Utilities

Water, gas, electricity...

Energy: make Labour demand public ownership

As Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, put it: “Public ownership and democratic control of our energy system provides the answer to a whole series of problems faced by working-class people. Public ownership and workers’ control make the perpetrators of the energy crisis pay for the damage they have done, while giving democratic power back to those who produce this wealth and those who need it.” The last two Labour Party conferences, in 2019 and 2021, voted overwhelmingly for public ownership of energy. In August the TUC came out for taking the energy firms (retail only...

Expropriate the energy industry!

Public subsidies to energy companies are not a good policy. We need public ownership of the energy system, not just the retail companies but as much of it as possible. So reluctant are the Tories to do anything substantial about energy bills that Labour’s policy of freezing bills through a subsidy to the retailers has been widely presented as a radical turn. It’s popular: YouGov found 86% support it, and 85% of Tory supporters. In fact, because the plan would be funded much more by withdrawing the flat-rate £400 relief payment the Tories have promised for October than by tightening the...

This drought was avoidable

At the time of writing nine out of fourteen regions across Britain have declared droughts. Thousands have seen their taps run dry. Farmers are predicting up to 50% losses on crop yields. Cattle and other livestock are likely to be slaughtered early as farmers run out of feed. We have just lived through a long dry spell culminating in the hottest, driest July since 1935. But this drought was entirely avoidable: the result of staggering mismanagement and profligacy by the UK’s privatised water companies. Since these natural monopolies were privatised in 1989 they have prioritised enriching their...

The energy-price shock and Starmer's sham plan

The energy retailers themselves, as well as Gordon Brown, the Lib Dems, Labour leader Keir Starmer, and the Rowntree Foundation, have schemes for reducing or mitigating the huge rises due in household energy bills. Our answer is public ownership of the whole energy industry, from oil and gas producers through power-station operators, the National Grid, and the energy retailers. That would enable some of the upstream super-profits to be used to moderate bills and to finance rapid expansion of renewables, nuclear, and energy-conservation. Plus - and the fight for these comes more readily to hand...

Beat the winter catastrophe

On 13 August , the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), with the TUC, the National Education Union, and dozens of charities and campaigns concerned with poverty, called for the package of relief payments announced in May to be at least doubled. That was £1,200 for worse-off families, through a variety of payments. The JRF reckons that worse-off households face an average of £2,800 increased costs, so similar relief plus 130% would do what the May package promised. The JRF and others also call for deductions from benefits for debts to be eased or paused. As of November 2020 (the most recent...

France to renationalise EDF

On 6 July the French government announced that it will take the country's primary electricity utility, EDF, back into full public ownership. This reverses the part-privatisation of 2005, from which 16% of the shares of EDF are now in private hands. The rationale of the decision is one which equally mandates public ownership of the energy industry in Britain: the need for long-term investment not vulnerable to the short-term oscillations of profit and share prices. The immediate impulse is the need to repair, renovate, and expand France's nuclear power stations, which provide a much bigger...

Wage rises, price curbs: where to push

"Don't Pay" , launched on 18 June, aims to get one million households to sign up to stop their energy direct-debits from 1 October. It calls for "a reduction of bills to an affordable level", but says it has no "set list of demands". Its first activity is via "email lists... Telegram, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and Twitter" and leafleting. The initiators are anonymous, say they are "not affiliated to any organisation", but hope eventually to move to organisation - "community groups... building this up street by street, estate by estate and city by city". The domestic energy price cap rose 12%...

Take energy into public ownership

In two months the number of UK households living in “fuel stress” — spending at least 10% of our budget on energy bills — is likely to treble. Yet Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership insists the energy industry that created this mess should carry on as before. The broadly right-wing Labour, but serious and thoughtful, Resolution Foundation think tank says that when the cap on bills rises in April the proportion of “stressed” households will leap to 27%. (That assumes an increase of around 50%, to something like £2,000 a year. Energy regulator Ofgem will announce the new cap on 7 February.) Labour...

Nationalise water to stop sewage dumping

Water companies in the England and Wales have been found to be illegally dumping raw sewage directly into Britain’s waterways and seas at staggering rates. An investigation from the Environment Agency (EA) found that in 2020 alone water companies had discharged sewage into rivers more than 400,000 times, for a total of more than three million hours. Companies are legally allowed to discharge raw sewage this way but only in exceptional situations where it would otherwise threaten to overwhelm the sewer system, such as after prolonged periods of rain. Then discharging allows fluid to move...

Common ownership is key for climate

On 13 September, BBC Newsnight asked shadow business and energy secretary Ed Miliband about Labour for a Green New Deal’s Labour Party conference motion calling for public ownership in energy, water, transport and other sectors: “We’re in favour of common ownership… Keir Starmer said in his leadership campaign he was in favour of public ownership in those areas. We haven’t changed that commitment... And why is that? Let me just explain this to you. Because in particular, in relation to natural monopolies, if we’re going to make this green transition, then public ownership is the right way to...

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