A publicly owned electricity generation firm could save Britons nearly £21bn a year, according to new analysis that bolsters Labour’s case to launch a national energy company if the party gains power.
Thinktank Common Wealth has calculated that the cost of generating electricity to power homes and businesses could be reduced by £20.8bn or £252 per household a year under state ownership, according to a report seen by the Guardian.
It’s interesting that a state-owned company would save homes money; when electricity was privatised under Margaret Thatcher, we were told our bills would be lower.
So it seems the Thatcher government lied to us.
And that leads me to my second point: if privatisation has led to higher bills, then why not just nationalise the privatised energy firms?
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Mandu Reid, the leader of the Women’s Equality Party, has told Sky News that Meghan Markle’s claims of racism within the royal household have been “validated”.
It comes after Lady Susan Hussey, the godmother of Prince William, asked charity boss Ngozi Fulani at Buckingham Palace “what part of Africa are you from?”.
I really like the moment in this clip in which Ms Reid said she didn’t want Lady Hussey to step down, but to step up – acknowledge that racism exists in the Royal Household and that they will take steps to remove it.
Perhaps they could start by taking training from Sistah Space, the charity to which Ms Fulani belongs. It’s what that organisation does.
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Charitable: Ngozi Fulani has said she would not like to see Lady Susan Hussey “vilified” because of her ill-chosen words.
At first, I thought this was a story about Prince Harry’s wife Meghan, and in a way it is.
She denounced racism in the Royal Household some time ago. I seem to recall she took a lot of stick for it – but now it seems she is vindicated after a charity representative from an ethnic minority was repeatedly asked where she was “really” from, by Prince William’s godmother.
Lady Susan Hussey, resigned after she repeatedly asked that question of Ngozi Fulani, a black British charity boss, at an event to support the Queen Consort’s campaign against domestic violence at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday (November 29).
Ms Fulani recounted how said Lady Hussey, 83, approached her and moved her hair to one side to allow her to read her name tag – which some might say was already extremely presumptuous; high-handed.
Then – well, here’s Ms Fulani’s own account:
Mixed feelings about yesterday's visit to Buckingham Palace. 10 mins after arriving, a member of staff, Lady SH, approached me, moved my hair to see my name badge. The conversation below took place. The rest of the event is a blur. Thanks @ManduReid & @SuzanneEJacob for support🙏🏾 pic.twitter.com/OUbQKlabyq
Lady SH: Where are you from?
Me: Sistah Space.
SH: No, where do you come from?
Me: We’re based in Hackney.
SH: No, what part of Africa are YOU from?
Me: I don’t know, they didn’t leave any records.
SH: Well, you must know where you’re from. I spent time in France. Where are you from?
Me: Here, UK.
SH: No, but what Nationality are you?
Me: I am born here and am British.
SH: No, but where do you really come from, where do your people come from?
Me: ‘My people’? Lady, what is this?
SH: Oh I can see I am going to have a challenge getting you to say where you’re from. When did you first come here?
Me: Lady! I am a British national, my parents came here in the 50s when-
SH: Oh, I knew we’d get there in the end. You’re Caribbean!
Me: No, lady, I am of African heritage, Caribbean descent and British nationality.
SH: Oh, so you’re from…
Ms Fulani said she believed the member of the Royal Household was trying to make her denounce her British citizenship, and the incident had led her to question how a situation like this could happen in a space “supposed to protect women against all kinds of violence”.
She said: “Although it’s not physical violence, it is an abuse.”
She added, charitably, that she did not want to see Lady Hussey “vilified” over her behaviour.
But that was always going to happen, I think – especially after some ill-advised Royal supporters chipped in to support Lady Hussey with the excuse that “she’s 83”:
George Stephens’s point is extremely strong – if also strongly-worded.
This Writer’s mother is of the same generation and would never treat another person in such a way. It simply would not occur to her.
I would say it was people of the generation before hers who may have displayed casual racism because they didn’t know any better. Most of them have passed away and that kind of behaviour should have passed with them.
If members of the Royal Household are displaying such traits, then it raises serious questions about standards there.
If I were from an ethnic minority, or an organisation that includes ethnic minorities in any way, I would certainly be having second thoughts about attending any Royal event in the future.
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Does anybody remember how, a few years ago, David Cameron and George Osborne justified imposing austerity on the UK – restricting government spending on public services and cutting public sector pay – by saying the national debt should not be handed down to future generations?
I mention this because today (Thursday, September 8, 2022), Liz Truss seems to have told households their energy debt will be extended into the future, to be paid off by an unspecified date.
It seems the Tories are all about ending public debt (although let’s remember they failed at that), but also all about shifting it onto private citizens instead – while protecting the profits of shareholders in privatised energy firms.
The plan involves capping energy bills at £2,500 per year for two years – this superceding the £3,549 cap announced by Ofgem last month. We will still pay more than we are now – even though many people already cannot afford the cost and will have to take out loans at varying degrees of unfairness.
A fund will be set up for people who do not get their energy through traditional means, like those who use oil or are on shared building networks
Businesses get a six-month scheme, after which time the government will provide “focused support” to be determined by the Business Secretary (Jacob Rees-Mogg) over the period of the blanket support scheme.
Green levies are being suspended.
The massive profits of the energy-generation companies will be safeguarded by Truss and her Tory government.
Truss said she would not impose a windfall tax on the energy generators because this would undermine the national interest by discouraging the investment needed to secure energy supplies generated in the UK.
But Opposition leader Keir Starmer contradicted the claim, saying energy generators have made it clear that if the government taxed their profits away from them, they would not cancel any of their investment schemes.
Truss did not say who would be paying the cost of imposing the new cap or how; this will be announced by Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng as part of a fiscal event later in the month. This Writer believes it will push the burden onto households – hence my suggestion that we will be forced into long-term debt because of it.
It also suggests that Truss is trying to prevent – or delay – debate about who pays. It also supports my suggestion yesterday that Truss is trying to build a zombie economy in which working people are forced to toil constantly, simply to service the debts that have been forced on them by rich, lazy Tory MPs who are themselves in thrall to rich, lazy business donors.
Oh – and fracking is back on the table again. Those of you in areas where fracking has been proposed can look forward to earthquakes, damage to your property, and a blight on the price of your home in the near future. It won’t affect Truss and her Tory pals!
Martin Lewis: he’s been saying the government has been able to predict the rise in the energy price cap for months – so why hasn’t it acted to protect vulnerable people yet?
Here’s a good question, posed by a Facebook friend of This Writer:
“Why [announce the inflation-dictated energy price cap rise in] October? Is that because the inflation rate, by which pensions are increased the following April, is set in September?
“Whether its intended that way or not (and I’m a cynic, I’d say it is), pensioners won’t get the inflation rise caused by October’s and April’s energy price rises – until April 2024 – having to go a whole year with insufficient money.
“It might apply to other benefits too.”
Can you see anything wrong with the reasoning here – especially when we knew the rise was coming and could predict exactly what it would be.
That’s what Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis says, anyway (along with very many other pertinent points) in this clip:
So there’s no reason for the government to deprive pensioners (and possibly benefit recipients) of inflation-linked pensions and benefits – or, indeed, to have delayed mitigating measures until after a new prime minister is sworn in.
And now we know that – possibly at least in part because of this failure – the number of people in fuel poverty, spending more than 10 per cent of their income on energy bills, is likely to almost double, from 4.3 million to 8.9 million within 12 months.
The price cap is now set to rise from £1,971 per year to £3,549 per year on October 1, and is projected to rise to an excruciating peak of £6,616 – almost double again what it is rising to reach in October.
Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi has said options for further household support packages are being drawn up – but we are also expected to cut our electricity use by between 15 and 30 per cent, according to our means.
To me, this suggests that the Tories are preparing to blame members of the public if they die of cold this winter, by pretending that they didn’t cut their energy use enough.
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Flag-waving fools: Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson have no idea how to run a country. They rely on patriotism to blind the gullible while they take your cash – and still put us into debt.
Some of us have been saying this for years but here’s a big-league economist to back us up.
Remember all the talk about Labour having “Maxed out the national credit card” that David Cameron and George Osborne used to win just enough seats to form a coalition with oily Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats in 2010?
It was nonsense. I said it at the time (and many times afterwards in articles on This Site. You can’t compare a national economy with household income and expenditure.
But it seems people are still being taken in by it because the Tories are still using it as the basis of their economic model.
That is the reason the UK has fallen deeper and deeper into debt during their 10 years in office. We can only go into debt, while they continue to follow this course.
Richard Murphy explains it very well in the video clip but I’ll paraphrase: while households become better-off by restricting spending, the nation loses out because businesses don’t benefit from that spending and cannot pass the money on through the system – therefore the nation becomes poorer.
So, by restricting spending with austerity policies, the Tory governments of the last 10 years have starved the UK of its economic lifeblood and plunged us into trillions of pounds worth of debt.
The only way to improve our economic situation is by spending into the economy with wise investments that help it to grow.
But Conservatives simply do not understand this basic (macro)economic fact. They never have.
See for yourself:
Some households fared well during the first Covid-19 lockdown. The lack of any way to spend their money meant they were able to pay off debts and bank spare cash.
But that won’t last. In some cases, families are already suffering because their income has fallen below their outgoings and the lockdowns are still going on.
In fact, the Tory plan is to ensure that they leach that money away from all of us as soon as possible.
There is nothing you can do about it in individual households because the household unit is too small to stave off economic intervention from a national government.
But if you group together with others, you might find a way.
Alternatively, you can just stick your head in the sand and wait for Rishi Sunak to empty your bank account and steal your house. It’s up to you.
You’ll probably see the sense in these words on March 2, when Sunak announces his spring budget.
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Jeremy Corbyn: He must control Labour policy announcements and not let ‘spokespeople’ offer opportunities to Tories [Image: AP]
Labour under Jeremy Corbyn must be much more careful and clear with its message – with no “loose lips” making it possible for the Tories to “sink the ship” (to adapt an old saying).
The BBC is reporting that Jeremy Corbyn has voiced his opposition to plans by the Conservative Government that would lower the overall household “welfare cap” in an interview with New Statesman. There’s nothing wrong with that – the cap was introduced at a level that was too low, and now the Tories want to cut it further, pushing more and more families into poverty and out of their current homes in what has been dubbed “economic cleansing” of housing estates.
But the report also quotes a “spokesman” who said Corbyn was “very much in favour” of getting rid of the cap altogether – supporting this with a quote from Corbyn himself, telling the TUC conference last week that he wanted to “remove the whole idea of the benefit cap”.
That’s just opening up the goal for the Tories to score.
Lo and behold, up pops Iain Duncan Smith – a man who has been missing for months while his Department for Work and Pensions was battered by allegations that his policies have been killing benefit claimants – accurate allegations.
Working hard to wash the blood off his hands and divert attention elsewhere, the Gentleman Ranker said: “chaos and confusion” surrounded Labour’s position – despite being an unlikely judge. Chaos and confusion have dogged his tenure as Work and Pensions secretary, yet he continues, blithely unwilling to acknowledge any problems.
“Conservatives believe that nobody should be able to claim more in welfare than the average family earns by going out to work,” he said. “By pledging to reverse this position, it’s clear that today’s Labour Party are simply not on the side of working people. They are still the same old welfare party – wanting to borrow more to spend more on benefits.”
Childish nonsense.
If Conservatives really believed that nobody should claim more than the average working family earns, then social security benefits would be capped at £32,000 – not £20,000. The fact that the Tories want to cut the amount available means they don’t want social security to be a safety net for people in hard times. Instead, they want to use it to prise people out of their homes and into poverty. That much is clear and indisputable.
Labour has not pledged to reverse any claim that people should have more in benefits than an average working family. The evidence shows that Iain Duncan Smith was lying. Claims by a spokesman and comments that the Labour leader wants to do something do not add up to a policy commitment.
And the claim by the man This Blog calls RTU (Return To Unit – a military term for an officer candidate who is not up to the task) that Labour is “not of the side of working people” is nothing less than offensive to all the working people who have suffered at the hands of the Tories over the last five years and more.
But the fact remains that Labour people gave the odious IDS a chance to push his perverted version of the facts.
Labour needs to be better than that. Whoever this “spokesman” is, they should take a back seat for the foreseeable future. Anyone who is that loose-lipped cannot be allowed to speak for the party or its leader. The party needs to be on-message, all the time.
Owen Smith, Labour’s new Work and Pensions spokesman, has fought a rearguard action, saying it is “very clear” that Labour is currently opposing only the plan to cut the cap to £20,000 nationally, and to £23,000 in London – but he shouldn’t have to do it.
It doesn’t matter whether Labour MPs, spokespeople, supporters or whoever want a particular policy, or want to undermine the new leader (still an issue among the neoliberals who are hanging on in the party in the hope of turning it back to Red Toryism), or have an agenda of their own – they need to shut up and stick to party policy.
Tories like Duncan Smith are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to attack Labour and divert attention away from their own policies of hatred towards anybody not in the top one per cent of earners. If Labour is to win the country back from these despots, then Labour needs a much better publicity strategy.
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His article in yesterday’s Guardian makes a lot of sense (although obviously he doesn’t go far enough in his suggestions. Labour never does, these days).
At least he’s making the right noises – pointing out that the Conservative Government’s plan to cut social security by £12 billion will harm people who are trapped by failing markets for housing and jobs. Think about it – cutting social security means people will be more insecure. That’s probably why Tories prefer to call it “welfare”.
He claims that the cut to the total annual household cap on benefits, from £26,000 to £23,000, is popular but will save less than one per cent of the total target.
More will follow – cutting tax credits (the subsidy for under-paying businesses, meaning people in work will be plunged into poverty), housing benefit (the subsidy for landlords, meaning people will be unable to pay their rent), and to disability payments (because nobody cares what happens to society’s most vulnerable until they become society’s most vulnerable; the evidence suggests these people will die).
According to Healey, every time the Tories wield the axe, they will challenge Labour to support them. If Labour refuses, the Tories will then be free to shout about Labour being the “party of welfare” – and never mind the fact that the Tories are the party of corporate welfare, funnelling billions to bosses.
Many of the cuts will punish the poor – without reducing the benefits bill, he reckons.
Take tax credits. Over the last five years, the Coalition government made 23 separate cuts, freezes and rule changes to tax credits costing working families £13.4bn. But overall spending rose, by £2bn.
Or housing benefit, where 10 separate cuts cost low-income renters both in and out of work over £5bn. But the total bill went up by £4bn over the Parliament.
Healey drew up a lengthy factual analysis of Coalition Government policy on housing benefits and discovered that the Tories and Liberal Democrats were actively increasing the bill.
The decision, for example, to raise council and housing association rents to 80 per cent of market rates will increase housing benefit spending by £5.4bn over the next 30 years, on those homes built in the last parliament alone.
He called this a “Conservative policy failure, with both the taxpayer and families on low incomes paying the price”.
His solution was for Labour to commit to building 100,000 new council and housing association homes a year until 2020, in the knowledge that those homes would pay for themselves, in full, in housing benefits savings over 27 years.
Just as people take out a mortgage over that time period and see a return on their home investment, so government could do the same.
Every pound invested in a genuinely affordable home means the state pays out less in housing benefit.
Over thirty years, I calculated that £1 generates £1.18 in savings… by recycling savings in benefit to build new homes, the up-front capital costs for those 100,000 homes each year would be no greater than the housing investment when I was Labour’s housing minister in our last year of government.
We can’t spend this parliament debating welfare costs on Tory terms again, so our challenge is to sidestep the narrow Tory narrative and start making a bigger case for bringing benefits spending down.
So this is the answer: Use the Conservatives’ own record against them and demonstrate that the government is asking the wrong questions and proposing the wrong solutions.
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Bottom of the class: George Osborne based his ‘Long-Term Economic Plan’ on a spreadsheet error by American economists. [Image: Gaianeconomics]
If you’re thinking, “That headline isn’t news”, you’re right.
It is, however, the main point troubling Professor Simon Wren-Lewis in his latest Mainly Macro blog article. He states that Tory chancellor George Osborne started out in a similar position and with a relatively similar policy to Labour’s Gordon Brown, but caused huge damage to household finances, whereas Brown did not.
“The answer, of course, is that the … contexts were different,” writes the learned professor. “Osborne’s austerity happened when the economy was just starting a recovery from a deep recession, and interest rates were at their then Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) of 0.5%… When interest rates are at the ZLB, monetary policy cannot counteract the negative impact of fiscal austerity on output.”
In other words, with austerity shrinking the economy, nothing else Osborne did would have stopped your wages from shrinking too. It is entirely possible that Osborne was perfectly aware of this.
George Osborne: His briefcase is still empty of policies and all he has to offer us is the carrot of false promises [Image: Kaya Mar www.kayamarart.com].
Yet he is planning an even bigger austerity squeeze on your incomes if the Conservatives form a government after this year’s election.
Professor Wren-Lewis dismisses the possibility that Osborne does not understand what he has been doing: “A much more plausible explanation for his actions were that the macroeconomic risks were understood, but were put to one side for political and ideological reasons.
“First the possibility of hitting Labour with a populist concern about the deficit was too great a temptation to resist for a Chancellor for whom political tactics are everything. Second, austerity was a means of implementing an unpopular policy of reducing the size of the state by the back door.”
He adds: “Now you may cynically say that in a contest between economics and politics/ideology, politicians will always choose the latter. However much that is true or false, when that choice costs each household at least £4,000, it would be very strange if that politician survived the judgement of the electorate.”
Perhaps so – but he and his party are banking on the electorate being too ignorant of the facts to realise this. That’s why I put it in the headline.
Campaigning in the centre of a small Mid Wales town yesterday, This Writer asked one group of young people (in their twenties or thereabouts), who quite clearly had limited means, which way they were going to vote. They ignored the question and walked on for several paces, then one turned around and, raising his fist to the air, yelled, “Conservative all the way!”
George Osborne is relying on people like this for his party’s survival.
We have to foil him by educating them.
It is a task that won’t end after the election; in fact, it is a task that may not end in our lifetimes.
But it is the only way to protect ourselves from continual exploitation by an entitled class of layabouts who expect us to do all the work while they have all the privileges handed to them on a plate.
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Average incomes in the years up to 2012. Source: ONS.
Average household incomes have risen by 0.2 per cent since the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats took office in 2010. Well, whoopee do!
That means for every £1,000 you earned then, you get £1,002 now. At long last you can buy that car you always wanted! That luxury holiday you’ve always been putting off; that mansion in the country!
Maybe not.
In fact, we know that average incomes are skewed by the disproportionately high earnings of the mega-rich, while the poorest in the country are losing more and more every day.
A far more indicative figure would be the change in the lowest incomes in the UK over the last five years – but you won’t see Cameron crowing over that!
Didn’t he once say the measure of a government was how it treated the least privileged people in society?
It’s amazing how they forget these comments when they’re asked to explain their record.
If anyone can provide figures showing the trend in the lowest UK incomes, please get in touch.
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![Bottom of the class: George Osborne based his 'Long-Term Economic Plan' on a spreadsheet error by American economists. [Image: Gaianeconomics]](https://i1.wp.com/voxpoliticalonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/140401osborne_dunce.jpg)
![This is how George Osborne probably looked after the fire in his pants caused by his incessant lying about the EU’s £1.7bn bill burned away the rest of his suit. Note that his briefcase is still empty of policies and all he has to offer us is the carrot of false promises [Image: Kaya Mar www.kayamarart.com].](https://i2.wp.com/voxpoliticalonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/141103osbornescarrot.jpg)
