamed, and convicted, for problems caused by cash-handling software, has called for the Post Office to be handed over to Amazon. Bates and other victims are right to be angry at the Post Office bosses’ venality and incompetence. But ownership by Amazon would make things worse, not better. As the ongoing strikes in Amazon’s BHX4 warehouse in Coventry show, Amazon’s treatment of its own workers has little to recommend it. Amazon resists the union recognition which would allow its workers to assert...

Plans set for Drax 8-13 August

On 24-25 February Reclaim the Power held a national gathering of climate activists in York to plan a protest camp on 8-13 August at Drax Power Station (a former coal turned biomass power station). Reclaim the Power (RtP) is a network of climate activists who come together to organise protests and direct action against coal and biomass power stations. Beyond this they also campaign for social and economic justice (e.g. against the hostile environment for migrants, and against fuel poverty). RtP was founded in 2013 and since then has organised protest camps and actions against fracking, Didcot...

Make unions commit Labour to green and renewable energy!

Labour leader Keir Starmer’s 8 February U-turn on Labour’s £28 billion flagship green investment pledge has been justified on the grounds that it is incompatible with servicing the national debt. He wants to be seen to be scrabbling around after every last penny, lest the Tories label him imprudent. The national debt, with interest payments around £100 billion a year, is a genuine problem. Much of the debt is held outside the UK, so couldn’t be quelled even by full public ownership of high finance in the UK, and even a workers’ government might want to retain links with the international...

Social provision and market rules

Critical to the replacement of fossil-fuel energy by low-emissions electricity generation (renewables and nuclear) is the expansion of the electricity grid. Since Thatcher’s privatisation, the grid is run by private companies, with the prices they can charge for transmission regulated by an official body, Ofgem. Ofgem is now considering its next round of price controls, and says that it will use the com­pan­ies’ “investabil­ity” as a criterion. It will aim to ensure that the companies not only cover their costs, not only make tidy profits, but make profits lush and reliable enough that their...

Push back the Tories!

On 16 and 17 January, the Tories could lose Commons votes on their Bill trying to save their “send them to Rwanda” asylum policy. Even if they win, they have a battle to work the bIll, which tries to instruct courts Rwanda must be reckoned safe even if it is not. From 30 January, train drivers are striking. As yet, the government and the Train Operating Companies (TOCs) hesitate about deploying the new Minimum Service Law, which allows for the TOCs to issue “work notices” instructing drivers to turn up sufficiently for 40% service, and to get the whole strike ruled unlawful unless the union...

Run water, post, and other utilities as public services

One quarter of England depends on Thames Water for water and sewage. It is now so near being unable to deal with its debts that there is talk of the government renationalising it. Why? After privatisation of water in 1989, the private owners sucked out billions in dividends, covered by loading the company with more and more debt. Thames Water is also the worst water company in England for leaks due to ill-maintained pipes. Others do worse for dumping raw sewage into rivers, but Thames Water is bad on that too. All that comes from a basic public health function being run not as a public service...

To win social foresight, end capitalism

In the Inaugural Address he wrote for the First International, the first big international workers’ movement, Karl Marx hailed the ten-hour legal limit to the working day won in Britain as a first victory in “the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class, and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class”. Social foresight! A string of government and corporate decisions to promote and develop more and more “carbon bombs”, fossil-fuel-based developments set to...

Labour’s NPF, certainty, and class

The “final” National Policy Forum report going to Labour Party conference in Liverpool, 8-11 October 2023, is mostly 112 pages of warm words evading clear commitments. The conference Delegates’ Briefing says that the facility to “refer back” items from the NPF report, established since 2017, will not be available, on the pretext that (for the first time since 2017) this is a “final” report and so there is nowhere to “refer back” to. Delegates will still seek to remonstrate by voting against sections of the report and passing motions stating clear commitments or contradicting the report. The...

Raise benefits, ban pre-payment meters, public ownership of energy!

The UN’s International Labour Organisation has described the level of benefits in the UK as a “policy of keeping [people] below the absolute poverty line... using social security as a means of economic compulsion to labour”. Universal Credit (UC) rose only 3.1% in April 2022. After a year of falling way behind inflation, in April 2023 it will rise by 10.1%, to £85 a week. For people under 25 and couples it’s even less. £85 is still lower than the rate before the Tories cut UC, in October 2021, from £95 to £75. The standard rate of UC is equivalent to about 16% of workers’ previous earnings. In...

Beat the freeze

As the weather gets colder, higher energy bills are biting. Maybe 10,000 households across Britain are being added to the 4.3 million already on pre-payment meters. Pre-payment means that you get no electricity or gas if you run out of cash one week, while with direct debit you incur debt but will not be cut off. It is more expensive, and loads the cost onto colder months rather than spreading it over the year. Energy firms can switch households on smart meters to pre-payment remotely, without having to send out an engineer. People on pre-payment meters are dependent on vouchers to get...

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